Army Has Fielded Launched Effects to 11 of 12 Divisions, With Griffon Supplying Most

The U.S. Army has fielded launched effects to 11 of its 12 headquarters divisions and to all three of its multi-domain task forces, a service official told reporters, leaving one division still to receive the unmanned systems. Lt. Col. Hunter Gray, the product manager for launched effects, said the 12th and final division is due to start receiving them next month, Breaking Defense reported on Monday, Nov. 9, citing a Thursday briefing.

What launched effects are, and what the Army has fielded

Launched effects are unmanned aircraft or payloads that can be sent from crewed aircraft, ground vehicles or maritime platforms to deliver kinetic or non-kinetic effects, Breaking Defense reported. Depending on range and payload, the systems are intended to extend a unit’s reach without putting soldiers directly in the same place as the target.

Gray said the fielding is part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s 2025 Drone Dominance memo, which directed the Army to provide launched effects to each headquarters division and multi-domain task force by the end of 2026. Defense Daily, reporting on a Nov. 6 update from Gray, said the deadline was mandated by Hegseth in late April 2025 and that the plan covers 12 divisions and three multi-domain task forces. Inside Defense, also reporting this week, said officials described the effort as meeting an objective laid out in the Army Transformation Initiative about 18 months earlier. Gray did not name the divisions that have already received systems, and Breaking Defense said the Army did not respond to questions about that by publication time.

He also did not disclose the total number of systems delivered. He said the majority have been long-range capabilities provided by Griffon Aerospace, and that the Army has received systems from Griffon’s broader family of launched effects, including the company’s Outlaw drone. Gray and Griffon President Jordan French would not list every fielded platform, Breaking Defense reported. “To narrow in on a singular platform is not really how we look at acquiring systems,” Gray said.

How Griffon became the main supplier

Gray said some vendors have been able to scale faster than others, and that Griffon stood out because of demand for its systems and its ability to take soldier feedback and deliver updated platforms quickly. Griffon can currently provide hundreds of systems a month to the Army, he said. “From the time that we identified the need to scale to the time that the first tranche of systems was delivered was about three weeks,” Gray said of Griffon’s systems. The Army has since “ordered more aircraft per cycle” in what he described as a repeated feedback and technical-insertion loop.

Ski Horrocks, the deputy program manager of unmanned aerial systems under Program Acquisition Executive Maneuver Air, said industry has also been able to deliver launched effects at scale because of the Defense Department’s drone marketplace and the rapid-acquisition authorities behind it. Other Transaction Authority contracts, he said, can be awarded much faster than traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation contracts and have helped the Army “move fast.” Gray said the service turned to established industry partners that could deliver “mission-ready platforms” at scale and used commercial supply chains to keep up with demand, in line with acquisition changes in the robotic and autonomous systems area.

The comments come as the Pentagon has also been putting money into unmanned systems through other channels, including an $850 million round of Office of Strategic Capital loans announced last week for drone, radar and battery makers.

What the data shows

By The Boston Report’s count from Gray’s briefing as reported by Breaking Defense, the Army is one headquarters division short of the 12-division goal set for the end of 2026, or about 92 percent of those divisions if the 11 already fielded are counted. All of the service’s multi-domain task forces have received systems, Gray said. He said the remaining division would begin to receive launched effects next month, which would fall in December if that timetable holds.

Those figures measure whether headquarters divisions and task forces have received launched effects, not how many aircraft each formation has, how many are ready to fly, or whether every subordinate unit is equipped. Gray did not release those details.

A related Drone Dominance goal is also unfinished. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s lead for that initiative, told reporters in September that the service had enough small, one-way attack drones to outfit each squad, but that the systems had not yet reached every squad and that the Army lacked enough trained personnel to operate them, Breaking Defense reported. Hegseth’s memo had directed that every Army squad be equipped with those small drones by the end of fiscal 2026. Merkl’s September comments indicate the inventory goal and the fielding-and-training goal were not the same thing.

Payloads and what comes next

Gray said the Army is buying a range of payloads rather than concentrating on one mission, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and kinetic effects. “The great thing about the way that these systems are designed and the way that they operate is that we can adjust the payloads based off of the user requirement in near real time,” he said. Demand, he added, “ebbs and flows based off of the concept of the operation of the unit that we’re dealing with.”

Because Gray did not identify the remaining division or the number of aircraft involved, the December fielding date should be read as the Army’s stated plan, not as a completed delivery. The Boston Report was not at the Thursday briefing and is relying on the published accounts of it.

Sources

• Breaking Defense: Army fields launched effects to 11 of 12 divisions, with Griffon Aerospace delivering the majority (Nov. 9, 2026)
• Inside Defense: Army on track to meet launched effects fielding goals by end of 2026 (Nov. 9, 2026)
• Defense Daily: Official: Army On Track To Meet Goal For Fielding Launched Effects Across The Force By End Of 2026 (Nov. 6, 2026)