Photo By Senior Master Sgt. Dan Heaton | Technicians prepare a balloon for launch on the shore of Thunder Bay during Silent...... read more read more
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ALPENA, Mich. ¬— Under shade awnings on shore and aboard boats in the bay, military contractors, technology companies and university research teams succeeded – and failed – during Silent Swarm 25, the fourth annual iteration of a U.S. Navy-led exercise testing emerging technologies centered around radios, radars and related systems.
Col. Michael Whitefoot, commander of the Michigan Air National Guard’s Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, loved it all.
“I love seeing these young companies come out here with an idea, a technology, a concept. In the lab, it always works great. But then they bring it into the wild, into the elements, and have to make it work out here. After that, they go back to the lab, iterate, and make it better,” he said. “Will it help our military? Will it be a technology that one day helps a rural hospital better serve its community? Will it be an idea that, when combined with other ideas, makes our country stronger? I don’t know which it will be, but all of that is happening at once.”
Silent Swarm 25 was the fourth annual iteration of a technology experimentation event held at the Alpena CRTC and the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, of which the CRTC is a component. During the event, about 50 companies conducted more than 65 different experiments as observers from the Navy and other military services looked on, identifying which experiments showed the most promise.
“We don’t know today which one of these technologies is going to transform our nation, but one of them might. And that’s why the NADWC exists,” Whitefoot said.
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Rogers, adjutant general and director of the Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, is an engineer by training. He led the creation of the NADWC in 2020 with the idea of supporting events just like Silent Swarm.
“Events like Silent Swarm are critical for accelerating innovation, allowing the Joint Force to test, train with, and rapidly integrate emerging capabilities to stay ahead of evolving threats and maintain our strategic edge,” he said.
The NADWC is primarily centered around the Alpena CRTC and the Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center, two Michigan National Guard facilities about 80 miles apart in the state’s northern Lower Peninsula. Camp Grayling is the largest Guard-operated ground training area in the eastern United States, and Alpena offers the largest military airspace east of the Mississippi. Together, they support integrated training options across land, air, maritime, space and cyber domains. These unique capabilities have attracted the U.S. Marine Corps for amphibious landing exercises, the U.S. Coast Guard for joint maritime boarding and rescue training, and numerous international partners to make trips “Up North.” (Michigan partners with Latvia, Liberia and Sierra Leone through the National Guard’s State Partnership Program.)
“We bring folks in here, technologies from industry, government labs, and academia, all focused on a central hypothesis that small electromagnetic spectrum operations … employed on small, multi-domain unmanned systems can have a really beneficial impact for our deployed forces,” said Rob Gamberg, project lead for Silent Swarm at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division. “We bring in new technologies, we create an environment where they can bring those technologies in and experiment with them, try new things — succeed, fail, learn.”
Whitefoot said the NADWC’s 148,000 acres of training space at Camp Grayling, 17,000 square miles of special use military airspace at the Alpena CRTC, resources in Thunder Bay and over Lake Huron, and more give companies the challenges they need to push the limits of their technology.
“We provide the space and the resources they need to reach new heights. And we don’t know where those heights will lead,” he said.
| Date Taken: | 07.26.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 08.27.2025 10:01 |
| Story ID: | 545886 |
| Location: | ALPENA, MICHIGAN, US |
| Web Views: | 95 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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