What in the world would they need this for?
There isn’t an air force on Earth that would require 500 drones capable of firing air to air missiles to deal with.
To allow existing fourth generation fighter jets to swarm and overwhelm an enemy's fifth generation fighter jets with disposable vehicles.
Not yet.
China. Russia. Lots of countries, might just very well also be developing exactly the same capabilities.
Right now.
“There isn’t an air force on Earth that would require 500 drones capable of firing air to air missiles to deal with.”
DARPA is trying to get ahead of the curve. Warfare may be moving to massive swarms of air, ground and sea bots that, individually, are not that powerful. But hundreds of them would swamp any current defenses. The Navy has been experimenting with the concept for several years now.
Imagine being a soldier on the ground when hundreds of bird-sized glide devices swarm out of a missile launched pod. With no engines and just flight surfaces to guide them, they seek heat sources and they can tell the difference between artificial heat and body heat.
Imagine being a pilot when a pod falls from a high flying carrier drone and it dumps hundreds of guided chaff-like bomblets that will explode when close or when they get sucked into your engine.
(I article’s proposed concept misses the point, but the effort of developing it will not be wasted.)
Big defense contractors are not likely the ones that will design what DARPA wants. They make their money off of big, expensive, failure prone weapons systems. The people who will design this are going to be working from a garage shop operation. I suggested similar ideas to General Dynamics and I was pointedly told, “We don’t have an employee suggestion system.”
Any "air-to-air" missile is automatically an "air-to-ground" missile. I suspect the "canned factory" will also be able to swap out guidance hardware as needed to easily change functionality. The part that goes BOOM would likely stay the same.