The DoW’s most agile testing engine and the nation’s premier drone proving ground are closing the gap between commercial innovation and battlefield readiness.
By: Dawn Zoldi
The Pentagon has a dinosaur problem, and it’s entirely by design. Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, Commander of the RAPTR Task Force within the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, leads a program deliberately named after prehistoric predators. RAPTR, the Rapid Assessment of Prototype Technology Readiness, feeds its most battle-hardened work into T-REX: Technology Readiness Experimentation. Together, they provide the Department of War’s (DoW) answer to a technology transfer culture that was never built for the speed of modern warfare. On a recent episode of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast Lt. Col. Matthew Limeberry, Commander of the RAPTR Task Force, joined GrandSKY founder and President Tom Swoyer to pull back the curtain on how these two ecosystems seem to be converging, and how their alliance could propel defense testing of emerging technologies in some of the toughest conditions in the United States.
The Problem: Iteration at the Speed of a Glacier
The old DoW testing and procurement cycle ran five to seven years. That timeline was built for exquisite platforms like the F-35, not for the types of first-person view (FPV) drones or other attritable systems that seem to be recalibrating battlefields globally, in real time.
Lt. Col. Limeberry acknowledged, “Outdated policies and bureaucratic ways of business still hamper progression.” He pointed to the war in Ukraine, where technology iterates every two to four weeks, as “Exhibit A” in making the case for why traditional timelines no longer work.
The DoW created RAPTR specifically to fill the gap. Housed within the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, a high-level Pentagon perch that spans every service branch and combatant command, RAPTR is joint by design.
“We aren’t just a single service provider looking at Army, or Marine or Navy requirements,” Limeberry explained. “We look at the entirety of the threat-informed landscape across all service combatant commands and help find those creative, innovative technologies to get after the totality of the problem.”
That cross-domain visibility allows RAPTR to elevate technologies solving a single service’s problem into solutions with department-wide impact.
T-REX: Where Slick Sheets Meet Reality
T-REX is RAPTR’s operational proving ground. Limeberry described it as a large-scale, Tier 1 experimentation campaign run twice a year, primarily at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, which also doubles as the homebase for the task force.
But RAPTR is far more than a demonstration day. It is the entry point into the DoW ecosystem for any emerging defense technology. Its rules are unforgiving. Companies need to prove their works outside pristine lab conditions.
“Everything works well in a laboratory when it’s 70 degrees in a vacuum and with white gloves,” Limeberry said. “What happens when these technologies get thrust into humidity, and wind, and rain, the same weather hazards you’ll experience overseas? We have to make sure the tech works in operationally relevant environments.”
If a company’s slick sheet says a drone carries a 10-pound payload for eight hours, T-REX makes them demonstrate exactly that, on a closed range, in real conditions, before it ever reaches a warfighter.
T-REX events are thematic. They cycle through the department’s most pressing operational problem sets: low-cost short range air defense kill chains, low-cost attritable one-way attack systems, multi-domain collaborative autonomy, FPV operations, resilient communications and contested logistics. One standout example that illustrates T-REX isn’t all roar and no bite includes the LUCAS platform. Developed in T-REX, it has been deployed in Operation Epic Fury.
Limeberry said the goal is to iterate tech “at the speed of relevance.” Along those lines, the task force’s 18-month sweet spot for fielding technology, while faster than legacy acquisition, still remains a target Limeberry himself admits needs to shrink further.
GrandSKY: The Proving Ground That Checks Every Box
GrandSKY, located in Grand Forks, North Dakota, provides exactly the kind of unforgiving proving grounds that RAPTR needs. Tom Swoyer spent more than a decade building GrandSKY into the nation’s first commercial UAS operations center co-located on an active Air Force base, Grand Forks Air Force Base. The campus spans 217 acres and sits beside a 12,351-foot runway. But its most compelling asset is airspace, which provides more than 11,000 square miles of beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) coverage. Swoyer revealed that GrandSKY has yet another 11,000 square miles slated to come online..
Counter-UAS companies find particular value in GrandSKY’s mixed-traffic environment, where manned and unmanned aircraft share the airspace simultaneously. AeroVironment, for one, has invested millions of dollars to establish a permanent counter-UAS demonstration center on-site. It brings customers to the equipment, rather than shipping the equipment around the world.
Besides what’s up in the air, GrandSKY has a lot going on, on the ground. The infrastructure is deliberately unglamorous and relentlessly practical (Swoyer’s words). It includes vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) pads, fueling stations, charging infrastructure, weather prediction systems and landowner relationships that extend operations kilometers beyond the base perimeter. Its tenant roster reads like a who’s-who of the unmanned enterprise: Northrop Grumman’s SkyRange mission repurposing RQ-4 Global Hawks, the General Atomics Flight Test and Training Center, the Northern Plains UAS Test Site and its Vantis network and Project ULTRA, the ambitious autonomous logistics corridor linking Grand Forks to Cavalier Space Force Station.
