DEFENSE · NEXT
Built for the day the link goes.
Jamming takes the link, and a fleet that needs the link to think stops. SwUM keeps coordinating over one-hop radio with no ground station in the loop, and every robot keeps its own copy of who is doing what.
~10,000
DRONES A MONTH UKRAINE WAS LOSING, MOSTLY TO ELECTRONIC WARFARE, BY RUSI’S ESTIMATE
2026
THE YEAR EVERY US SQUAD FIELDS EXPENDABLE DRONES
0
GROUND STATIONS OR ROUTING TABLES REQUIRED
~10,000 · RUSI ESTIMATE, REPORTED BY IEEE SPECTRUM AND TASK & PURPOSE
2026 · DEFENSESCOOP, JULY 2025
0 · SWUM SPEC V0.2, SECTION 6
No ground station. No routing table. No reliable link assumed.
ONE HOP
Information crosses the swarm by repeated one-hop broadcast. Links can work in one direction only, and the protocol never needs a reply to make progress.
ISOLATED, STILL WORKING
Tier 0 is a microcontroller that keeps the radio, the shared state, the allocation rules and inference running when the robot is cut off.
AUTHENTICATED FRAMES
Every frame carries an authentication tag. Outsiders can read, drop, replay and inject frames, but they cannot forge one.
LOSSY RADIO
The spreading time is a theorem, not a hope.
Over h lossy hops, the time for news to reach every robot has a proved binomial tail bound (Theorem 3). The settle time before a START is two dissemination periods, the minimum that avoids double starts. Real radio loss is bursty, so the field pilot sizes the settle time from measured latency rather than from the formula.
WHAT WE DO NOT CLAIM
Honest about the threat model.
The first release assumes members follow the protocol but may crash, reboot, move out of range or lose any frame. Members that actively lie are outside it, except that every durable fact, each attempt record and each bundle, is individually signed and a bundle needs a threshold of co-signatures.
Per-claim signatures and reputation are a planned extension on the larger radio classes.
WHEN
Starts once the pilot has loss data.
Defense work starts after the factory pilot has produced real loss and latency measurements, so the protocol constants are set from the field rather than from the model.
Low-level flight control, perception and payload skills stay out of scope: the flight controller is a device that accepts velocity or waypoint commands.
WHAT YOU GET
