the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is exploring new potential concepts of operations as part of its Gremlins program, which has been experimenting with swarming drones that are designed to be launched and recovered in mid-air. DARPA is now looking into the possibility that personnel on a mothership aircraft that deploy and retrieve these unmanned aircraft might be able to load new payloads onto them, including swarms of smaller drones or munitions, before sending them out on new missions.

Steve Fendley, President of the Unmanned Systems Division at Kratos, offered these new details about the plans for Gremlins in a recent interview with Military.com, portions of which were published today. Dynetics, now a subsidiary of Leidos, is the prime contractor for the Gremlins program, but hired Kratos to oversee the actual design and construction of the drones themselves, which are designated X-61As. DARPA first initiated the Gremlins project in 2015.

The government is adding requirements," Fendley told Military.com. "They now want to rearm the Gremlins in air and redeploy [them], so they won't just do one mission now."

Fendley did not name any specific payloads that the Gremlins might carry in the future, according to Military.com, but did say that the options could include "actual weapons." DARPA has long talked about individual X-61As being able to carry different payloads, such as different sensor packages, electronic warfare jammers, and even potentially small warheads, and then operate together in a fully-autonomous, networked swarm to carry out missions collaboratively.

"[The military wants] to be able to deploy and retrieve a volley quantity, which is approximately 20 of those aircraft [the X-61A]," Fendley added. The X-61A is an "attritable tactical unmanned aerial system that can fly a several hour-long mission," he continued."

Attritable means that they are cheap enough to be employed in higher-risk environments where the risk of losing the aircraft is elevated enough that commanders would be disinclined to send in more expensive and more sensitve assets. At the same time, the Gremlins concept has always envisioned the X-61As as being recoverable for reuse, as well, but it has not been entirely clear in the past what the exact concept of operation might be in this regard.

Beyond all this, Fendley is now describing X-61As carrying expandable payloads, which could also include non-kinetic stores, such as electronic warfare decoys, and using them during a mission, before being recovered by a mothership aircraft. A specially-configured C-130-series cargo plane has been used in this role in Gremlins flight testing so far. The drones would then get reloaded inside that aircraft and be quickly sent back out again.