Air Force awards Georgia Tech $85 million for Golden Horde swarming munitions effort

The Air Force has awarded an $85 million contract for the Golden Horde science and technology demonstration effort to a research center affiliated with the Georgia Institute of Technology, according to a Defense Department notice.

Golden Horde will introduce networking, collaboration and autonomy to a homogeneous or heterogeneous group of weapons already available in the Air Force’s arsenal. It's one of the service's first vanguard projects intended to expedite an emerging technology's transition into a program of record.

Georgia Tech Applied Research Corp.'s five-year contract will provide "research and development of emerging munition technologies, as well as integrated weapon demonstrations," the DOD notice, released Thursday, states.

The first task order is an undefinitized vehicle worth at most $46 million and is expected to be completed before December 2021.

Last March, Scientific Applications Research Associates also received a contract for Golden Horde -- worth $100 million. SARA is doing design work to package communications and autonomy technology into inventory munitions, Col. Garry Haase, head of the weapons directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told Inside Defense Oct. 11.

He said AFRL will do flight testing with those systems in 2021.