Released  23 June 2022.

This podcast discusses drone swarms, which can be used at sea, on land, in the air, and even in space, are fundamentally information-dependent weapons. No study to date has examined drone swarms in the context of information warfare writ large. This article explores the dependence of these swarms on information and the resultant connections with areas of information warfare—electronic, cyber, space, and psychological—drawing on open-source research and qualitative reasoning. Overall, the article offers insights into how this important emerging technology fits into the broader defense ecosystem and outlines practical approaches to strengthening related information warfare capabilities.

Click here to read the article.

Keywords: information warfare, drone swarms, unmanned systems, cyberwarfare, electronic warfare

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

(Guest 1: Zachary Kallenborn)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes Zachary Kallenborn, author of “InfoSwarms: Drone Swarms and Information Warfare,” which was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Kallenborn is a policy fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government, a research affiliate of the Unconventional Weapons and Technology program at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism), a senior consultant at ABS Group, and a self-proclaimed US Army “mad scientist.” He is the author of publications on autonomous weapons, drone swarms, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction.

Zach, I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for making time to chat with me today.

(Kallenborn)

Thanks for having me.

(Host)

Your article explores the dependence of drone swarms on information and the resultant connections with areas of information warfare—electronic, cyber, space, and psychological warfare—drawing on open-source research and qualitative reasoning. Put this in context for us, please.

(Kallenborn)

The context of the discussion is looking at drone swarms—a rapidly emerging technology that numerous states are developing. Obviously got the big players—China, Russia, the United States are all developing this technology. But even smaller powers, like South Africa. And this technology is even already being used in combat. We saw just last year that Israel used a drone swarm in combat in the fight against Gaza. Now, before jumping into these sort of larger issues of information warfare, it’s important to understand briefly what we mean by “drone swarm” here.

We’re not necessarily talking about simply large numbers of drones used en masse, which is often how the term is used within media, but really what we’re talking about is drones that have some level of communication and coordination between them so that they’re operating effectively as a singular unit instead of, say, 10, 15 individual drones.

Now, what that means is there’s potentially a range of capability within that. Because if we’re talking about simply coordination and communication at the basic level, that’s a pretty simple thing. So in the case of like the Israel example, likely all they’re really doing is just doing some coordinated searches over an area to help identify a target. It’s not anything all that fancy or unusual, but we can imagine in the future how artificial intelligence and autonomy may make coordination communication fairly significant. You could imagine, for example,