JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Washington — The U.S. Army has an ambitious plan to field autonomous platforms across all its divisions in 2026. During a recent demonstration in the Pacific Northwest, it put that plan to the test, handing over the first batch of systems to a group of soldiers for a trial run.
The mid-August special user demonstration at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington was part of a project called Launched Effects, a term the Army coined to describe a class of autonomous system that isn’t quite a drone or a loitering munition but can be launched from the ground or a vehicle to provide a range of effects — from targeting and surveillance to kinetic strike. The systems are designed to scout high-value targets in hard-to-reach terrain where a soldier might not have a clear picture of what’s happening on the battlefield.
The service plans to field short, medium and long-range Launched Effects, or LEs, in the coming years, and a key part of its strategy is to continuously iterate on and update those systems based on soldier feedback and mission requirements. That’s a departure from more traditional acquisition programs that can take years to set a requirement, develop and test a system — all before an operator ever touches it.
The Army’s approach closely aligns with a push from senior leaders in the Pentagon to significantly ramp up efforts to arm U.S. military units with drones and other unmanned systems. In late April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed Army leadership to equip every division with launched effects by the end of next year. Following Hegseth’s memo, the Army announced a new strategy, the Army Transformation Initiative, that emphasizes the need for more autonomous systems.
Then in June, Hegseth issued a broader directive, instituting a wave of acquisition reforms aimed at making it easier for the services to buy and field unmanned systems. The goal, he said, is “drone dominance” by 2027. While the Pentagon hasn’t defined what that end state looks like from a quantity perspective, the message is clear: Senior leaders want to get autonomous systems into the hands of operators, and fast.
In an interview after the demonstration, the Army’s program manager for uncrewed aircraft systems, Col. Danielle Medaglia, said that while the service’s Launched Effects initiative predates these Pentagon directives, the urgency and high-level tasking from Hegseth is key to aligning priorities within the service and making sure the program sticks to its delivery timelines.
“What this did was really allowed us to get the advocacy we needed to issue launched effects as quickly as possible to the soldiers,” Medaglia told Defense News. “We have been given that flexibility from the Army acquisition executive to do exactly that, and by saying, ‘field to each division by 2026,’ that also helped align all of our teammates.”
Soldier feedback
The three-week event here had multiple aims, but chief among them, officials said, was soldier feedback on whether the first batch of short-range Launched Effects systems is user friendly and relevant to their mission needs.
In March, the service chose three off-the-shelf short-range systems that will serve as a baseline for the effort: RTX’s Coyote Block 3, Anduril’s Altius 600 and AEVEX Aerospace’s Atlas. It bought a limited number of each vehicle and distributed them to three units during the user demonstration in August, with each unit focused on a single system.
Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said in an interview that while the service has experimented with Launched Effects at several exercises, the user demonstration was the first time it gave them to operators for hands-on training.
“Getting that feedback from the soldiers, from the commander in the field, helps us drive industry from the standpoint of what are the pros and cons of the capability,” Baker said. “From a larger perspective across the Army, it drives our doctrine, our organization, the materiel solution, the training aspect.”
During the first week of the demonstration, each of the three 7th ID units participating in the event conducted initial equipment training on their assigned system. They learned how to set up the LEs, integrate them into their mission planning and use the flight controllers. They also conducted simulated flights.
In week two, they operated the systems live for the first time, running through the setup protocol and tracking their flight path.
For the third week, the units once again flew their systems but this time they applied them to a tactical scenario and had a chance to operate multiple vehicles at one time.
According to soldiers and service officials, the demonstration was largely a success. Army leaders — from engineers to program executive officers — said they were impressed with how quickly soldiers adapted to the new equipment and their enthusiasm around incorporating them into operations.
Medaglia said it’s too early to provide a distilled rundown of the lessons learned, but she noted that the event provided invaluable data that will shape future training, requirements and operational concepts.
“Each of those units did not interact with each other and you saw them fight it in their specific way, with their experience and their type of expertise,” Medaglia said. “It really opened our aperture on how we could leverage LE moving forward.”
