Pentagon agency wants drones to hunt in packs, like wolves - The Washington Post: The U.S. military is preparing for a series of meetings that could shake up how the Pentagon flies its fleet of drone aircraft and move them toward hunting together in packs.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host the gatherings in March for its Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program, it said this week. The major emphasis: Figuring out a way to move free of having a pilot operate only one drone with assistance from a sensor operator and a team of intelligence analysts through satellite links.
“Just as wolves hunt in coordinated packs with minimal communication, multiple CODE-enabled unmanned aircraft would collaborate to find, track, identify and engage targets, all under the command of a single human mission supervisor,” said Jean-Charles Ledé, the program’s manager, in a statement.
DARPA officials said the CODE program would use a combination of software and algorithms to “extend the mission capabilities of existing unmanned aircraft well beyond the current state-of-the-art.” It also would allow drones to operate in areas in which electronic warfare might be used against them or they might be shot down, officials said.
