On the morning of September 11, 2022, the U.S. Army launched a swarm of 40 s small quadcopter drones into the California desert as part of a training exercise designed to prepare America’s soldiers for a grim reality of modern war: cheap off the shelf drones capable of carrying munitions have become ubiquitous on the battlefield.
Brig. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commander of the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, posted a video of the swarm on Twitter. “At sunrise this morning a swarm of 40 quadcopters all equipped with cameras, MILES, and lethal munition capable launched in advance of 11th ACR’s attack on a prepared defense by 1AD,” Taylor said. “Drones will be as important in the first battle of the next war as artillery is today.”
Videos by VICE
As first spotted by The Warzone, the drone swarm is part of a training exercise. “MILES, and lethal munition capable” sounds ominous but references what the drone is capable of doing and the equipment it’s been equipped with. MILES is the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, a kind of fancy laser tag that tracks kills and casualties.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
The Army has been training with drone swarms since at least 2019. “We are going to test out drone swarms—so 40 drones by one operator flying overhead dropping grenades,” Col. Carl Michaud, the deputy commander of NTC told Military.com when the program first launched.
The swarm of drones is a terrifying image. It’s also become a reality on the modern battlefield. The Islamic State used quadcopter drones modified to drop grenades and improvised munitions during its war in Syria and Iraq. Both Russia and Ukraine are doing the same in Ukraine, sometimes with disastrous results. The use of drones in war has become so ubiquitous that Russia has put out informal calls to train more pilots.
Countering these swarms is tough. A single drone flying through the sky is a hard target for someone with an assault rifle to shoot down in the chaos of war. The need to counter these drones has led to an explosion in anti-drone tech. Companies are trying everything from microwave guns to net launchers to counter drone swarms. So far, there’s no silver bullet.
