GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- The 184th Wing’s Point Defense Battle Lab served as a primary Red Team capability during Technology Readiness Experimentation 26-3, using threat-informed small unmanned aircraft systems to put emerging military technologies to the test Aug. 16-28, 2026.
T-REX 26-3, hosted by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Mission Capabilities, brings military personnel, government organizations and technology developers together to evaluate new capabilities against Joint Force operational problems.
Unlike exercises built primarily around the capabilities of a single service, T-REX focuses on problems that cross service boundaries.
“The difference is it’s not just single-service focused; it’s entire joint operational problem focused,” said Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Rapid Assessment of Prototype Technology Readiness Task Force and director of T-REX. “Helping accelerate innovative capability to the warfighter faster, at speed and scale and relevance, is the drive of T-REX.”
T-REX 26-3 focused on contested logistics and related operational challenges, including low-cost, short-range air defense. For the PDBL team, the mission was to provide the adversary.
PDBL operators employed threat-informed small UAS and varied their tactics based on the systems being evaluated. Rather than providing a single, predictable target, operators changed threat profiles and employed UAS swarms to create a more difficult problem for the systems and personnel being tested.
The work also complements the priorities of Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which is focused on improving the Joint Force’s ability to counter emerging UAS threats. By exposing developing capabilities to threat-informed tactics and UAS swarms, PDBL helps generate operational lessons that can inform the broader counter-UAS community.
“Our job was pretty straightforward: give them a realistic problem to solve,” said 1st Lt. Blake Elliott, 184th Point Defense Battle Lab red air director. “We weren’t there to make a system look good or bad. We wanted to push it, find out where it struggled and give the developers something useful to take back.”
That adversarial component allows experimenters to see how a capability performs when the problem becomes less predictable.
“You can’t be operationally relevant unless you have red air capabilities that are threat informed from the environment, from real-world application,” Limeberry said.
Limeberry described the PDBL’s ability to employ UAS swarms and stress systems under evaluation as an “invaluable asset” to the event.
For Elliott, simply putting an aircraft in front of a system is not enough to replicate the threat red air is intended to represent.
“Anybody can put a drone in the air and fly it at a system,” Elliott said. “That’s not really red air or aggressor tactics. We want to make the system and the operator deal with an adversary that is changing tactics, using swarms and creating problems they weren’t necessarily expecting.”
Those interactions give developers and military users an opportunity to identify limitations while there is still time to address them. During T-REX, a system struggling against the red team is not necessarily a bad outcome. Finding those problems is part of the purpose of experimentation.
“Finding a weakness here is a good thing,” Elliott said. “This is where we want to find it. If we can identify the problem now, developers have an opportunity to fix it before somebody has to depend on that capability operationally.”