Green Berets Drop 500-lb Glider Drones in NATO Drill

U.S. Army Special Forces and a Romanian Air Force crew dropped autonomous cargo gliders over North Macedonia during Trojan Footprint 26, the largest U.S.-led special operations exercise in Europe.

The aircraft were DZYNE’s Grasshopper resupply gliders, the same family the Air Force quietly fielded last year. The exercise wrapped on May 21 after ten days of testing across Eastern Europe. The gliders are designed to keep cut-off troops alive when the front line moves faster than the supply chain.

What Trojan Footprint 26 Was Built to Test

Trojan Footprint 26 ran from May 12 to May 21 and brought together roughly 1,000 U.S. special operations troops, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs, with another 2,000 personnel from 23 NATO Allied and partner nations. Training sites included Krivolak in North Macedonia, Cincu and Bucharest in Romania, plus elements in Georgia and Spain. U.S. Special Operations Command Europe ran it.

SOCEUR described the exercise as a “testing ground for refining tactics, testing cutting-edge technology, and developing innovative operational concepts.” That is press release language for what is actually happening, which is a yearly stress test of how quickly NATO special operations can move, communicate, and supply themselves in the geography that matters most right now.

The Grasshopper drop is the headline drone moment from the exercise, but it is not the whole story. The bigger picture is that the U.S. and its allies are rehearsing contested-logistics work in the same theater where Russian electronic warfare and drone activity have rewritten what is possible.

The Grasshopper and Its Long-Range Cousin

As Task and Purpose reported, DZYNE Technologies builds two versions of the Grasshopper. The base model is a pure glider with no engine, a coffin-shaped fuselage, and wings that extend after the drone clears the launch aircraft. It cruises at about 109 mph, lands by parachute, and can carry a payload of 500 pounds for a range measured in tens of miles. Empty weight is around 575 pounds.

The Long-Range Grasshopper adds an onboard turboprop. Same 500-pound payload, but DZYNE says the powered variant offers roughly ten times the range of the pure glider, at a fraction of the cost of any crewed aircraft doing the same job. Both versions are autonomous, both can navigate in GPS-denied environments, and both are designed to be expendable after a single mission.

The Romanian C-27J Spartan was the launch platform during Trojan Footprint 26. Photos released by SOCEUR show the Grasshopper exiting the rear ramp, deploying its wings, and gliding toward a drop point in Krivolak. The Air Force took delivery of its first Grasshoppers from DZYNE in 2025, so this exercise is an early integration test with allied airlift rather than a brand-new program reveal.

Why This Matters After Ukraine

Three years of watching Russia and Ukraine fight has changed how the Pentagon thinks about resupply. Convoys get hit. Helicopters get hit. Even small drones flown by anyone with a few hundred dollars can find a vehicle on a forest road.

The classic answer to “how do we keep this unit fed and reloaded” has become significantly harder against an opponent with real electronic warfare and persistent ISR coverage.

A glider solves part of that. The base Grasshopper has no engine, so its electromagnetic signature is “very low,” in DZYNE’s own language. There is no radar return worth chasing, no heat plume worth tracking, and no radio handshake that a Russian-style EW unit can detect and home in on.

A C-27J releasing a glider from outside the threatened airspace shifts the risk from the crew of a $40 million transport to a $40,000 disposable airframe.

Ukraine has not used Grasshoppers, at least not publicly. But the operational logic that drove this program forward is Ukrainian-shaped. Cut-off platoons, contested rear areas, no safe road, and a constant need to push ammunition and water forward without sending a vehicle. The Grasshopper is one answer to that specific problem.

What $40,000 Buys the Pentagon

DZYNE puts the unit cost of a Grasshopper around $40,000, made possible by low-cost manufacturing techniques the company has talked about publicly. Compare that to the cost-per-sortie of pretty much any crewed resupply alternative.

A C-27J flight burns fuel and crew time. A helicopter is more expensive again and far more vulnerable in contested airspace. A failed convoy can cost lives and a vehicle worth several hundred thousand dollars.

The math gets interesting when you stack it against what the Grasshopper is asked to do. If a single $40,000 airframe successfully delivers 500 pounds of ammunition, batteries, or medical supplies to a Green Beret team operating behind enemy lines, the Pentagon’s cost-per-pound-delivered drops to a number that compares favorably to almost any other option. If the glider gets shot down or crashes, it is still cheaper than losing a crewed aircraft on the same mission.

That is the kind of math that is reshaping how the U.S. and its allies think about contested logistics. Cheap, expendable, autonomous platforms can take on the missions that were too risky for crewed assets and too important to skip. The Grasshopper is one of the first such platforms to make it past the proof-of-concept stage and into a live multinational exercise.

What Allied Integration Looks Like

The piece that distinguishes Trojan Footprint from a U.S.-only test is the allied airlift integration. Romania flew the C-27J that dropped the Grasshoppers, with U.S. and Romanian crews working the launch sequence together.

That is the actual hard part of any new system in NATO. The hardware works in a hangar in Arizona. The hardware working from a partner nation’s aircraft, with a partner nation’s crew, on a partner nation’s training range, is a different verification.

SHAPE and SOCEUR both made a point of noting that Trojan Footprint 26 covered ground operations, maritime tasks, and air integration across multiple countries.

The Grasshopper drop is one data point. The fact that 23 allied and partner nations participated, with Spanish special operations working alongside Romanian and Georgian forces, says something about how seriously NATO is treating its eastern flank in 2026.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what nobody is saying out loud. The Grasshopper exists because the Pentagon spent the last three years watching the war in Ukraine and concluded that the way the U.S. military has resupplied its forward units for the last fifty years is not going to survive contact with a peer enemy in 2026.

Crewed transport aircraft are too valuable, helicopters are too vulnerable, and ground convoys are too easy to find. Somebody had to design a way to move 500 pounds of cargo forward that did not put a crew at risk.

A $40,000 single-use glider is not a glamorous answer. It is a practical one. The Grasshopper is exactly the kind of platform a defense industry that has spent decades chasing exquisite, expensive solutions needs more of. Disposable, autonomous, low-signature, and built around a job that has to get done whether or not the contested airspace cooperates.

What I find worth watching is what comes next. The Long-Range Grasshopper with its turbine engine pushes this category into something that looks less like a glider and more like a cheap one-way cargo drone. That overlap with the Iranian Shahed family of one-way attack drones, and the Ukrainian long-range strike drones that have followed, is not accidental. The same airframe philosophy applies to both jobs.

Trojan Footprint 26 wrapped on a Thursday with a glider drop in North Macedonia. The exercise is over. The platform it tested is just getting started.

Photo credit: Army National Guard / Capt. Christopher Booker