Armys

The U.S. Army has announced that its future fleet of ME-11B High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) aircraft will be based at Fort Hood in Texas. The service says it will also establish a first-of-its-kind operational drone battalion at this base as part of a larger consolidation of aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets. This all follows the Army’s retirement of the last of its turboprop ISR planes last year.

The Army shared the ME-11B basing plans in the context of the relocation of the 116th Military Intelligence Brigade, headquartered at Fort Gordon in Georgia, to Fort Hood. That process is now underway. The most recent iteration of the 116th has been serving as the Army’s main aerial ISR formation since 2014. Over the past 12 years, the brigade has also overseen units at several other bases across the country, including ones already at Fort Hood.

The Army is currently expecting to take delivery of the first ME-11B prototype before the end of the year. The service is also in the process of acquiring two additional prototypes. The Army plans to buy at least six production examples, but this number could grow in the future. The HADES jets are being converted from Bombardier Global 6500 business jets.

“The move, authorized on March 3, 2026, by then-Chief of Staff of the Army General Randy George, positions the brigade to lead the deployment of the Army’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) marking a pivotal step in the modernization of the nation’s global aerial intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (AISR) capabilities,” according to an Army release today. “This relocation consolidates and redesigns the Army’s only fixed-wing AISR brigade to better support multi-domain and large-scale combat operations globally.”

Fort Hood is one of the largest Army facilities anywhere globally. It has its own airstrip, Robert Gray Army Airfield, which is collocated with Killeen Regional Airport. Signs that the ME-11Bs would be based there had already emerged last month with a contracting notice regarding planned work on hangars at this airfield, specifically to accommodate the new jets.

The Army sees HADES as a critical part of a broader paradigm shift in how it will provide aerial ISR support going forward. The ME-11Bs fly higher, faster, and farther, than any of the now-retired turboprop types the Army previously operated. As such, the HADES aircraft will be able to get to and from operating areas faster, and stay on station longer. Compared to their predecessors, the jets’ onboard sensors and datalinks will have better lines of sight from their perches, too. That higher operating ceiling allows the aircraft to use a slant angle to peer deeper into denied areas while still flying in international airspace and further away from potential threats. 

The concepts of operations for HADES, as the Army has described them publicly so far, also envision the planes launching extremely long-range drones. With ranges of around 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) or more, the idea is that the drones will dramatically extend the sensor reach of their launch platforms, and keep them further away from hostile air defenses. The service says the air-launched drone capability will offer a way to provide a penetrating intelligence-gathering capacity able to support future high-end operations without the need for a very stealthy or otherwise extremely costly platform.

“In 70 or 80 years, there would be 0.1% of the time when you wouldn’t be able to fly ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions] because you would be afraid of the threat, potentially, or the threat would be too high to fly,” Andrew Evans, Director of Strategy and Transformation with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, or G-2, explained to TWZ and other outlets at the Army Aviation Association of America’s (AAAA) 2026 Warfighting Summit in April. “That means that 99.9% of the time of a life of the system, it is a useful system for deterrence, for building pattern of life, target development, and so on and so forth. So we’re building a system that can be used for 99.9% of the useful life of the system.”

“There will be nothing in the world that we can’t touch with a combined range of HADES and what we can launch off of this thing,” Evans added. “I don’t think anybody’s safe in the future from a sensing perspective.”

Evans offered additional details about plans for HADES, and hinted at additional advanced capabilities planned for the jets down the line. Each jet will have two hardpoints under each wing for external stores, which could include pods with additional sensors or other systems. You can read more about all of this here.

Significant questions about the Army’s HADES plans do still exist, including when it comes to filling capacity gaps left by the retirement of dozens of turboprop ISR aircraft. As noted, the service currently plans to acquire just six production HADES jets on top of the three prototypes. This is down from the original expected fleet size, which was still just a dozen aircraft.

The Army does envision a future aerial ISR ecosystem that includes other assets, including high-altitude balloons. Those lighter-than-air platforms could take on other missions, as well, and even be able to deploy swarms of uncrewed aerial systems. The service has also been at least been experimenting with high-altitude, extreme-endurance drones. Space-based ISR assets are set to play an ever-more-important role across the U.S. military, too.

The potential for new drone developments brings us back to the Army’s additional plan to stand up what it is currently calling simply the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Battalion at Fort Hood.

