L3Harris Technologies and Shield AI have completed the first live-flight test of an autonomous electronic-warfare kill chain that pairs L3Harris's Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations (DiSCO) battle-management ecosystem with Shield AI's Hivemind mission-autonomy software, the companies said in a joint July 16 announcement out of Melbourne, Florida. The U.S. Army-supported demonstration ran on L3Harris's Green Wolf launched-effects platform and follows a February 2026 simulated test of the same architecture.
Sense, share and act — without a human
During the sortie, unmanned aircraft carrying the compact Deceptor software-defined EW payload detected and characterized unknown electromagnetic signals on a live range. DiSCO fused that spectrum data across the swarm; Hivemind, running on board the Green Wolf, then commanded follow-on UAS to autonomously reroute through a safe operating corridor. The full sensor-to-decision cycle happened at machine speed with no operator in the loop.
Green Wolf as a networked EW node
Green Wolf was purpose-designed as a launched-effects vehicle — a low-cost, air-launched UAS meant to project sensing and effects at range for a fraction of the cost of a crewed strike aircraft. Pairing it with the Deceptor payload and Hivemind converts each Green Wolf into a networked EW node that can share targeting and threat data with other nodes and with crewed platforms. "By pairing autonomous decision-making with advanced spectrum battle management, we're giving warfighters the resilience and speed they need to stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats," said Lauren Barnes, L3Harris president of Spectrum Superiority. Christian Gutierrez, senior vice president of Hivemind at Shield AI, said the test "proved Hivemind can compress the sensor-to-decision cycle in real time."
What comes next for tactical-edge autonomy
The two firms said they will expand mission applications and open-architecture autonomy for EW at the tactical edge, a program area now flush with Pentagon investment. It builds on June's CCA initial-production green light for Anduril and General Atomics and dovetails with the Pentagon's new drone cooperation deal with Ukraine. Shield AI's Hivemind now powers Green Wolf alongside the company's own V-BAT Group 3 UAS and the newly unveiled X-BAT AI-piloted VTOL fighter, extending Hivemind's footprint to a third-party launched-effects platform for the first time.
Reporting based on L3Harris and Shield AI's joint press release of July 16, 2026 and coverage from ExecutiveBiz, Bitget News and Military Embedded Systems.