  As telescope facilities become increasingly more capable they also become
increasingly complex and require additional resources to operate. This is
particularly true for the current and future generations of "software defined
telescopes" that can support a variety of observing programs simultaneously,
either through commensal observations or through support for multiple pointing
centers as in the case of dipole arrays or dishes equipped with phased array
feeds. At the same time, many current and future facilities are also
distributed over large geographic areas, making monitoring and maintenance more
difficult and costly. For these reasons we have developed a new paradigm for
telescope operations called the "swarm telescope" that breaks large, single
facilities into smaller groups of independent systems that can collaboratively
work together to function as a single facility but with much less operational
overhead. In this paper we outline the swarm telescope concept and an example
of its implementation at the Long Wavelength Array. We also discuss potential
advantages of using this approach for other facilities, in particular the Next
Generation Very Large Array.
