From Southern Lightning to Silent Swarm

In preparation for the annual Silent Swarm experimentation event, which takes place in the summer, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane organizes a supporting risk-reduction event titled “Southern Lightning,” held every April in South Carolina.

The event, done in collaboration with U.S. Fleet Forces Command, focuses on resilient communications within unmanned autonomous systems, said Robert Gamberg, project lead.

This year was particularly unique with the event’s first week hosting the USS Cole and MH-60R Seahawk helicopters from the U.S. Fleet Forces Command. The South Carolina National Guard also brought AH-64 helicopters, the event lead told SIGNAL Media.

“We were able to, for the first time ever, bring some of those relatively low [technology readiness level] technology initiatives into a fleet experimentation event, and man, they really performed fantastically,” he said. 

The second week took place in Aiken, South Carolina, in partnership with the Savannah River National Lab. “We do another week of experimentation up there and that was focused on resilient comms in the face of electronic attack. We did some RF [radio-frequency]-enabled cyber work and some [positioning, navigation and timing] work up at the ranges,” Gamberg stated. 

“It’s either new technologies or new ways to execute the experimentation in the summer,” he explained. “On the resilient [command and control] side, knowing that we had this complex problem with the 400 multidomain entities, we needed to make sure that we had those stress tested, those mesh networks, with distance between nodes, throughput, accuracy, and then the electronic attack piece.”

“Working directly hand-in-hand with the fleet, that was a fantastic first-ever opportunity for us in Southern Lightning this year,” Gamberg concluded.