Autonomous swarms are the future of drone warfare

DRONES HAVE become a standard weapon of war. Small quadcopters currently inflict the majority of casualties on the battlefield in Ukraine, and in recent weeks Iran has rained thousands of larger drones on the cities, airfields and oil facilities of the Middle East.

For all their destructive potential, however, they are personnel-heavy to operate. Unless a drone is directed along a preprogrammed path, even the smallest can require up to six people to control and maintain. It would be more efficient if that ratio could be flipped: if one person could control many drones at once and, better still, if each drone could co-ordinate with its neighbours to strike a single target. Such drone swarms are fast becoming a reality.

Inspiration comes from animal swarms, such as the murmurations of starlings or shoals of fish, in which the movement of the flock is neither directed by a central brain nor preprogrammed into each creature, but emerges from a simple set of rules all members follow. In the military world, that would mean a swarm could be controlled by a mission commander who would look at intelligence and make decisions about which targets to strike.

Swarms come in many levels of sophistication. The simplest have some type of deconfliction to ensure that they do not all go for the same target. A version of this is implemented in Britain’s Brimstone anti-tank missile, which entered service more than 20 years ago. It can be fired in salvoes, with the first missile attacking the highest-priority target, the second missile the next-highest, and so on.

The Russian V2U attack drone takes a similar approach. Each one has wings of a different colour. A red drone, say, might be assigned to attack the highest-priority target, an orange one the second and so on. If the second drone sees the first drone miss its target then it will take over the job. If any drone loses sight of its predecessor, however, it risks jumping the queue, dragging its followers with it. 

The Israel Defence Forces used the first combat-drone swarm in Gaza in 2021 to track down Hamas groups firing rockets, though how the drones communicated with one another is unclear. But some of the most innovative work is being done in Ukraine. In February 2025 Mykhailo Fedorov, then Minister of Digital Transformation, announced that a dozen Ukrainian companies were working on drone swarms and the first was intended to be in service by the end of the year. Mr Fedorov is now the country’s defence minister.

Several Ukrainian suppliers are already deploying swarming systems on a small scale. Sine Engineering, a company based in Lviv, Ukraine, has rolled out a system called Pasika (apiary), which handles a first-person-view (FPV) drone’s communications, navigation and ability to autonomously plan a flight path. The firm describes this as a “cheat code” for drone operators. Pasika allows drones to find their own way to a predefined area and orbit there—communicating with one another via radio—until they are instructed to strike targets the operator has identified.

An operator with 11th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, who goes by the call-sign Samosud, says that Pasika has been highly effective at stopping massed Russian assaults which might have been too rapid to halt with individual drones.

Swarmer, another Ukrainian firm, was reported to have had its first success last September: a mini-swarm of one scout and two bombers controlled by a single operator. The operator uses the scout to find a target, and the bombers automatically engage it. The company says it has now tested swarms of up to 25 drones.

The Fourth Law, a Ukrainian company whose name alludes to Isaac Asimov’s fictional laws of robotics, is aiming for what it calls “massively scalable autonomy”, using AI to enable vast numbers of drones that can fly and find targets on their own. The company sees autonomous bombing, target detection and identification, navigation without GPS and autonomous take-off and landing as its next challenges. A drone swarm that can overcome them all will be able to carry out an entire mission with minimal human supervision.

Impressive as Ukraine’s challengers are, they face stiff competition from Auterion, based in America, which has supplied tens of thousands of its Skynode strike kits to Ukraine. These add AI capability to drones, enabling autonomous navigation, the ability to lock on to targets—and swarming. In January America’s Department of War released a video from its “Swarm Forge” programme. It showed several FPV drones hitting targets in quick succession with the aid of Auterion’s Nemyx swarming software, which runs on Skynode. The operator just selects a target and the software does the rest.

Lorenz Meier, Auterion’s boss, says that Nemyx allows the drones to communicate with each other to attack targets in priority order. The swarm is synchronised so that if one drone is lost, another automatically takes over its target. This capability may already be in use in Ukraine.

Some Ukrainian analysts suggest that mature swarms of tens of drones are still two or three years away. That is largely to do with the problem of scaling up the mesh networks that allow larger groups of drones to share data. But things could move faster. On March 13th Russian military commentators described “massive” Ukrainian strikes carried out with 300-400 drones over a narrow front. They are said to have attacked targets to a depth of 20km and allowed a rapid advance by Ukrainian troops. Swarms may have played a role.

Thus far in Ukraine the sheer volume of FPV drones has benefited defenders, who can see and attack from a safe distance. Russian gains have, therefore, been small and hard-won. Drone swarms, which allow the efficient and rapid concentration of firepower, could flip the dynamic. ■