WASHINGTON — After canceling a major, high-altitude balloon demonstration planned for the Indo-Pacific last year in favor of deploying those assets to the Middle East, the U.S. Army has accumulated a range of findings to inform future efforts, according to a senior service official.
“We were asked to pivot and do some experimentation in combination with operations, and we pivoted and supported operations in CENTCOM [US Central Command],” Andrew Evans, director of the Strategy & Transformation Office within the Army’s Intelligence Deputy Chief of Staff (G-2), told Breaking Defense.
“They were effective for the mission that they were assigned,” he added, though he could not specify the exact locations or operational scenarios involved.
The Army has experimented with high-altitude balloons multiple times over recent decades, renewing interest in the technology in recent years for expanded battlefield sensing and communications. Previous tests typically involved one or two balloons, with plans to launch more than 100 over Indo-Pacific waters in 2026. That large-scale demonstration did not materialize, but smaller swarms were deployed to CENTCOM.
“From a scale perspective, we went from one to two to dozens simultaneously,” Evans said at the sidelines of the Annual Association of the US Army conference. Those smaller groups were sufficient to surface three distinct challenges involved in operating autonomous balloons within an active combat theater.
Primarily, there were logistical hurdles associated with shipping the balloons to the Middle East and storing them.
“Balloons can be a little finicky in terms of temperature, and you have to contend with environmental characteristics,” Evans said.
Second, there were questions regarding how to sustain and operate the balloons, requiring additional analysis on future force structure, Evans noted.
“We had a lot of help from vendors in this space, but as you think about employing your systems and going from something like a Pacific [theater] to something like a CENTCOM [theater], you learn where those friction points might exist between what the military might need to inherently own, and … what a vendor could help provide in terms of the service,” Evans said.
Due to ongoing regional instability, vendors had to cede control to the military, ensuring all actions remained compliant with applicable authorities.
“And there’s just not a lot of folks that are trained on how to operate it, so we’ve learned some things along the way and we’re going to take those back,” Evans said.
A further challenge, though anticipated, concerned airspace control. Although Evans did not elaborate, airspace management remains contentious as the military integrates aerial drones into corridors shared with manned aircraft and commercial flights.
“There were some challenges. … That was not a new finding, [but] a consistent observation,” Evans said.
Looking ahead, Army leadership is confident in the need for stratospheric sensing but remains uncertain about the delivery platform.
“Would it be a balloon? Would it be a solar glider? Would it be some sort of pseudo satellite?” he said. “It’s unclear. No decision has been made.”
