From Ships to Swarms: Far Transfer From Maritime Autonomy To Medical Teams

Multiple surface vessels working in tandem

As we spend more time exploring how to improve swarm teams at Mission Critical Medicine, we've been looking deeper into how swarms show up in non-medical fields. Defining swarm teams broadly as distributed groups of self-organizing, semi-autonomous agents collaborating as problem-solving teams yields some interesting and perhaps unexpected areas of insight.

Recently, I came across a compelling analysis by Applied Intuition Defense on swarms of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs, or maritime drones), which you can find here. Though the piece centers on digital simulation and naval operations, it carries powerful lessons for teams that respond under pressure in the medical world.

Here are three core insights I believe map directly into systems-level emergency responses, resuscitation, and medical swarm teams :

Collaboration is key in Hybrid / Swarm Teams

In hybrid fleets, traditional crewed naval vessels and USVs must coordinate—bringing diverse capabilities together while facing integration, communication, and role overlap challenges. In medicine, we have our own “hybrid fleets” in action: paramedics, nurses, respiratory therapists, physicians, perfusionists, and more—often converging suddenly during codes, traumas, or complex emergencies.The key takeaway? You can’t assume that combining capabilities yields a smoothly functioning whole. To succeed, you must intentionally design how parts interact: command channels, fallback protocols, role awareness, and redundant feedback loops.

Acting Under Partial or Degraded Information

The article states:

“Each vehicle can be assumed to have only partial knowledge of its surroundings… due to communication delays or degradation.”

Replace “vehicle” with “provider,” and one finds a mirror image of clinical reality. In any emergent event:

• Team members lack full visibility into what others are doing in that moment

• Signals might be delayed, lost, or misinterpreted

• Latency, bandwidth constraints, or system failures further degrade coordination

Effective swarm teams don’t wait for perfect information—they act while building and maintaining shared mental models of the evolving situation, continually adjusting to changes and correcting blind spots.

Swarming Is a Learned (& Maintained) Capability

One implicit thread in Applied Intuition’s arguments is that swarming—like collaborative autonomy—does not emerge automatically just because you put capable agents together. Even if each agent (or clinician) is highly skilled, distributed coordination under uncertainty is a distinct meta-skill.That means:

• Practice matters: rehearsal under realistic uncertainty is indispensable

• Reflection and debriefs are necessary to uncover friction or misalignments

• Adaptation must be continuous—what worked yesterday may fail under new constraints

In the same way that naval swarms must iterate mission after mission, medical teams must practice “swarming under stress,” adjusting communications, role boundaries, and fallback strategies over time.

Bridging Domains: Why This Matters for Mission Critical Medicine

Much of what we do in mission-critical care is about coordination under pressure. Whether it’s resuscitations, ECMO initiation, multi-team transports, or mass-casualty response—the problems are rarely linear. They require adaptability, fast feedback, and emergent structural coordination.

By borrowing from fields like autonomy, robotics, and distributed systems engineering, we can expand our mental models for how to train, structure, and maintain medical swarm teams. If you’re interested in this intersection—autonomy design, team coordination, systems thinking in acute care—I'd love to hear how you're approaching it and what you're learning.