Swarming balloons: Army planning mass exercise in ’26 over Indo-Pacific waters

WASHINGTON — A hundred-plus high-altitude balloons could populate the skies over waters in the Indo-Pacific region next year as part of a US Army swarming exercise designed to explore questions about mass effects, according to a senior service official.

“As intel professionals, we are very interested to see what type of advantage we could create when we don’t just launch a balloon or two balloons at a time, but we launch 100 of them or more,” explained Andrew Evans, the director for the new Strategy & Transformation Office inside the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence shop (G-2).

While details of that swarming exercise are still evolving, Evans said his team is partnering up with the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force and that those soldiers will likely launch more than 100 high-altitude systems over the waters somewhere in the Indo-Pacific region. Why there? He said they will need a “broad open area” to maneuver in case environmental conditions send balloons crashing down.

As the plan continues to develop, Andrews said he expects the exercise to include balloons in various sizes and carrying different payloads. Some may simply act as decoys, while others could be collecting information and more balloons could be dropping uncrewed systems with additional “sensing” capabilities.

Though it’s unknown how many companies will participate, each vendor will be showing its respective command and control capabilities, and will likely have different ways of controlling the balloons up in the skies, he later added. 

“Our primary goal is to demonstrate autonomous swarming capabilities that generate a persistent, cost-effective presence in the stratosphere,” Evans told Breaking Defense during an Aug. 22 interview. “Once operationalized, this type of capability will enable us to conduct a range of military operations including enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), the extension of tactical communications, and the rapid reconstitution of on-orbit capabilities when space is denied or degraded.”

Over the years the Army has worked on various balloon and aerostat projects. One high-profile foray included the ill-fated Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) that was abruptly canceled in 2017 after the 7,000-pound aerostat escaped its tethers, floating for nearly 100 miles through Maryland and Pennsylvania, while knocking out power lines and drifting into trees. 

But in recent years, service officials have a renewed interest in just how those aerial capabilities can be used. From Evans’s vantage point, he said once “operationalized,” high-altitude variants will enable the service to conduct a host of military operations including ISR, extending tactical communications, and rapidly reconstituting on-orbit capabilities when space is denied or degraded.

“The data and insights from this experiment will directly inform our strategy for integrating stratospheric assets into our Army and joint force architecture, ensuring we maintain a technological and operational edge in a contested environment,” Evans said. “This effort is poised to redefine how we project power and gather information in the future, and will serve to validate operational concepts that strengthen our competitive position across the continuum of conflict.”