Drones Aren’t Swarming Yet — But They Could

True drone swarming, defined as resilient and collaborative autonomous problem-solving at machine speed, does not yet exist in military applications. Current capabilities are often mislabeled as swarming but are actually just robotic maneuver en masse, which is not a true step-change in warfare. The U.S. defense industry has focused on platform hardware and quantity rather than the critical distributed systems architecture needed for genuine swarming. The military force that first achieves true swarming—an intelligent, adaptive system without a single point of failure—will gain a decisive strategic advantage capable of overwhelming current systems.