This week a stunning piece in the South China Morning Post reported the Chinese Government DEVELOPED a SWARM battlefield weapons system completely distributed – able to survive anything Americans can throw at it.

It is a “self-healing network,” with “thousands of highly resilient A.I.- driven kill weapons – un-crewed aerial, surface and underwater.”

The article sent shockwaves through the Pentagon and the war fighter vendor community surrounding Washington DC – because few considered the Chinese could solve the “drones as a flock of birds challenge.”

The Chinese solved the most vexing challenge of drone SWARM warfare – managing thousands of drones – without a data center.

Well, it appears the Chinese not only solved this next generation warfare issue, they are at least a year – if not more – ahead of the United States.

What is SWARM warfare?

SWARM is the ability to control thousands, to tens of thousands of cheap drones – each with a small explosive – as a weapon that can take out a capital ship, like an aircraft carrier.

Drones are the ultimate in asymmetric warfare – cheap, fast, hard to shoot down, operating with no central point of control. As the Chinese noted – you can shoot down many of their drones, the remaining ones can reconstitute the threat – instantly.

The U.S. Government envisioned a type of multi-platform warfare with its earlier MOSAIC architecture – which we cover here on this site.

SWARM is far beyond MOSAIC – because SWARM means no central point of control or failure.

In a recent post, the Fractal team published the key requirements for SWARM technology:

These are the requirements – for A.I. drone management on the battlefield:

“Battlefields need computing capabilities BILLING systems do not have.

Among them are:

• No central point of control (cloud).
• No central point of failure (it’s not the same thing as control) (Still the cloud or data center).
• Ability to ingest immense amounts of IoT (sensor, meter, camera, satellite) data – Integrate it, process it, decision it – at quantum speed – during a fight.
• Close to infinite scalability – at least scalable enough to handle trillions of real time transactions without degradation.
• Communication among hundreds of thousands of entities (devices, drones, weapons, processors) with limited to close to non-existent bandwidth, often intermittent bandwidth.
• Quantum speed, on ANY current hardware, in battlefield conditions.
• A.I. models, created and run, on the battlefield, from battlefield data collected during the fight – at quantum speed on current hardware.

These capabilities have one characteristic war fighters cannot ignore – NONE can be delivered with conventional centralized, data center architecture.”

Is the U.S. behind the Chinese?

As far as controlling thousands of drones, the answer is currently yes.

That is not inside information – conventional technology simply cannot scale to meet this distributed compute challenge. Everyone knows it – while the BIG DATA CENTER LOBBY is trying to hide this fatal limitation.

Why?

Virtually all current software technology in the U.S. is a relic of the 1980s – relational technology – and it is painfully slow, expensive and cannot scale to the speed needed to make 10,000 drones operate as if they were a flock of birds.

Relational tech – and its derivatives need a massive, energy consuming data center to operate.

Some DoD – now War Department – vendors are pitching pimped-out trucks with data centers on them driving around the battlefields – anything to protect the fallacy that the age of the centralized data center is over.

These artifact technologies were built to run billing systems, manage HR and deliver sales forecasts. They work fine for a few billion records, when a report is needed in a week.

The modern battlefield is vastly different.

There are sensors, devices, cameras on soldiers’ equipment.

Every vehicle collects and forwards digital information.

Jet fighters flying overhead collect oceans of photo and terrain data – and the satellites above dwarf what is collected on the battlefield.

No current relational technology – or any derivative, can collect, process, store and decision this galaxy of data instantly – because billing and HR systems are not built for that sort of thing.

There is a much bigger problem – and it is fundamental to why the Chinese can deliver thousands of drones, with no central point of control or failure and the United States cannot do the same with 11.

China has a huge advantage – China is NOT burdened by obsolete, U.S. enterprise software which by definition demands centralized command and control.

The centralized command and control doctrine pushed by the current software industry – which limits America’s war fighting capabilities – is obsolete for modern drone warfare.

These vendors, led by billionaires telling the world they need gargantuan data centers, ruining Virginia’s farmland to run A.I. models – are trying to outrun their technology’s obsolescence by convincing the Pentagon it can deliver SWARM warfare, from a data center on the battlefield.

Fortunately, the Chinese helped the United States by demonstrating – or publishing – distributed computing – not central control – is the future of drone warfare.

The key to drone warfare is cheap drones, in flocks of thousands, instantaneously adapting to changing battlefield conditions via artificial intelligence.

The drone war fighting battle will be won not by centralized command and control where a data center on a battlefield can be taken out in one shot and the drones come crashing down.

The future of drone warfare is not hardware – it is not big data center enterprise software – the Chinese proved drone warfare will be won by nimble, distributed software, which is scalable and survivable.

That means no data center on the battlefield – no data center anywhere.

The future, which the Chinese cannot deliver is where the SWARM itself becomes the virtual data center operating as a computing MESH.

This may be one of the singularly most important innovations in drone, un-crewed warfare – MESH computing – turning every friendly device on a battlefield into an A.I. computing MESH – that cannot be taken out – because it has no central point of failure.

This Fractal Substack is the only place you will read about MESH computing – unless our friends at Apple take us up on demonstrating it in every Apple corporate account.

The MESH aggregates the compute power of all the friendly devices on the battlefield and in an instant delivers the A.I. compute power of a massive data center – without the data center.

American political, military, and business leaders see the U.S. high tech sector through a fallacious lens – if there are multi-billion dollar software companies, with billionaires running them – they must have cutting edge technology.

Nobody asks how old that technology is.

Nobody asks how a technology built to run a billing system can scale to drone warfare.

Nobody asks how a batch processing technology – like every relational database – can handle the interactivity of billions to trillions of transactions, from different sensor devices – and instantaneously process those transactions – to give the war fighter a battlefield A.I. advantage.

Nobody asks how a 1980s technology – like Oracle – can possibly deal with these modern A.I. challenges.

The Chinese just showed the United States military these 1980s tech dinosaurs – ones they would surely never use – companies who are centralized data center – centralized command and control down to their DNA – are not the future.

What happens on the battlefield presages what happens throughout industry.

You can rest assured the Chinese are not using Oracle or Palantir.

If they were, they could not achieve independent, distributed command and control.

The Chinese may have given the Department of War the wake up call that came without a shot being fired – that centralized command and control is not going to solve the SWARM challenges – and we thank them for that.

Our Fractal team and others like us are delivering something the Chinese are not close to developing – quantum speed on current hardware – so American war fighters can have the weapons they need to win – today.

We lay these facts before you – again – that the conventional technologies running about everything today are obsolete.

The future of war fighting is asymmetrical weaponry, driven by A.I. without centralized command and control.

Fractal and its partners are proving it in future battlefield examples today.

Those capabilities – running the largest A.I. models – without a data center will continue to make their way into commercial applications – showing there is no application, for A.I. or any other domain – that needs a data center.