“The companies merging to form the UAS Battalion are currently engaged in global operations, and their consolidation will enhance the brigade’s agility, deployability, and lethality,” the Army’s release today says. “The 116th MIB (AI) remains the Army’s sole unit deploying small, tailored forward elements to launch UAS remotely operated from home station, significantly reducing sustainment and mobility costs.”

The 224th Military Intelligence Battalion, currently based at Hunter Army Airfield, which is part of Fort Stewart in Georgia, will at least form the core of the new drone formation.

“Following the divestment of its manned fleet, the 224th Military Intelligence Battalion strategically pivoted to focus entirely on unmanned aerial intelligence. This transition aligns with the U.S. Army’s new force structure, under which the 224th is designated to become the first unmanned aerial system battalion in the Army,” according to the unit’s official website at the time of writing. “This new chapter includes a change of station from Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia, to Fort Hood, Texas, scheduled for completion by 2027. The move will consolidate the entire 116th Military Intelligence Brigade in a single location, enhancing its operational capabilities.”

“The newly formed battalion will consist of a Headquarters and Headquarters Company, two [MQ-1C] Gray Eagle companies, and one processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) company,” the 224th’s official page adds. “These strategic initiatives position the 224th at the forefront of the future of Army aerial intelligence.”

However, it is unclear from the details in the Army’s release today whether personnel or assets from other existing units might be part of the “merging” that forms the new UAS Battalion. The formation could grow further in the future. The service says the overall consolidation of the 116th Intelligence Brigade is set to bring 1,228 additional personnel to Fort Hood from Fort Gordon, Fort Stewart, and Fort Bliss (also in Texas), between now and Fiscal Year 2028.

The Army also has other MQ-1C companies assigned to combat aviation brigades at bases across the country. There are additional Gray Eagle units within the service’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, as well.

It should be noted here that the Army’s present leadership has been vocal in its desire to move on from the MQ-1C, a design with its roots in the Global War on Terror. The service has openly questioned the design’s survivability and general relevance in future conflicts. It has also seen pushback from Congress. Gray Eagles have been actively engaged in operations against Iran this year, as have their MQ-9 Reaper cousins.

The U.S. Air Force has also previously sought to retire its MQ-9s after raising questions about their value outside of lower-intensity fights. More recently, the service has described them as star players in the conflict with Iran, despite substantial combat losses. This has all fueled a renewed debate about the Reaper’s future, as you can read more about in detail here. The Air Force has now also partnered with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) on a new MQ-9 replacement effort that puts major emphasis on modularity and lower costs.

The Army’s aerial ISR ecosystem is certainly in the midst of a major watershed moment, with HADES being just one part of the future equation. Fort Hood is also now set to be the focal point for those plans as they continue to evolve.

“The key to the future of Aerial ISR is the consolidation at Fort Hood of the mighty 116th!” Army Maj. Gen. Timothy Brown, head of the service’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), said in a statement per the release today.

Central to that consolidation effort, and the broader future of Army aerial ISR, will be the arrival of new HADES jets at the base in Texas.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

On Thursday, U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC) stood up a new command to speed up reaction times and sustain operations within the anti-access/area denial environments of the Pacific. To help achieve that goal, the commander of this new unit told TWZ he wants to be able to saturate any future adversary with so many drones they have trouble operating. 

“We have learned, particularly looking at Ukraine, there really is no sanctuary area that is protected from observation and potential targeting,” Maj. Gen. Bernard J. Harrington told us during a media roundtable to introduce his new command. It’s called the 7th Infantry Division Multi-Domain Command – Pacific (7th ID MDC-PAC). Headquartered at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, it combines the 7th Infantry Division and the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF). The idea is to merge the maneuver capabilities of the 7th ID’s two Stryker brigades with the long-range sensing, fires, cyber, space, electronic warfare, and information capabilities of the MDTF.

The new unit was created as the U.S. still struggles to be on the leading-edge of modern drone warfare, especially when it comes to the lower-end segment of this broad capability set, a deficit we have frequently highlighted. This is a concern top Army officials have acknowledged to us.

US Army Historic Pivot: 7th Infantry Division Becomes Multi-Domain Command – Pacific

“As we look at our employment of drones,” Harrington proffered, “we are looking at a host of not just traditional sense-and-strike drones, but how do we couple that — utilizing an adaptive and agentic C2 [command and control system] — to long-range one-way attack, to be able to overwhelm potential adversarial systems by a volume that is connected from our sensor drone all the way to our long-range one-way attack drone.”

