Pentagon Mad Scientists Have Made the F-16 Even More Lethal

David Axe

Security,

Swarming 3-D drones launched from fighter aircraft are reality.

In the middle of June 2015, a U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter took off from an air base in Alaska and flew over a military training range at 430 miles per hour. On command, something burst from the fighter’s flare dispenser—a drone roughly the size of a soda can and weighing just one pound.

The tiny, orange- and black-colored robot fluttered toward the ground trailing a parachute. After a few seconds, the chute separated from the drone, the robot’s wings—which had folded into the body for compactness—extended outward. An inch-wide propeller began spinning, propelling the diminutive machine forward.

The drone is called “Perdix.” It’s the latest product of the Strategic Capabilities Office, a secretive Pentagon organization, formed in 2012, whose job is to find new ways to deploy existing weapons.

One of the office’s ideas is to transform F-16s and other fast jets into high-speed launchers for swarms of small drones that could confuse enemy defenses or perform surveillance.

“Just imagine an airplane going in against an [integrated air defense] system and dropping thirty of these out that form into a network and do crazy things,” Bob Work, the deputy defense secretary, told trade publication Breaking Defense. “We’ve tested this. We’ve tested it and it works.”

The Perdix drones are 3D-printed out of Kevlar and carbon-fiber. Powered by lithium-ion batteries—the same kind you’d find in a cell phone—the Perdixes launch from a standard flare dispenser, like on the F-16, F/A-18 and other warplanes.

Toughness was a key design requirement. A Perdix must survive forceful ejection from a high-speed launcher and right itself in turbulent winds.

The drones were originally developed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. The students tested the Perdixes from balloons and envisioned the small unmanned aerial vehicles supporting environmental monitoring.

But it was the military that was most interested in the tiny machines. The Virginia-based Strategic Capabilities Office—a twenty-six-person team led by William Roper, a physicist who previously worked for the military on missile defense—began experimenting with Perdix in 2014.