Army doubles balloons for upcoming SWARMS demo, adds NORAD to the mix

WASHINGTON — US Army plans for a high-altitude balloon swarm experiment in the Indo-Pacific region are expanding, with more platforms and help from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to track them, according to a senior service official.

“We’re using this both to define what intel sensing could look like at scale [and] operationalizing the stratosphere for a phase one-type conflict,” Andrew Evans, the director for the new Strategy & Transformation Office inside the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence shop (G-2), told Breaking Defense.

The idea, he said in an interview in October, is to use the swarm as a dispersed, attritable intel-gathering tool at the outset of some hostilities or in the immediate aftermath of a worrying geopolitical incident.

“[For example], if something happened and you’re less concerned about station keeping and you just need to get sensors in the air to know what the heck’s going on, this is sort of the vision,” he said. “But you have to do it at volume and create mass disruption for an adversary.”

In August, Breaking Defense first reported on the 2026 experiment but since then, the number of potential balloons has doubled to 200, Evans explained.

Also new, Evans said NORAD reached out to the service with an offer to use its ground-based radars to track the floating objects to better get a picture of how such a swarm, if used by an adversary, would look to US observers, which would aid both offensive and defensive planning. The US Coast Guard is also expected to be on hand to help track the balloons. All of it is part of the “Lego building” that makes up the extremely high-altitude experiment.

While the service is still fleshing out details for next year’s $3.5 million experiment — now being called the Swarming Worldwide Autonomous Reconnaissance in the Multi-domain System (SWARMS) — the tentative plan is to acquire those couple hundred balloons. They will then be launched within 1,000 miles of Hawaii from both islands and ships, with some simply acting as decoys while others are outfitted with intel sensors, jammers or faux-kinetic effectors. 

“We’re going to launch in multiple waves, demonstrating what a phased use of these might look like over time,” Evans explained. “We’re going to create mass disruption [of the] stratosphere to demonstrate what it would look like if this was coming at you.”

Evans later added that the use of decoys is something the US is “seeing play out in Ukraine,” saying if it’s done “at scale, the adversary doesn’t know if it’s a decoy, if it’s a sensor, if it’s an effector. So, they have to operate as if any of it could kill them.” 

What the experiment isn’t going to do though, is a live collection of intel and disseminate that data onward. That part of the equation, Evans explained, has not been completely worked out, and service officials are hoping to glean insights on those lingering question marks during the 2026 SWARMS demo and then fold them into a possible follow-on event in 2027.

“We want to get the training wheels off this thing, and then we’ll start to partner,” Evans said.

“Not all of this has been completely solved yet. … We think that we’re going to have some challenges and therefore, need to resolve how we do the architecture of this, especially when you have multiple vendors that are all coming with their capabilities,” he said.

Theresa Hitchens contributed to this report.