by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

One of the most important jobs for an air force is suppressing enemy air defenses. It means hacking, jamming or otherwise blowing up radars and anti-aircraft missile sites — often during the opening stages of a war.

Now a new project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency envisions a near-future strategy using a cargo plane converted into a missile and drone-packing mothership — all commanded by an F-35 stealth fighter.

In short, it’s about how to build a communications network between the mothership, drones and the fighter jet — which work together to destroy an enemy air defense site before it can shoot back.

The agency calls it the Systems of Systems Integration Technology and Experimentation program. It’s a dry and a mouthful, but mainly refers to the software that controls the whole network.

Having the missiles, planes and drones is one thing. It’s another thing to get them to communicate with each other without overwhelming the F-35’s pilot — and without being hacked.

It’s about distributing “air warfare capabilities across a large number of interoperable manned and unmanned platforms,” DARPA stated in a March 30 press release. “The vision is to integrate new technologies and airborne systems with existing systems faster and at lower cost than near-peer adversaries can counter them.”

Here’s a video showing how the agency sees this in action. An F-35 flies toward a hostile radar and surface-to-air missile site, followed by a “mission truck akin to a modified C-130” that’s loaded with missiles and drones.

SoSITe concept. Darpa video

The C-130 functions like a mothership, and launches several largely-autonomous drones toward the target. The drones close in, jam the enemy radar and transmit targeting data to the F-35.

Like a middleman, the fighter pilot’s job is to look at what the drones see, confirm they’re looking at an enemy target — and then order the mothership to unleash its missiles. Computer algorithms sort the drones’ data so the pilot only sees what he or she needs to see.

“The mission truck launches a swarm of small low-cost cruise missiles, or LCCMs, that speed toward the enemy radar target,” the DARPA video narrated. “While each missile has a relatively small warhead, collectively they can have a tremendous impact.”

There’s little the air defense site can do about it.

In the video, the missile launchers destroy several incoming LCCMs … but there’s too many. Like a swarm of mosquitoes, you can’t swat them all. The other idea is that it costs less to blow up the radar with a swarm of cheap, tiny missiles than it costs the enemy to try — in vain — to shoot them down.