In the army and defense forces, equipment or something which can cause damage on a large scale is called the “Weapon of Mass Destruction”. MQ-9 Reaper is the current drone working with the air force where it is operated by the pilot on the sky and loaded with missiles and launching them according to the situation and command on the pilot from the top.

Kallenborn, explains a drone called AFADS (Armed fully autonomous drone swarm) which can be on air and attack the opponents without human interaction and there would be no much supervision required. The programmed drone is the nest mass destruction weapon as it can identify the civilian from military targets ad the amount of damage it can cause is the reason Kallenborn calls it’s a WMD.

US army has been working on UAS Smart Munition for missile deployment, it may look like science fiction but the army is all set to launch the drone carrying missiles. The Cluster Swarm project is working on deploying a missile warhead that can detect the vehicle with explosives and attack them automatically.

Phase II of the development is sent to AVID who has a better and unique approach for the same. Previously the AVID was in the news when they designed the T-Hawk drone which was deployed in Iraq to find the IEDs in 2017.

The Cluster Swarm will be more powerful than anything in the drone weapon vertical. The existing drone CBU 105 can hit the desired target in a few hundred meters away as the new Swarm can hit the target many square miles away from the target. We had a disadvantage using CBU 105 as it there overlaps in the target where more number of drones hit one particular Target and have left the other targets to let go. The current Cluster Swarm is focusing on not overlapping the target and would focus on hitting different targets across the warhead.

Phase II completion focused on choosing the right target, deploying the missiles, and automated navigation. It is said that the charge of 9 launch vehicles will deliver thousands of drones on the target area. If the army goes ahead with Phase III then we would see drones shortly in wars.

The United States is not the only player in the market as Turkey has already deployed drones across their borders and currently it is manually controlled however the manufacturers claim it to be fully automated drones. Russia and China are not far behind.