Harrington was referring to an AI-driven system that can make and execute decisions on its own — routing data, repositioning sensors, matching targets to shooters — without requiring a human to manually approve each step. He later described it as being a “soldier-on-the-loop, not in-the-loop” system, meaning that a human monitors and can override the system’s actions.

You can read all about how AI will enable the future of lower-end drone warfare in our deep dive here.

In another lesson from Ukraine, as well as conflicts in the Middle East, Harrington wants to be able to use decoy drones to “confuse and potentially deceive an adversary.” The goal is to “deplete potential magazine depth.”

We saw this play out in Ukraine, where Russian mass barrages typically use decoy drones to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, confuse its sensors and force the expenditure of valuable air defense munitions. Ukraine eventually responded in kind, with its own decoy drones, to achieve the same effects.

The need for the U.S. to develop a vast arsenal of long-range one-way attack drones that can also serve as decoys to consume enemy effectors is a topic TWZ has addressed in the past.

You can see one of the Russian decoy drones in the image below.

Harrington added that he is also looking at electronic warfare drones “to help isolate, and then enable other drones to be effective. So when we look at the family of systems, it is not just one role for any one of our drones — it’s how do they pair together, and then how do we get sensor to shooter most effectively to target any adversary appropriately.”

Harrington declined to say what kinds of drones the new command aims to field, though it should be noted that U.S. Central Command recently used Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) kamikaze drones, a design reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, in the war against Iran. It was the first time those drones were used in combat.

“There are a host of drones that we are using from multiple vendors, and really what we’re looking at is how do we start bridging the gap — because I would say with the multi-domain task force, we got to a point for the first time that I’ve seen where we could now engage farther than we could sense,” he posited. “So we have worked very, very closely with several vendors in order to close that distance.”

A key to making this all work is getting these drones into the hands of troops to see how these systems actually function across the wide range of environments where the Army operates in the Pacific.

“We’ve got Arctic steppe in Alaska and the high north that are going to require a different type of drone and different types of employment than you would have in a jungle environment in Hawaii or Malaysia, which is different than a desert environment in the Australian Outback,” USARPAC commander, Gen. Ronald Clark, told us.

“It’s challenging, but we’re dealing with the best and brightest that we have — our young troopers out there are very comfortable with having technology in their hands, and very comfortable with giving feedback associated with what works and what does not, because their buddies’ lives depend on it,” Clark posited. “It’s literally a responsibility that every soldier takes on and takes very seriously.”

“The other thing I’d add is the distances we have to operate,” Clark noted. “For instance, if you drew a box that was 2,000 nautical miles in each direction and started in Cambodia — went east to the Philippines, south to Indonesia, and then back west to Malaysia, and then back to Cambodia — that box is roughly the same size as the box you would draw if you placed it over Western Europe, from the UK to Finland to Turkey to Spain.”

Interestingly, the officials leading this effort declined to name a specific adversary and there was no mention of China at all, even though that nation is the primary pacing threat of the service and by far the biggest challenge in the region.

“The multi-domain command Pacific is not tied to a specific adversary, and it’s not tied to a specific location,” Clark explained when asked about threats from North Korea. “It’s a capability that we have built to counter any threat from any adversary, so it’s not necessarily focused on a specific part of the region or a specific adversary.”

As we noted earlier in this story, this new command is being set up as the Army has struggled to catch up to drone warfare developments abroad. China has invested heavily in lower-end drone warfare at the infantry level up to long-range one-way attack drones. The country’s capacity to mass produce all types of drones rapidly on gigantic scales remains a real concern, too. This is not lost on U.S. Army leadership.

“We are behind on long-range sensing and long-range launched-effect strike,” Maj. Gen. James (Jay) Bartholomees, commanding general of the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, told us last year at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) annual symposium. “We absolutely need to build this capability quickly. We need to test it in our region; we also need to work with our allies and partners to do the same.”

The Army, it seems, is still trying to figure this all out.

Given that 7th ID MDC-PAC is essentially only a day old, there is a long way to go before the Army can draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of this concept. There are still many unknowns regarding what kind of drones the division has and is seeking, how many they need and the timelines for procurement. Regardless, setting up a new unit concentrating on melding drone warfare with the maneuver capabilities of Stryker brigades is a clear indication that the Army realizes it has to change how it operates to succeed in a Pacific fight.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com