A once secret Pentagon office took an idea first developed by students at MIT three years ago to develop what might become the U.S. Air Force's best bet for an intelligent swarm of cheap, expendable aerial drone decoys that confuse an enemy's integrated air defense system.

Thoroughly tested for two years in the cold of Alaska and the heat of California, "Perdix" microdrones are ejected from flare dispensers of Air Force aircraft such as the General Dynamics F-16 and the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet. They fall to earth, deploy their folded wings and assume a formation to attain the goal they're programmed to accomplish.

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The job of these decoys is to confuse enemy radar systems, diverting attention away from manned air superiority fighters or attack jets. An F-16 has 30 flare dispensers and can, therefore, carry 30 Perdixes.

Perdixes are 3D-printed using Kevlar and carbon fiber. Each drone comes with spring-loaded carbon fiber wings; a low-drag fiberglass fuselage; a custom pusher propeller and a lithium polymer battery pack.

Each drone is about the size of an iPhone 6 and weighs some 2.2 kilograms. It's built using commercial off-the-shelf components.

The microdrone was created and developed by MIT students. The Pentagon's once secret Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) liked the idea and repurposed a drone intended for civilian scientific experiments into a drone that fights wars.

SCO Director William Roper, a physicist, began Perdix testing in 2014. SCO's goal is to make the Perdix system much more effective and more cost-friendly compared to the expensive and very much larger ADM-160 MALD (Miniature Air-Launched Decoy). MALD is 2.4 meters long.

"They (Perdixes) are expendable and fly low as a surveillance asset. You can have a lot of them for a saturation approach. Saturating has an advantage over the thing it has to defend against. Its defender has to take more time and money to defend against it," said Roper.

The Defense Department agrees.

"Just imagine an airplane going in against an IAD (Integrated Air Defense) system and dropping 30 of these out that form into a network and do crazy things," said Robert Work, Deputy Secretary of Defense.

"We've tested this. We've tested it and it works."

The Pentagon has been testing swarms of drones designed to jam enemy air defenses; blanket areas with small sensors and attack targets.

TagsPerdix, aerial drones, MIT, Strategic Capabilities Office, William Roper, Robert Work, microdrone