U.S. military says it conducted the first kinetic drone swarm on American soil during a recent exercise

During a demonstration earlier this month, the U.S. military conducted the first kinetic drone swarm on American soil, officials said, a notable milestone in the Pentagon’s effort to experiment with unmanned systems that communicate across a common operating network to accomplish various tasks.

A small group of troops gathered at Camp Blanding, Florida, on Jan. 8 where they launched four first-person view drones — some of which were packed with plastic explosives — into the air and toward a column of inflatable tanks. One drone acted as a “leader,” guiding the other three toward their targets, which exploded in synchronized pops, according to a video of the demo. 

The military and tech companies have demonstrated drone swarms before, but officials are touting this latest exercise as the first time they’ve attacked simulated targets, armed with live ordnance.

A drone swarm can refer to multiple unmanned systems being used at once, but the phrase specifically implies that these platforms are coordinating with each other across a shared network to fulfill a specific military objective. A defense official, who asked to be identified as a War Department official in keeping with the Trump administration’s terminology, said the Camp Blanding demonstration achieved just that.

“This event marked the first-ever kinetic drone swarm on U.S. soil,” the official told DefenseScoop on Wednesday. “During the demonstration, a single operator commanded three different types of first-person view drones, equipped with kinetic payloads and integrated through a common communication system to strike targets in a near-simultaneous manner.”

The exercise was part of a Pentagon pace-setting project called Swarm Forge, which was announced in a slew of military artificial intelligence-related documents on Monday. Part of Swarm Forge intends to test and scale “ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities,” according to the Defense Department’s latest AI strategy. 

The official did not specify if or how AI was used during the drone swarm when asked, but said that part of the Swarm Forge effort was meant to “push the boundaries of cutting-edge technology to ensure AI cooperation with warfighting units.”

Once seemingly a notion of science fiction, drone swarms — ones that could use AI to coordinate hundreds or even thousands of autonomous systems on land, sea or air — have been an interest of the U.S. military for years. In 2021, Israel reportedly used the first known, authentic drone swarm against Hamas in Gaza.

A little over a year ago, the Marine Corps established a specialized FPV drone team that has since acted as the service’s central hub for training, doctrine and experimentation. Known as the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team, it has been training and certifying Marines across the fleet for squad-level FPV system use, DefenseScoop recently reported.

Nathan Ecelbarger, a Marine veteran and president of the U.S. National Drone Association, said that his organization used MCADT concepts to help administer the drone swarm demonstration at Camp Blanding. The USNDA has overseen several drone competitions between the services, where troops test their unmanned systems capabilities and trade tactics.

“The Marine Corps has done an incredible job demonstrating 1:1 employability,” he told DefenseScoop in an email. While that capability “won’t get overshadowed,” higher levels of command could be faced with much starker drone ratios — possibly in a swarm of hundreds or more, he said. 

“It’s an open ended question that won’t be solved on paper or powerpoint,” he said. “It will be solved by warfighters packing C4 on a hill somewhere in America.” 

He added that technology from several UAS-centric companies participated in the demonstration, specifically Auterion, Kraken Kinetics, and SINE Engineering. The drones in the demo appear to be using Auterion’s Nemyx system, which intends to “turn autonomous drones into a single, coordinated combat force,” according to the company.

“We’ve seen restrictions and red tape preventing this type of testing on many U.S. military installations,” Ecelbarger said. “We want to change that. Camp Blanding leadership have been incredible partners.”

The defense official said that special operations forces, Air Force explosive ordnance disposal personnel and Marines participated in the demo.