AIBRIEF
At Gray Flag 2026, a Navy multi domain exercise, General Atomics showed software that reads a single commander's intent and turns it into a coordinated plan across crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
On September 10, a single operator at GA-ASI's Gray Butte facility near Palmdale, California briefed a mission in plain language. Software parsed the intent and handed each aircraft its tasking: a flight of MQ-20 Avenger uncrewed jets, plus simulated wingmen, ran a coordinated strike plan against land, air, and maritime targets without per-aircraft joystick control.
The exercise ran under the Navy's Gray Flag 2026 multi-domain series, pairing the service's PMX-281 strike-planning office with General Atomics. PMX-281 writes the mission-planning software Navy crews use to brief strikes. On this iteration, GA-ASI extended that baseline with mission context that complies with the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA), the Pentagon's emerging standard for how autonomy software advertises its behavior to other systems.
The Navy planner now exports a machine-readable description of what the commander wants done. GA-ASI's Tactical Autonomy Ecosystem (TacACE) converts that into route, tasking, and timing for each platform, simulated crews included via a Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) test harness. That translation layer is the test's new variable.
Group 5 aircraft are the heaviest class of military drones, fighter-sized or larger. Letting one commander direct a heterogeneous force of physical and simulated Group 5s from intent alone is what changed from prior Gray Flag iterations. What remains unverified: no independent Navy or DoD release has corroborated the autonomy behavior or the A-GRA compliance claim; both rest on GA-ASI's September 10 recap.