First Golden Horde swarming weapons flight encounters software issue

The Golden Horde program flew a "collaborative autonomy" payload on Small Diameter Bombs for the first time last month but ran into a software update issue that drove the weapons to strike a failsafe target, the Air Force announced in a press release Thursday.

The program's inaugural flight demonstration occurred Dec. 15 at Eglin Air Force Base, FL, where testers piloting an F-16 carried two SDBs outfitted with algorithms, a software-defined radio and a seeker. The Air Force Research Laboratory and industry partner Scientific Applications and Research Associates built these technologies to enable “networked, collaborative and autonomous” weapons, or a swarming capability, which the military believes can help overwhelm adversary defenses.

Upon release from the F-16, the SDBs quickly established communication with each other and detected a GPS jammer. The bombs then worked together to identify the two highest priority targets, but as a result of an improper software load, testers could not send the collaboration guidance commands to the weapons’ navigation system. Without the updated target coordinates, the SDB IIs instead struck a backup location.

Steven Stockbridge, Golden Horde principal investigator, nevertheless said in Thursday’s notice he’s "very pleased" with the demonstration, adding, "The team saw good performance from the networked collaborative sub-systems and understood the root cause of the weapons not impacting the desired targets. We anticipate readiness for the next flight test."

The program expects to conduct two more demonstrations with four SDBs in early 2021. While it’s not clear what the follow-on plans are, the release states the Air Force doesn’t currently intend to transition the swarming technologies to SDB munitions.

Rather, the December flight test “builds the foundation for integrating this technology into a variety of other weapon systems, which will help the U.S. maintain a technological advantage over our adversaries,” Col. Col. Garry Haase, director of AFRL’s munitions directorate, said in the notice.

The Air Force established Golden Horde as a “vanguard” program in 2019 to accelerate development of swarming weapon technologies through live and virtual testing. The notice describes these munitions as “semi-autonomous” since they follow predefined rules of engagement and enable or disable actions when certain conditions are met.