Autonomous drone swarms could become a major challenge for civil protection in the years ahead. The technology may enable more precise strikes against civilian targets, according to a new report from the Swedish Defence Research Agency—FOI.

“It isn’t difficult to imagine a future where mass attacks by autonomous swarms occur,” says Peter Bennesved, a civil defence researcher at FOI.

Both the technology and the industrial capacity to build drones at scale have surged.

“Drones are simple to scale up and can deliver effects over a wide area. In practice, there is no clear upper limit to the numbers that can be used. “In Ukraine, Russia used more than 700 drones in a single attack in July, an indication of where things may be heading,” Peter Bennesved notes.

FOI’s researchers foresee a future in which autonomous drone swarms cooperate in real time to hit targets with even greater precision. Bennesved notes that the war in Ukraine has already shown how drones can damage civilian infrastructure; single drones, for example, have been used effectively against the electricity supply.

“Protecting civilians from a lone drone is often easier—but precision is the challenge,” Bennesved says. “A drone can reach places a cruise missile or artillery shell cannot, for example, and small drones can pursue cars or emergency vehicles. One small drone can be enough to strike a transformer substation.”

What will set tomorrow’s systems apart from today’s is their degree of coordination. For now, groups of drones are flown by operators, either working as teams on the ground or as individuals.

“There’ simply more in the air now—more drones. They’re already being used in a swarm-like way—launched en masse—but the large attacks don’t seem to be co-ordinated in real time,” Peter Bennesved says.

The question of autonomous drone swarms is also currently a topic of legal debate. Today, individual drones fall under the Geneva Conventions, but future autonomous weapons systems raise many ethical questions.

“There has to be an accountable person behind every weapon fired. If a weapon chooses its own targets, that’s a problem in international humanitarian law—and especially so with swarms,” Peter Bennesved argues.

A further complication is the lack of a clear definition of what counts as an autonomous weapon, which will make it harder to regulate swarms under international law.

It is clear that swarms could pose major challenges for the organisation of civil protection, but they could also become part of the solution.

“I expect future swarms to be used much as individual drones are today. The purpose doesn’t change; what changes is that air attacks can become more effective when the platforms interact to a greater extent. And swarming technology isn’t only a problem—you can imagine swarms being used for civil protection as well,” Peter Bennesved says.

FOI researchers have also examined the psychological impact of swarms on civilians.

“Fear of swarms has mythological roots. There’s a deep, psychological fear of swarms embedded in culture and in the human imagination,” says Peter Bennesved, drawing a parallel to Hitchcock’s famous film The Birds.

The study, Swarming Drones and Civilians External link, opens in new window., was produced by a multidisciplinary research team and looks at drone swarms and civil protection through the lenses of technology, history, and international law.

Read the full report at foi.se.