A Snowstorm Forged a Partnership
The RAPTR-GrandSKY connection was, perhaps fatefully, birthed out of North Dakota’s sometimes challenging environment. Lt. Col. Limeberry and his boss were visiting Grand Forks to assess GrandSKY as a potential T-REX host site when a December snowstorm stranded them overnight. A one-hour walkthrough turned into a full evening of deep conversation.
What emerged from that storm-forced meeting was a shared vision to expand T-REX beyond Camp Atterbury to test in diverse operational environments. GrandSKY’s flat topography, extreme weather capability, restricted-airspace adjacency through the North Dakota National Guard, and proximity to the Air Force’s new Point Defense Battle Lab make it uniquely suited to host as a distributed T-REX testbed.
Add to that, the need for speed. “The speed with which you can call us on a Monday and be flying on a Thursday, it doesn’t work that way for everybody all the time, but we have the capabilities,” Swoyer said. “We are up and running 24-7.”
Limeberry framed the ambition in geographic and even geopolitical terms: “We’re looking at opportunities with allies and partners, such as Australia, and finding ways to test in different countries of origin that want the same capability to bolster a defense industrial base and replicate the same process.”
Counter-UAS: The Coin of the Realm
Both guests agreed that counter-UAS presents the defining challenge of this moment, across defense and homeland security. For his part, Swoyer is building GrandSKY’s detection architecture layer by layer. He has acoustic sensors positioned kilometers out, passive and active radar, RF detection and multi-system integration through open APIs into a common operating picture (COP). His assessment of the current state is frank: “In my experience so far, we have not found any one system that is able to do it all. Most systems are great at one thing, but not everything.”
The autonomy dimension makes this even more urgent. Swoyer noted that while some counter-UAS systems claim to defeat swarms, defeating more than three or four in practice remains an open problem. “You send 10 in, and it’s tougher. You can detect them all, but the operator becomes quickly overwhelmed. The autonomy piece is crucial.”
Limeberry’s T-REX portfolio is already addressing the larger end of that kill chain by moving beyond Group 1 and 2 UAS into low-cost short-range air defense against Group 3 platforms and above. The goal is to complement the small-UAS-focused work of JIATF 401.
The regulatory dimension adds another layer of complexity. Most of GrandSKY’s work occurs in the National Airspace, not restricted airspace. Detect-track-identify is its operational lane, not kinetic interdiction. But Limeberry sees policy catching up as the whole-of-government approach to airspace integration continues to gain momentum.
For Stakeholders: How to Get in the Fight
For industry companies, researchers and integrators looking to engage with T-REX or GrandSKY, both leaders offered a clear and low-friction path forward.
To engage RAPTR and T-REX:
- Visit cto.mil, the R&E portal for the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering.
- Connect on LinkedIn, where RAPTR posts open solicitations at no cost to industry participants, the lowest barrier to entry available.
- Bring a relevant capability, and the task force will ensure it gets in front of the right decision-makers.
To engage GrandSKY:
Reach out via the GrandSKY website or directly via email. Contact information is posted publicly. Companies with logistics capable UAS, traffic management systems, detection sensors, counter-UAS systems or multi-C2-integrated technologies are especially encouraged to connect
Check the Grand Forks Point Defense Battle Lab website for active RFIs seeking new technologies. (This website is unrelated to GrandSKY)
Limeberry’s message to industry: “Get involved, get connected. If you’ve got something relevant, we’ll make sure it gets in front of somebody important, and we’ll see if it works.” For companies accustomed to waiting years for procurement feedback, that offer represents a real paradigm shift.
What’s Next: The Future of Defense T&E
Looking across the next 12 to 24 months, both leaders point to contested logistics, multi-domain collaborative autonomy and expanded geographic testing as the near-term frontier. GrandSKY is already planning BVLOS logistics corridors connecting Grand Forks, Cavalier Space Force Station, Camp Grafton, and eventually Minot Air Force Base. Such a triangle will stress-test traffic management, frequency management, command and control, and weather resilience across 200-plus-mile routes.
T-REX, meanwhile, seems to be moving toward what Limeberry referred to as that “franchise model.” It will export the RAPTR methodology to new domestic sites, such as North Dakota, and to international partners who want to replicate the same scalable, repeatable experimentation process. The goal is the same whether it runs in Indiana, Grand Forks, or somewhere across the Pacific: “Solving the right problems at the right time, at the right speed, for the warfighters to be successful in competing against pacing and adversarial threats.”
In a world full of fossils, T-REX is definitely not a relic. It is hunting…and coming at you sideways, thanks to RAPTR.
Watch Episode 121 of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast featuring Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry and Tom Swoyer.
For more on the broader autonomous systems ecosystem that frames this work, including previous coverage of GrandSKY, Project ULTRA, and DoD counter-drone and autonomy efforts, visit Autonomy Global and the Dawn of Autonomy podcast archive, where we have covered these developments across multiple deep-dive episodes and feature articles.