Stratospheric balloons have won over the general in charge of U.S. Army space and missile defense. Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, commander of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), told reporters on Oct. 14, 2026, that high-altitude balloons had changed his mind. “It was game-changing for me,” he said of seeing them fly. The Army has not named a balloon system for fielding.
Rafferty spoke at a media roundtable during the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting. His remarks came after the Army redirected balloon systems once intended for a swarm test in the Pacific to support operations in the Middle East.
The comments were reported in an Oct. 14, 2026 article by Joseph Trevithick in The War Zone. Rafferty said he first heard about the balloons while at Army Futures Command’s Long Range Fires Cross-Functional Team. “It just sounded crazy to me that we were considering this,” he said, according to TWZ.
From skeptic to convert in Morocco
What changed his view was seeing the balloons fly. “I went with the 2nd MDTF [Multi-Domain Task Force] to Morocco for training and experimentation,” Rafferty said, per TWZ. He cited “their ability to station-keep, and their ability to sense and even deliver effects from high altitude.”
Col. Joseph Mroszczyk, head of SMDC’s Transformation Integration Directorate for Space Superiority, said that altitude band offers persistence, broad coverage and space-like capabilities, per TWZ, and defined it this way: “Really, where you go from about 60,000 feet to 100,000 feet is what we focus on in the stratosphere.”
A Pacific test that went to real operations
According to TWZ, “the Army axed plans for a balloon swarm test in the Pacific last year” and “instead sent those systems to support real operations in the Middle East,” in support of U.S. Central Command. TWZ said it is unclear when that deployment took place or how long it lasted, and credited Breaking Defense with first reporting the shift.
The Army’s Pacific swarm plans had been public for months. Breaking Defense reported in November 2025 that the Army’s high-altitude balloon swarm experiment, called SWARMS (Swarming Worldwide Autonomous Reconnaissance in the Multi-domain System), was planned for 2026 in the Indo-Pacific, with launches within 1,000 miles of Hawaii from islands and ships. That report put the planned balloon count at about 200 and the experiment’s budget at about $3.5 million, with NORAD offering ground-based radars to help track the swarm.
How the balloons did in the Middle East is described only in general terms. Andrew Evans, director of strategy and transformation in the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) office, said they “were effective for the mission that they were assigned,” TWZ reported, without detailing those missions. Evans also said, “We had a lot of help from vendors in this space,” and that the Army learned “where those friction points might exist between what the military might need to inherently own” and what vendors provide.
No system picked yet
For all the enthusiasm, the capability remains experimental. TWZ’s article names no balloon system, vendor or program of record selected for fielding. Mroszczyk said, “what I’m pushing for is a family of stratospheric systems that really covers smaller size” up through larger platforms, and that the Army is “looking to do that throughout multiple experiments over the course of the coming year.”
The hardware in view so far includes balloons from Aerostar, shown in TWZ’s lead image, and the Wallabee sensor payload made by Urban Sky. TWZ also pointed to an Apollo-R drone shown carried under a balloon during Exercise Orient Shield 26 in Japan, and to the establishment of “a new schoolhouse for high-altitude balloon training.”
The next verified step is the one Mroszczyk described: a series of experiments over the following year meant to demonstrate command and control of the balloons and networking with other Army capabilities, per TWZ.
Top image: A U.S. Army micro high-altitude balloon lifts off at Yausubetsu Training Area, Hokkaido, Japan, on Sept. 21, 2026. Image Credit: Sgt. Steve Asfall / U.S. Army — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons