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Silent Swarm exercises gave companies rapid development environment, NSWC Crane director says
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Summary
Dr. Angela Lewis described Silent Swarm as an annual experimentation series that expanded from 17 to more than 50 participating technologies and relayed a participant's claim that the event enabled "nine months' worth of development in three hours."
Silent Swarm, an annual experimentation series described by Dr. Angela Lewis of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, is designed to mature technologies for small, attritable unmanned systems and resilient communications by providing a realistic multidomain test environment.
Lewis said the event is sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Integrated Sensing and Cyber Office and that the exercise's focus has included electromagnetic warfare, radio‑frequency enabled payloads, digital payload delivery and resilient communications. "During the first year of Silent Swarm, we put out a request for interest and built an event that included 17 participating technologies," she said, and by the third event in 2024 "teams [were] experimenting with more than 50 technologies."
Lewis related a company outcome brief from FY25 in which a participant said the event allowed it to "execute 9 months' worth of development in 3 hours," a rapid development claim she highlighted as evidence of the event's value. She said Silent Swarm provides a multidomain experimentation site at the National All Domain Warfighting Center in Alpena, Michigan, where government engineers, academic partners and industry participants can test integration across ground, aerial and maritime platforms.
Lewis emphasized that Silent Swarm gives small businesses and nontraditional defense firms opportunities to validate technologies in a realistic environment and collect government‑grade data with government subject‑matter experts and operators present. She framed the event as one of several mechanisms—alongside consortiums and internal education—that accelerate moving promising research toward operational use.
Lewis' statements were made on the Transfer Files podcast produced by the Federal Laboratory Consortium; the claim about accelerated development comes from a company brief she cited and was presented as that participant's report.
