The US Marine Corps wants to equip troops with deadly swarming drones that could bring a sci-fi element to the battlefield, according to a report on Wednesday.
The drones — commonly known as suicide or kamikaze drones — would be able to travel up to 12 miles, hover over a battlefield to hunt for targets and then attack, DefenseNews reported.
“The swarming idea would be ‘How do I overwhelm the enemy’s defenses and cut off lines of escape,’” Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at The Hudson Institute told the outlet.
“The idea here is to cause an area effect,” Clark said. “You want to overwhelm defenses or cause explosions over a wider area to try and herd your adversary or cut off lines of retreat.”
The force is looking at having small troops of Marines carry the killing robots to deploy over massive battlefields, according to the report.
The swarming capability makes the AI-powered bots even more lethal, since it means they can communicate to maximize the effectiveness of a strike.
“You might create a blast pattern or detonate in some kind of order that herds your adversary into an area that you want to be a kill box,” Clark explained.
“So, swarming for the Marine Corps would be about driving your enemy’s behavior in ways advantageous to yourself.”
The unmanned weapons could also be used as decoys to get the enemy to look for troops in the wrong place.
Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and analyst with The Heritage Foundation, explained the tech could be more useful than traditional Marine weapons, such as a .50 caliber machine gun.
“If I have a .50 cal: Hugely heavy, massive logistics burden to carry around the ammo…,” Wood said.
However, “If I have a man-portable unmanned system that I can launch with a camera, it’s small in size so its detectability is reduced, it can send that information back to the unit and it can also hit a target with great precision,” Wood said, “that’s an awesome capability to have.”
Since the tech already exists, it could be made available much more quickly than under a typical Department of Defense acquisition program, the report said.
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