NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Army plans to test out new tactical drone-swarming capabilities before Project Convergence, according to a service official.

The 2022 Experimental Demonstration Gateway Exercise — also known as EDGE 2022 — will include the “largest interactive drone swarm to date,” said Gen. Walter Rugen, the director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross-functional team at the Aviation Association of America summit on April 5. The Army will preview more than 50 technologies during the May event.

The EDGE exercise last year was conducted in May at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to prepare for Project Convergence, which is the Army’s experimentation campaign for joint all-domain command and control.

The drones will perform behaviors such as detect and identify “pacing threats” and observe when the swarm has entered a degraded visual environment. Rugen noted the drones will test their ability to autonomously report outside of communications-denied or GPS-denied environments.

The Army — now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on the swarm — will also test the drones’ ability to kill targets and assess battle damage, he said. During EDGE, the service will weigh how it can use swarming for attacks in combat.

“I may change my word downstream, but we're thinking maybe at times … you may want a wolfpack,” he said.

While the drone behaviors are not set in stone, Rugen said the drone swarm may be led by an “alpha” that would control the rest of the drones tasks in a hierarchical command chain.

“If one wolf gets knocked by the antlers, the second one's going to be up,” he said.

The lead in the swarm could be a manned platform, but the service is exploring how a drone could take control if the swarm is out of range like in a denied or degraded environment, he explained.

“We're innovating in this space, and we're seeing what the art of the possible is and it's very exciting,” he said.

Rugen echoed Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville’s concerns about inexpensive unmanned aerial systems. McConville said in his April 4 address that enemy drones would continue to be a threat into the future.

“We're just creatively working with what does the swarm needs to do to be better than maybe what some of the cheap swarms of our adversaries are looking at,” Rugen said during a media roundtable at the summit.

Additionally, Rugen noted the Army would test electronic warfare capabilities at the EDGE exercise.

“We're gonna see tremendous amount of moving the needle on electronic warfare with electronic sense, electronic attack and all that to generate that decision dominance,” he said during a panel at the summit.

As with Project Convergence, there are allies and partners participating in the event this year, Rugen said. There are seven international partners who will test out equipment alongside the U.S. Army, including in a combined air assault.

“We’ll be working on cross boundary contingencies and cross domain solutions to enable those cross boundary contingencies to happen at speed,” he said of the air assault exercise.