Pentagon’s Mass-Drone Test Signals Near-Term Deployment

Three drones controlled by one operator simultaneously hit three targets in the Swarm Forge demonstration

Auterion

A new viral video released by the Pentagon for their Swarm Forge initiative shows a single operator hitting three targets with three drones simultaneously. Auterion carried out the demonstration using Kraken Kinetic warheads, and it looks like a global first: a one-to-many lethal strike in a live-fire environment with small drones.

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

Lots of companies can do flashy demonstration a la Tony Stark, And 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 on a daily basis in Ukraine. The multi-target demonstration takes this up a level: it is signpost towards imminent drone swarm warfare. Meier says the U.S. may deploy the system, known as Nemyx, as soon as the end of this year. Or as the Department of War puts it, “The future of warfare is now.”

Auterion’s Nemyx: Mature Swarm Software

The demonstration shows the attack from the operator’s point of view. 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 on their way it just monitors.

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

The drones exchange information including relative location and ‘heartbeat’ status, and which target they are homing in on. The swarm is synchronised 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 jamming, greatly aided by simple physics. It requires relatively little power to jam communications between a nearby drone and an operator many miles away, it is much harder to jam communications between drones which are much close to each other than to the jammer.

“Even if all communication is lost, each drone will use its best efforts to hit its target,” says Meier.

For the U.S. military, the system needs to be not just effective but also safe. Meier says the certified safety system allows the entire swarm to be armed and disarmed at will, which also appears to be a first. As well as being lethal, the Nemyx swarm is reliable and, crucially, trustworthy, and commanders need not be fearful of unleashing an unpredictable weapon.

The human operator is still very much in charge, but their role is now as mission commander overseeing the swarm rather than drone pilot.

“Hardware Is Completely Irrelevant”

Auterion is essentially a software company. The point 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 design, which is inspired by Ukrainian 10-inch FPVs. We share the SLM-10 design with drone makers so they can make a simple FPV which takes advantage of our software.”

The SLM-10 Dragon is typical of the quadcopter attack drones seen in Ukraine, having a 25-kilometer range and 20 minute flight time with a 1.5 kilo payload. Alternatively it can carry a 3 kilo payload over a shorter ranges. This type of design has become as much a mass-produced commodity item as the low-end smartphone, typically costing $500 or less. They destroy everything from tanks to foot soldiers in vast numbers.

But integrating this type of drone into a swarm raises it to a higher level and enables rapid attacks at a large scale.

The same Nemyx swarming software run on larger or smaller quadcopters, fixed-wing attack drones like the ‘Ukrolancets’ destroying Russian air defenses, or long-range attack drones like the Lyutyi and Fire Point FP-1s hitting Russian oil refineries. In all cases Nemyx can carry out efficient large-scale attacks against multiple targets.

Because Auterion do not make the hardware, customers can produce everything in their own country and guarantee their supply chain. This applies to the software too.

“We have negotiated software escrow agreements in the U.S. and Germany,” says Meier.

This legal arrangement means a software developer deposits the source code and related materials with a third-party agent, so whatever happens the customer can access and maintain critical software. It secures sovereign control, a vital aspect as dependence has become a talking point in a time of instability and shifting alliances. Nobody wants their drones to have a hidden kill switch controlled by someone else. Reliance on China is a particular concern which can now be avoided.

From Demonstration To Deployment

When upgrading to the next generation missile or aircraft, militaries have a selection of different options, all of which may be slight changes from existing hardware. But drones swarms are a new capability.

“Right now the benefit of swarms is binary: either you have it, or you do not,” says Meier.

And while the concept of swarm drones has been around for some time – my book Swarm Troopers was published in 2015 – the U.S. military has recently become enthusiastic about them.

The demonstration is part of Swarm Forge, one of the ‘pace setting projects’ that comprise the Department of War’s new Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy, Swarm Forge is a “Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test, and scale novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities – combining America’s elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.”

The challenge will be for the military find effective ways to incorporate swarms into their operations. New technology can cause growth pains as it edges out well-established, and much-loved incumbents. Armies held on to cavalry, for example, long after its value had become questionable.

Meier believes an easy transition is possible, especially as he does not set drones against legacy platforms in an either/or choice.

“I’m not a big fan of saying you should stop buying other things, that customers should stop buying tanks or that drones will replace fighters,” says Meier. “We are not putting other people out of business. We don’t care if you buy other stuff. It doesn’t mean replacing tanks, but arming tanks with drones.”

He sees drones as fitting into existing command structures and proving their worth with additional capability.

“A commander can order a complex strike on a set of positions as before, except that instead of an air wing, they can also call on Nemyx to, plan, orchestrate the strike and then carry out battle damage assessment afterwards,” says Meier.

And whichever sectors of the military push ahead with swarms, they can get them far more rapidly than the traditional multi-year procurement cycle allows with legacy platforms.

“We can scale up cheaper, faster and at a grander scale,” says Meier.

The swarms are getting larger. Auterion are currently operating swarms of up to 22 units, but that number doubles every few months. Soon single operators will not just be hitting three targets at a time, but thirty. Or more. At present, Russian columns are wiped out slowly by successive FPV strikes; a swarm attack might take out the entire column in seconds.

Meanwhile other nations are scrambling to develop their own drone swarms. China is reportedly well advanced in this field, but so are India, Russia, Israel and others. Turkish firm STM released a video claimed to show their Kargu drones carrying out a swarm attack on three dummies simulating infantry this week.

Auterion’s Nemyx-powered swarm may see its first combat use in Ukraine in the next few months.

Individual drones have proven incredibly effective in Ukraine. This week President Zelensky said that in 2025 drones inflicted 80% of the damage on Russian forces. Which means the drones are already doing four times damage as much as everything else put together. Swarms will multiply that effectiveness, and the smarter the swarm the more capable it will be. Whoever ends up with the best swarms with the smartest software will have a decisive advantage.