In the future both the US and our Allies, as well as our enemies will be using robotic insect swarms to attack soldiers. This means thousands if not hundreds of thousands of insects making their own cloud of darkness like a killer bee swarm times ten or a small Locust Plague. These swarming robotic insects will attempt to over whelm the troops and kill them or perhaps use a non-lethal dose of injection to put them to sleep. Either way the enemy swarms will be able to cause an entire platoon of troops to lose their will to fight or kill them all with small directional explosive charges on contact. How can we stop them? Is it possible to stop such a strategy or enemy weapon? I believe it is. How so you ask?

Well consider flying a UAV or unmanned aerial vehicle into a swarm to stop them? This is how one species would do it against another. Did you know that Bats eat up to 1000 bugs per hour? In this case we would not necessarily eat them as they are merely a robotic swarm attacking a human group of soldiers. But we should consider how nature would attack this problem. Use a larger UAV to perhaps collect them like a giant Hoover Vacuum Cleaner; that is to say collect them in a bag and then seal them up. They may have biological weapons on them and will need to be sterilized.

The UAV defense swarm killer will need to make many passes just like when you vacuum your floor and there may need to be many of them working as a team together like the net-centric underwater unmanned autonomous vehicles, which search for under water sea mines. And these units cannot have air intakes or the UAV would get clogged up by all the attacking swarm units; they most likely could have to run on batteries or a fuel cell. I hope you will consider this in 2006, as one potential strategy for taking out a swarm of micro-mechanical devices aimed at our troops.