Defense News was on site during the second week of the demonstration, when units were transitioning from the classroom to the training ground.
Spc. Jacob Richter, whose unit experimented with AEVEX’s Atlas, said he came into the demonstration with no experience operating drones. He said the classroom and simulation training prepared him well for the live flight and described the system as easy to use.
“It was a seamless transition,” Richter said. “The flight simulator they had mimicked the flight almost perfectly. There was almost no change.”
Access to LEs means units can use an autonomous system to scout a target or gather other intelligence, and then a second vehicle can act as an attack drone for the strike mission. Richter and 1st Lt. Zach Glenn said the scout capability could allow them to fly further into restricted spaces and lessen some of the security concerns that come with sending human operators to perform that mission.
“We can use the scout drone to know what’s ahead of us, and we can also use the attack drones with the scout to eliminate the assets we’re worried about,” Glenn said. “If we’re worried about the enemy detecting any type of [electromagnetic] signature we’re putting off with our radios, we can eliminate that ahead of time. It’s just added security. It’s another tool in the toolkit we can use.”
Lt. Col. Michael Wallace, battalion commander for the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said getting feedback from soldiers like Glenn and Richter allows him to refine operational concepts based on their experience with the system.
“They’re identifying some of the limiting constraints of employing it, they’re seeing what the capabilities are, how to integrate it into their operations,” Wallace said. “They’re providing that to guys like me that have a little bit more experience on how to refine that and nest it with how we fight and how we do operations.”
Wallace noted that getting systems in the hands of soldiers is about more than familiarizing soldiers with how they work — it’s a chance to let them experiment and decide how the technology might augment or support their mission in a way someone on the outside might not have envisioned.
“I think that’s what all these great civilians are out here trying to do is get the items in the hands of the warfighter so that we don’t see it for the first time when we’re downrange,” he said. “We’ll continue to iterate on it, provide feedback and ultimately they can help inform a capability that’s going to make the whole Army more lethal and more ready.”
Continuous iteration
The Army plans to leave some number of systems behind with units at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to continue training and improving the capability, but the service is still defining its longer-term strategy for fielding the first round of Launched Effects.
In late July, the Army approved the program’s acquisition strategy, which uses what’s called an urgent capability acquisition pathway — an approach reserved for high-need programs slated to field in two years or less. That label, according to LE Product Manager Lt. Col. Hunter Gray, gives the program flexibility to move fast, regularly update its requirements and reopen competition to new vendors.
“It’s something that allows us to move very quickly, to adopt technology that’s ready to issue to units today and to iterate — to provide a continuously upgraded capability that’s driven by user feedback and the most current state of the technology that we’re seeing in industry,” Gray told Defense News.
That level of openness will require the service to find a balance between leveraging commercially-available equipment and making sure the systems it delivers are operationally relevant. The plan right now is to initially field off-the-shelf platforms like those it demonstrated last month and then survey industry every six months to see what new capabilities might be available, never committing to a single vendor but rather always soliciting new ideas solutions.
Maj. Chris Dudley, assistant product manager for Launched Effects, said in an interview at the event that the Army’s strategy is a significant departure from other acquisition programs that spend years on the front-end building an exquisite system with little to no operator input.
“We’re sort of inverting the process and trying to get it into the soldiers’ hands first, and then we’ll iterate and develop on the findings that we have,” he said.
As the Army makes its plans for fielding the baseline short-range LE systems, the service is also eyeing medium and longer-range systems using the same acquisition approach. Officials said the recent special user demonstration will inform the process for buying, fielding and crafting training plans for those platforms as well.
At the same time, the service is working to make sure that its architecture for Launched Effects is modular — from the launchers they fly from to the controllers used to operate them. Having a plug-and-play infrastructure not only makes the system versatile and simpler to integrate, but it makes it easier for vendors to design systems that fit those specifications.
Baker, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said the plan is to have that architecture defined over the next 18 to 24 months.
“What we want is really an agnostic capability to launch from air to ground,” he said. “What we don’t want is to buy one type of specific launched effect to do one type of mission set and then another launched effect to do another mission. We want modularity with the program.”
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.