Autonomous Combat Drone Operations

This application area focuses on using autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned systems to conduct combat and force-protection missions in the air and around critical assets. It covers mission planning, real-time navigation, target detection and tracking, engagement decision support, and coordinated behavior across multiple drones and defensive platforms, including high‑energy laser systems. The core idea is to offload time‑critical sensing, decision-making, and engagement tasks from human operators to software agents that can respond in milliseconds and manage far more complexity than a human crew. It matters because modern battlefields feature dense, fast-moving threats such as drone swarms, cruise missiles, and contested airspace that overwhelm traditional manned platforms and manual command-and-control processes. Autonomous combat drone operations enable militaries to protect ships and bases from low-cost massed attacks, project power without exposing pilots to extreme risk, and execute distributed, survivable strike and surveillance missions at lower marginal cost. By coordinating large numbers of expendable or attritable drones and integrating them with defensive systems like high‑energy lasers, forces can achieve higher resilience, faster reaction times, and greater mission effectiveness in highly contested environments.