Army Tests Golden Shield Anti-Drone Net at Fort Hood

The U.S. Army just proved it can detect, track, and destroy a drone without a human pulling the trigger. The 1st Cavalry Division completed a live-fire test of its Golden Shield counter-drone network at Fort Hood, Texas, from April 7 to 9, as Army Recognition reports.

It was the first time an autonomous sensor on one platform identified a hostile drone and passed engagement data to a weapon system on a separate platform that destroyed it.

What Golden Shield Actually Is

Golden Shield isn’t a single weapon or a single radar. It’s a formation-level system of systems designed to wrap an entire armored brigade in a networked anti-drone shield. The architecture combines a next-generation command and control layer, multiple sensor types, kinetic and non-kinetic effectors, and the Army’s Vehicle Protection System Base Kit.

That base kit is a modular, open-systems survivability controller built to serve as the foundation for future hard-kill and soft-kill active protection integration.

The concept works like this: distribute sensors and shooters across multiple vehicles in a formation, connect them through a shared digital backbone, and let AI handle the detect-track-cue cycle at machine speed.

No single vehicle needs to carry every sensor and every weapon. The formation shares tracks, threat classifications, and engagement authority across the network. When it works, the cheapest effective weapon available at the right moment gets the shot, not the most expensive one.

The test fell under the 1st Cavalry Division’s Pegasus Charge initiative, a broader transformation effort designed to push commercial and non-developmental technology into soldiers’ hands fast enough to reshape how armored units fight. Army Capabilities Development Command partnered with industry for the exercise, and the results fed directly into the Army’s Transforming in Contact program.

Alfred Grein, Executive Director for Research and Technology Integration at DEVCOM’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center, put it plainly during the exercise. Some of the systems tested are more mature than others, and that’s exactly why the Army runs these experiments: to figure out what’s ready for soldiers in the field.

The Hardware in the Mix

The gear that showed up at Fort Hood tells a story about where the Army is heading. DVIDS imagery confirmed two notable systems in the exercise.

Perseus Defense brought its Harpe micro-missile system. The Harpe is a 15-inch guided interceptor designed to kill Group 1 and Group 2 drones, the small, fast, low-flying platforms that have become the most persistent threat to ground forces. It fires from a pod holding eight missiles, with an engagement range over 3,280 feet.

Each missile costs under $10,000. Perseus, a Y Combinator-backed startup headquartered in Buda, Texas, went from initial rocket prototypes in June 2025 to fully guided hit-to-kill flight by January 2026. During the Golden Shield exercise, the Harpe demonstrated radar-cued intercepts, multi-launch capability, and fully active terminal guidance against live drone targets.

For context, that $10,000 price tag matters. Traditional counter-UAS interceptors like the Coyote run $100,000 to $150,000 per shot. The Harpe sits closer to the cost range where defenders stop losing the math against $500 drones.

Swarmbotics also brought its FireAnt V4 autonomous ground robot. FireAnt is a man-portable, attritable UGV designed for counter-UAS, ISR, and electronic warfare with modular payloads and swarm autonomy. In the Golden Shield context, it served as a robotic forward sensor, extending the formation’s detection range without putting crews at risk.

A single operator can command six to eight FireAnts via a secure touchscreen interface. The Army formally selected Swarmbotics for its Transformation in Contact program with the 1st Cavalry Division back in February 2026.

The combination is significant. Micro-missiles for the kill. Ground robots for forward sensing. Both feeding into a shared network that assigns the right response to the right threat at machine speed.

Why Bradleys Could Become Drone Killers

Golden Shield also connects to a munitions development that could change the math for every armored brigade. The Army’s XM1228 BADGER round is a 25mm proximity-fuzed cartridge designed for the M242 Bushmaster chain gun on the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. It uses miniaturized radar to detect a drone in its flight path and detonates within lethal distance, no direct hit required.

The BADGER drops into the existing weapon system with zero vehicle modifications. The gunner loads it like any other 25mm round and fires. If Golden Shield’s networked sensors can provide better detection and cueing, every Bradley in a formation becomes a node in the anti-drone kill web.

That preserves specialized missiles like the Coyote for higher-end threats while turning the most common armored vehicle in the brigade into an organic counter-drone platform.

The BADGER is currently in safety confirmation testing with Northrop Grumman and is expected in formations by 2027. Once it arrives, the combination of Golden Shield’s networked sensing and BADGER’s plug-and-play lethality could give armored brigades a counter-drone capability that scales without requiring new launchers or dedicated air defense vehicles at every echelon.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the press release language, and Golden Shield is the Army’s admission that the current approach to defending armored formations from drones doesn’t scale.

Right now, counter-drone defense for armored brigades depends on dedicated air defense assets like Sgt. Stout on Stryker and M-LIDS, plus whatever a crew can do with their existing weapons and good situational awareness.

That worked when the drone threat was occasional. Ukraine proved it’s now constant. Armored columns face persistent drone surveillance and attack from platforms that cost a few hundred dollars. You can’t answer that with $150,000 missiles and hope the supply chain keeps up.

Golden Shield’s real contribution isn’t any single weapon. It’s the networking concept. One vehicle detects, another shoots, and the AI handles the handoff faster than a crew could process it.

That’s the only way counter-drone defense works during movement, when tank and Bradley crews are already juggling navigation, fires, reporting, and vehicle survivability. Adding “scan the sky for quadcopters” to their task list isn’t realistic. Automating the detection-to-engagement cycle is.

The Harpe micro-missile at under $10,000 per shot and the BADGER 25mm round are the right direction on cost. But this was a three-day exercise at Fort Hood, not a brigade-size maneuver under electronic warfare and GPS degradation in contested terrain. The 1st Cav proved the concept works in a controlled environment. Proving it works when a near-peer adversary is jamming your data links and sending 50 drones at your column simultaneously is a different test entirely.

The Army knows this. Maj. Kevin Korrea, the division’s air and missile defense chief, said the next step is integrating these systems into training so tankers can manage them while conducting normal operations. That’s the hard part: making sure the network doesn’t become one more thing competing for cognitive bandwidth in a turret.

Golden Shield is early. But the architecture is right, and the direction is clear. Armored brigades either learn to carry their own adaptive anti-drone shield, or they become the next generation of expensive targets on a drone-saturated battlefield.

Photo credit: U.S. Army by Spc. Julian Winston