Meaningful Human Control over Swarms in ISTAR

Modern military operations have changed in terms of scale, speed, and complexity. From operations that were closely limited, asymmetric, and prioritized the protection of one’s own forces, the area of responsibility now lies in larger geographic areas, and hence, with limited personnel, technological amplifications are in dire need. This paper is a concept paper that will describe an intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) use case and provide a concept for a decentralized swarm for surveillance operations in denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited (DDIL) environments, providing options to maintain meaningful human control (MHC). The paper starts by introducing human-machine teaming (HMT) with swarming, specifying the use case as a storyline, and providing a solution concept with decentralized epidemic routing.