Procurement of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle for the U.S. Army may end as part of a wide-ranging force-structure overhaul, which raises questions about whether the service may look to retire the fleet sooner than expected. This comes as the drone’s manufacturer continues to develop modernized versions of the Gray Eagle, as well as add new equipment and capabilities.
Plans for the fate of future MQ-1C acquisitions are made clear in a joint memo from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, released yesterday.
“We will cancel procurement of outdated crewed attack aircraft such as the AH-64D … and obsolete UAVs like the Gray Eagle,” the pair stated.
“Our Army must transform now to a leaner, more lethal force by infusing technology, cutting obsolete systems, and reducing overhead to defeat any adversary on an ever-changing battlefield,” George and Driscoll said.
Other assets that the Pentagon wants to cut under the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) include various ground combat systems, among them the HMMWV (High Mobility Multi-purpose Vehicle, better known as the Humvee) and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).
In response, C. Mark Brinkley, a General Atomics spokesman, told TWZ: “When we talk to actual Gray Eagle operators with experience using the aircraft in combat, and infantry soldiers who have brought them to bear on the adversary, the universal feedback is that the Army needs more, not less.”
Nevertheless, the joint memo from George and Driscoll comes on the heels of an April 30th memo from U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This had called for the Army to divest “outdated, redundant and inefficient” programs in favor of new priorities, including long-range precision munitions and air and missile defense. However, Hegseth’s order does not mention specific platforms, but does also call for the “end [of] procurement of obsolete systems” including “outdated UAVs.”
Derived from the Air Force’s Predator, the basic MQ-1C — originally known as the Warrior — was tailored for warfare in the Middle East, using a heavy-fuel piston engine instead of a turboprop, and was intended to be operated by a cadre of enlisted soldiers.
The MQ-1C, which first started entering Army service in the late 2000s, is a medium-altitude, long-endurance drone. Designed to perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and attack missions, the uncrewed aircraft has a sensor turret under the nose equipped with electro-optical and infrared cameras and can carry munitions and other stores, including advanced sensor systems, on up to four hardpoints, two under each wing. The Army employs Gray Eagles independently, as well as in crewed-uncrewed teams with AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopters.
As of 2019, the Army had acquired at least 204 MQ-1Cs, 101 of which were delivered in the enhanced Extended Range configuration.
Noteworthy is the fact that GA-ASI has already made efforts to ensure that the MQ-1C is better able to meet the demands of a future conflicts, which could include an expeditionary peer confrontation rather than a counterinsurgency fight.
Continued efforts produced the Gray Eagle 25M version, first flown in December 2023. A first order for the new drone was placed for the Army National Guard only last year.
Among the new features of the Gray Eagle 25M are an improved heavy-fuel engine, increased onboard power, significantly reduced maintenance requirements, and the Expeditionary Ground Control System. Designed to reduce the footprint of both personnel and materials, this system allows soldiers to fly missions from tents, buildings, or mobile shelters, making it easier to rapidly relocate or deploy to remote sites without traditional infrastructure.
The Gray Eagle 25M also has an improved flight computer, with five times more processing capacity, and a modular open-system architecture to ensure new capabilities can be integrated quickly and relatively cheaply. According to GA-ASI, these might include new weapons and long-range sensors.
The Gray Eagle 25M has also been at the forefront of GA-ASI experiments involving air-launched effects. This has also been conducted with a view to increasing effectiveness and survivability, for example, using the drone to lob air-launched effects toward enemy air defense systems on a large contested battlefield. At the same time, the Gray Eagle 25M can transmit data gathered by those smaller drones to other friendly elements, be they aircraft, long-range fires, or other platforms. Gray Eagle is also being tested as a drone interceptor, which you can read more about here.
Additional development has produced the Gray Eagle STOL, or Short Takeoff and Landing variant. This incorporates technology that was first demonstrated on the company-funded Mojave demonstrator, a heavily armed drone descended from the Gray Eagle and tailored for operations from remote or austere locations with rough strips and limited logistical support.
While the Pentagon’s leadership may have gone cold on the MQ-1C, at least for now, General Atomics insists that the drone still has an important role to play, including in peer conflicts.
“The Army’s RSTA [reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition] mission is not going away in the future, and nor should its ability to conduct those operations without getting soldiers killed,” GA-ASI’s Brinkley told TWZ.
Brinkley also noted that the modernized Gray Eagle 25M, Gray Eagle STOL, and EagleEye radar were all developed by the company “despite low funding priority and an unclear vision from the U.S. Army that has forced Congress and others to make bold moves on behalf of America’s soldiers.”
At the same time, Brinkley appeared to acknowledge that there is a considerable capability and performance gap between the original MQ-1C and the Gray Eagle 25M and Gray Eagle STOL now being offered.
Coincidentally, the memo from George and Driscoll was published the same day as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) announced details of the MQ-1C’s participation in the Army’s Project Convergence event, billed as a modernization experiment and based out of Fort Irwin, California, and surrounding ranges.
An MQ-1C Gray Eagle Extended Range (GE-ER) version participated in Project Convergence Capstone 5 (PC-C5), which ran throughout March. The drone in question was equipped with commercially available next-generation long-range sensors that were operated by the Army throughout the event.
According to GA-ASI, the drone “flew unimpeded by the employed electronic threats and generated targets of interest at Multi-Domain Operations (MDO)-relevant ranges for the 82nd Airborne Division and participating units.”
The full sensor fit for the MQ-1C involved in PC-C5 comprised modernized communications intelligence (COMINT), electronic intelligence (ELINT), synthetic aperture radar/moving target indicator (SAR/MTI), and Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) radios, all of which make use of the drone’s open architecture.
“The GE-ER was operated at an altitude and range that negated kinetic threats and utilized the long-range sensors to effectively detect, identify, and target threat emitters and vehicles,” GA-ASI said in a media release.
That the MQ-1C is potentially vulnerable even when faced by lower-end adversaries has been amply demonstrated by the scale of losses suffered by the still-growing number of shootdowns of U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen.
The increasing vulnerabilities of the MQ-9 Reaper — the larger cousin of the Army’s MQ-1C — saw the U.S. Air Force abruptly announce its desire to stop buying those drones, citing concerns about growing vulnerabilities. The service has also said in the past that it could retire the drones for good by 2035, but has continued to take deliveries of new examples in the meantime.
According to General Atomics, new versions of the Gray Eagle are “similar to [the original MQ-1C] in name only, just as the rifles today’s soldiers carry are nothing like the rifles of the Continental Army. Without these aircraft, tomorrow’s U.S. Army faces an uphill battle that quadcopters and other low-endurance, low-capability gadgets cannot hope to overcome in a future fight. Backpack drones have a place on the battlefield, but they cannot replace the force multiplication of Gray Eagle.”
This final point reflects the focus on new kinds of drones as outlined in Hegseth’s memo, which calls for prioritization of “inexpensive drone swarms capable of overwhelming adversaries.”
At this stage, the cuts proposed under the Army Transformation Initiative remain a Pentagon recommendation, and any major divestments of equipment and disbandment of units are likely to face plenty of pushback. Nevertheless, the call to step away from the MQ-1C does provide useful insight into the kinds of aerial platforms the Pentagon wants to see the U.S. Army operating in its future force structure.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com