Autonomous Drone Warfare

Autonomous drone warfare has become the new military measure of pridehood. No, the amount of drones does not equate to future military direction or might. The following article will list the top five autonomous drone warfare directions, of which, Order of Battle (OOB) doesn't even break that ceiling. Here are the top five most important future drone warfare concepts: Power Scale, System and Sensor Integration, Power Scale Enablers, Communications Resilience and Flexibility, and finally, Doctrine.

The following isn't a spray and pray approach like some news outlets, and instead is extremely targeted for the future of drone warfare few understand. All information is based on current defense contractor spending. This isn't a dazzle with length, but kill with brevity.

1. Power Scale
   • Back in 2020, quantum was new and IBM had a hard time convincing people quantum was useful. So IBM and Darpa created a concept called quantum volume. It was a unit of measure for all quantum advantage going forward.
   • Power Scale units is the most important term the Army was foolish enough not to create.
   • Marines: Power Scale contracts for amphibious warfare ships.
   • Army: recently released the most important study about 3D printing at the front line. Usage was through a reinforcement learning model to print/build systems based on real-time mission requirements.
   • USAF: Project Hercules; CJ-130 mothership loaded with 1k+ drones.
2. System and Sensor Integration
   • Andruil: Space Force contract for this overlay.
   • Palintir: Army sigint integration for this.
   • Lockheed: all of the F35 lol.
   • Raytheon: Loyal Wingman.
3. Power Scale Enablers
   • Simple, whether it's the British bringing chip manufacturing to orbit, or the Army producing military drones, the principle remains the same: the closer you produce to the objective, the cheaper it is.
   • Recently, EUCOM opened a shop to test these Proof-of-Concepts using exactly this.
4. Communications Resilience and Flexibility
   • DARPA's favorite motto is survivable communications. They overkilled it when I was in the service. Advanced swarms, kill chain TTPs, or newer ballistic missiles rely on centralized and decentralized communication. Nothing has changed.
   • This is significantly different than system and sensor integration.
5. Doctrine
   • This doesn't mean creating a drone force, or arming every soldier with drone capabilities. That's not just ignorant, its dangerous.
   • Example: in 2025 the Army decided to create a new sub-brigade division for decentralized theater-level geoint surveillance based on new drone capabilities.
     • Time and place, with the right training and CONOPS, is significantly more important than weapons abundance.

Though the Army has contracted the movie industry to write their Ghost Fleet 5/6th EWIR concepts, these are to bring people up to speed. Not to lay out the actual future capabilities. Unfortunately, other sources, use these laymen concepts to develop their own future concepts, even if the science isn't right. The following are crazy, and irresponsible, ideas.

Ender's Game is the most overinflated example of future warfare.

- Fact: the F-35 has enabled pilots to control remote systems through the Loyal Wingman trials
- Fiction: humans do not have the capacity to sustain linear, let alone exponential, growth. Our hardware, our brains, are the limiting factor in controlling remote assets.
- Gist: the best human-machine interfaces (HMI) could hope for are a dozen central relays that act in a decentralized manner.

Neuralink is so pre-mature and is the hype that never dies, even if it should.
- Fact: HMIs do help control simulated interfaces: such as playing video games.
- Fiction: the success of these HMIs have been patient specific, have not been evaluated as one's neural connections reshape, and require technology that won't exist in 100 years (biological quantum temporal signal matching and relay).

Yes, FPV or livestreamed weapons control is popular right now.
- Fact: FPV weapons have existed for a long, long time.
- Fiction: FPV are cheap alternatives to true autonomous warfare. This was highlighted, but is typically neglected. Their failures to make this deduction means they believe FPV is the end all goal, which its not.

Smaller and more modular surveillance is a product of chip miniaturization, not drone initiatives.
- Fact: Swarm Biotactics have existed for 50 years.
- Fact: The CIA released information that they had the recent German's TTPs long, long ago.
- Fact: biomimicry was the inspiration for the computer in the 1940s, the reason for computer vision in the 1980s, and the reason for Toyota's robot basketball player this year.
- Fiction: locust-inspired bio swarms are more vital for surveillance than warfare. This should be under a separate category.