The US Army had planned to fill the sky over the Pacific with more than a hundred high-altitude balloons this year, the biggest balloon swarm experiment it had ever tried. It never happened. The balloons went to the Middle East instead, and they went to work.

Andrew Evans, director of the Strategy & Transformation Office in the Army's intelligence staff (G-2), told Breaking Defense on 12 October that the service was "asked to pivot and do some experimentation in combination with operations." The balloons supported US Central Command, the headquarters running the war with Iran. Evans would not say where they flew or what they did.

He did say how many. "From a scale perspective, we went from one to two to dozens simultaneously."

The Exercise That Became an Operation

The original plan was ambitious. In August 2025, Breaking Defense reported that Evans's office, working with the Army's 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force, wanted to launch more than 100 high-altitude balloons over Indo-Pacific waters in 2026. By November the target had grown to about 200, under an experiment called SWARMS, short for Swarming Worldwide Autonomous Reconnaissance in the Multi-domain System, with launches in waves from islands and ships within 1,000 miles of Hawaii. NORAD had offered to track the swarm on its radars to see what an adversary's balloons might look like.

Then the Iran war intervened. Instead of a scripted demo, the Army sent smaller swarms into a live theatre. "They were effective for the mission that they were assigned," Evans said, though he could not describe the missions.

Stratospheric balloons ride at altitudes far above airliners and most air defences. They can carry cameras, signals-intelligence receivers or radio relays, and they cost a tiny fraction of a satellite or a long-endurance drone. Steering is the hard part: modern balloons change altitude to catch winds blowing in the direction they want to go.

Three Lessons From a War Zone

Evans described three problems the swarms exposed. The first was logistics: getting balloons and their gas into the Middle East and storing them. "Balloons can be a little finicky in terms of temperature, and you have to contend with environmental characteristics," he said, which matters in Middle Eastern heat.

The second was people. Vendors helped a great deal, Evans said, but the military had to stay in the "driver's seat" during real operations, and "there's just not a lot of folks that are trained on how to operate it." The Army now has to decide which skills it must own and which it can buy as a service.

The third was airspace. Evans did not go into detail, but sharing the sky with fighters, tankers, drones and airliners is a known headache for anything that drifts with the wind. He called it "not a new finding" but "a consistent observation."

Balloon, Glider or Pseudo-Satellite?

The Army is now sure it wants eyes and ears in the stratosphere. It is not sure what should carry them. "Would it be a balloon? Would it be a solar glider? Would it be some sort of pseudo satellite?" Evans asked. "It's unclear. No decision has been made."

Each option has its fans. Balloons are cheap and can be launched in large numbers. Solar-powered gliders and other high-altitude pseudo-satellites are built to stay aloft for weeks at a time and hold position better. All of them offer something drones and satellites struggle to provide: persistent coverage that is cheap enough to lose.

The irony will not be lost on anyone who remembers February 2023, when a Chinese balloon drifted across the United States and an F-22 Raptor shot it down off South Carolina. The technology Washington called a spy balloon then is now one the Army has flown into a war of its own.

The Wall Street Journal explains how high-altitude balloons became an aerial surveillance tool.

Sources: Breaking Defense (12 October 2026, August 2025 and November 2025); The War Zone; U.S. Army / DVIDS.