Army sent balloon swarms to Middle East to support CENTCOM operations

WASHINGTON — After scrubbing a large-scale, high-altitude balloon demonstration in the Indo-Pacific last year to send the assets over to the Middle East, the US Army has gleaned a series of observations for future use, 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, the director for the Strategy & Transformation Office inside the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence shop (G-2), told Breaking Defense today. 

“They were effective for the mission that they were assigned,” he added, though he was not able to disclose the exact location and operational scenarios in which they were used.

The Army has tested out high-altitude balloons multiple times in the last few decades, and the service has revived the push to deploy them in recent years for added battlefield sensing and communications. Testing has typically included one or two balloons at a time, but the Army was looking to experiment with over a hundred high-altitude balloons in the skies over waters in the Indo-Pacific in 2026. While that didn’t come to fruition, smaller balloon swarms were used in CENTCOM.

“From a scale perspective, we went from one to two to dozens simultaneously,” Evans said on the sidelines of the Annual Association of the US Army conference. The smaller swarms were enough to highlight a trio of challenges associated with operating those autonomous balloons inside a theater with active military operations.

First, there were logistical challenges tied to transporting the balloons into the Middle East and then storing them. 

“Balloons can be a little finicky in terms of temperature, and you have to contend with environmental characteristics,” Evans said.

Then, there were questions about how to support and operate the balloons — something the Army and joint force will need to do “a little bit of additional thinking” about regarding what force structure will need to look like, Evans said.

“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,” Evens said. 

Given the ongoing regional options, industry had to put the military in “driver’s seat” to ensure everything was in accordance with the proper authorities the US military had. 

“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.

Another challenge, albeit one expected, was related to airspace control. While Evans did not expand on this point, airspace control has been a point of contention as the military seeks to add aerial drones into airspace that also includes manned military aircraft and commercials planes.

“There were some challenges. … That was not a new finding, [but] a consistent observation,” Evans said.

As for what’s next for balloon experiments and buys, Evans said Army leaders are pretty certain that they need stratospheric sensing capabilities, but it is “unclear” how they will be delivered. 

“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.”