Survivable Swarm Coordination After Ground-Radio Collapse

The question is how a nano-UAV swarm keeps coordination when land-mobile radio, FirstNet, cellular, and 10-gigabit access have shared the disaster: fire, flood, hurricane, or other ground-plant failure. GAO-23-106930 names that case. Computing and communication still have to advance together before swarms can track and act in uncontrolled environments. The solution is neighbor-first Plane C. The payload is keep-alive, relative pose, task token, and abort. The paths are short-range optical and near-infrared between airframes that still see each other, ultra-wideband or 60 GHz for relative pose, and acoustic as last keep-alive when smoke or water takes the optical path. Endpoints are independently powered. Abort is freeze of actuation. A ground station, a serving cell, and a 10-gigabit drop are restoration paths when they return. They are not the layer that holds formation while they are gone. This is a design paper. It reports no measured fleet.