Swarm Forge: Pentagon’s massive drone test signals near-term deployment

A new viral video released by the Pentagon for their Swarm Forge initiative shows a single operator hitting three targets simultaneously with three drones. Auterion performed the demonstration using Cracking Kinetic warheadsand it appears to be a global first: a one-to-many lethal attack in a live-fire environment with small drones.

“What this shows is that the customer trusts the system enough to place live warheads on swarming drones that are not directly controlled by the operator,” Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier told me. “That is a historic level of trust.”

Many companies can do that flashy demonstration a la Tony StarkAnd there are other (very different) salvo-launched, guided, multi-target systems. But this is something more.

Auterion drones with individual AI targeting destroy Russian vehicles in Ukraine every day. The multi-target demonstration takes this to the next level: it is a signpost to an impending drone swarm war. Meier says the US could deploy the system, known as Nemyx, as early as the end of this year. Or as the War Department puts it: “The future of warfare is now.”

Auterion’s Nemyx: mature swarm software

The demonstration shows the attack from the operator’s perspective. They just click on each of the three targets and the drones do the rest, thanks to Auterion’s Nemyx swarm software.

A central mission planning system organizes the attack, but once the drones are underway, it merely monitors.

“The swarm engine distributed by Nemyx runs as an app on each of the drones,” says Meier. “They communicate with each other and organize themselves to attack targets in order of priority.”

The drones exchange information including relative location and ‘heartbeat’ status, and which target they are aiming at. The swarm is synchronized so that if one drone is lost, another automatically takes over its target.

Meier notes that the swarm’s robust mesh network is highly resistant to disruptions, which is greatly helped by simple physics. It takes relatively little force to disrupt communications between a nearby drone and an operator many miles away. It is much more difficult to disrupt communications between drones that are much closer to each other than to the jammer.

“Even if all communications are lost, each drone will do its utmost to hit its target,” Meier says.

For the US military, the system must not only be effective, but also safe. Meier says the certified security system allows the entire swarm to be armed and disarmed at will, which also appears to be a first. The Nemyx Swarm is not only deadly, but also reliable and, most importantly, reliable, and commanders need not fear unleashing an unpredictable weapon.

The human operator is still in charge, but their role is now that of a mission commander overseeing the swarm rather than a drone pilot.

“Hardware is completely irrelevant”

Auterion is essentially a software company. The purpose of the demonstration is to show what the control system can do, the drone itself hardly matters.

“The drone hardware is completely irrelevant,” says Meier. “In the demonstration we used the SLM-10 reference designinspired by Ukrainian 10-inch FPVs. We are sharing the SLM-10 design with drone makers so they can create a simple FPV using our software.”

The SLM-10 Dragon is typical of the quadcopter attack drones seen in Ukraine, with a range of 25 kilometers and a flight time of 20 minutes with a payload of 1.5 kilos. Alternatively, it can carry a payload of 3 kilos over a shorter range. This type of design has become as much of a mass-produced product as the budget smartphone, which typically costs $500 or less. They destroy everything from tanks to foot soldiers in large numbers.

But integrating this type of drone into a swarm takes it to the next level and enables rapid attacks on a large scale.

The same Nemyx swarm software runs on larger or smaller quadcopters, fixed-wing attack drones like the ‘Ukrolancets’ that destroy Russian air defenses, or long-range attack drones like the Lyutyi and Fire Point FP-1s that hit Russian oil refineries. In all cases, Nemyx can conduct efficient large-scale attacks against multiple targets.

Because Auterion does not make the hardware, customers can produce everything domestically and guarantee their supply chain. This also applies to the software.

“We have entered into software escrow agreements in the US and Germany,” says Meier.

This legal arrangement requires a software developer to deposit source code and associated materials with a third-party agent so that no matter what happens, the customer can access and maintain critical software. It ensures sovereign control, an essential aspect dependency has become a topic of conversation at a time of instability and changing alliances. No one wants their drones to have a hidden kill switch controlled by someone else. Dependence on China is a particular concern that can now be avoided.

From demonstration to implementation

When upgrading to the next generation of missiles or aircraft, militaries have a selection of different options, all of which can be minor changes to the existing hardware. But drone swarms are a new possibility.

“Right now, the benefit of swarming is binary: you either have it or you don’t,” Meier says.

And while the concept of swarm drones has been around for a while – my book Swarm of Troopers was published in 2015 – the US military has recently gotten excited about it.

The demonstration is part of Swarm Forge, one of the “pace-setting projects” that are part of the new Acceleration strategy for artificial intelligenceSwarm Forge is a “Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test, and scale new ways of fighting with and against AI capabilities – combining America’s elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.”

The challenge will be for the military to find effective ways to integrate swarms into their operations. New technology can cause growing pains as it leaves the established and beloved incumbents behind. For example, armies held on to cavalry long after its value had become questionable.

Meier believes an easy transition is possible, especially since he doesn’t pit drones against older platforms in an either/or choice.

“I’m not in favor of saying that you should stop buying other things, that customers should stop buying tanks or that drones will replace fighter planes,” Meier said. “We don’t put other people out of business. We don’t care if you buy different stuff. It doesn’t mean replacing tanks, it means arming tanks with drones.”

According to him, drones fit into existing command structures and prove their value with additional capabilities.

“A commander can order a complex attack on a series of positions as before, except that instead of an air wing he can also call on Nemyx to plan the attack, orchestrate it and then assess the battle damage,” says Meier.

And whatever sectors of the military are swarming forward, they can get them much faster than the traditional, multi-year procurement cycle with older platforms allows.

“We can scale cheaper, faster and on a larger scale,” says Meier.

The swarms are getting bigger. Auterion is currently operational swarms of up to 22 units, but that number doubles every few months. Soon, individual operators will hit not just three targets at once, but thirty. Or more. Currently, the Russian columns are slowly being wiped out by successive FPV attacks; a swarm attack can take out the entire column in seconds.

Meanwhile, other countries are trying to develop their own drone swarms. China is reportedly far advanced in this area, but so are India, Russia, Israel and others. Turkish company STM released a video claimed this week to show off their Kargu drones conducting a swarm attack on three dummies simulating infantry.

Auterion’s Nemyx-powered swarm could be deployed to Ukraine for the first time in the coming months.

Individual drones have proven incredibly effective in Ukraine. This week, President Zelensky said that drones will be deployed in 2025 80% of damage to Russian troops. That means the drones are already busy four times as much damage as everything else combined. Swarms will multiply that effectiveness, and the smarter the swarm, the more capable it will be. Whoever gets the best swarms with the smartest software has a decisive advantage.