Swarming Terror | Small Wars Journal

Swarming Terror

Zachary Kallenborn, Gary Ackerman, and Philipp C. Bleek

On 25 April 2022, the White House released a new  National Action Plan for countering domestic-unmanned aircraft systems.[1] As the White House implements the plan, and works with Congress to secure new authorities like the new bipartisan Drone Act of 2022, policy-makers need to consider how drone terrorist threats scale and evolve over time.[2]

Drone Swarm. Source: Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)

Multi-Drone Swarms

Multi-drone terrorism represents an emerging terrorism threat, with a range of potential consequences including, at the high end, mass casualties. Although terrorists could quite easily acquire numerous drones, they face considerable challenges in obtaining and deploying the technology to control multiple drones at once. This is especially true for drone swarms in which multiple drones are integrated into a single weapon platform with inter-drone communication. The real difficulties involved with…