- U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll visited USAG Ansbach on April 30 and personally signed a Merops AS-3 Surveyor counter-drone system during a briefing by 52nd ADA Brigade and 12th CAB.
- Each Merops Surveyor interceptor costs approximately $15,000; the U.S. purchased 13,000 within eight days and deployed 10,000 to the Middle East within five days of operations beginning.
The U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll visited U.S. Army Garrison Ansbach in Germany on April 30, where commanders from the 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade and 12th Combat Aviation Brigade briefed him on counter-unmanned aerial systems tested and implemented over the past year, and among the systems on display was the Merops AS-3 Surveyor counter-drone system, developed under Project Eagle, the defense initiative funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Driscoll personally signed one of the Merops drones, a gesture that carried more weight than a simple photo opportunity.
The 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command announced the visit on May 2, noting that Brig. Gen. Curtis King, the command’s commanding general, Brig. Gen. John Mountford, V Corps deputy commanding general, and Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis, 7th Army Training Command commanding general, were all present alongside their soldiers for the engagement. The Ansbach visit gave Driscoll a direct look at the counter-drone capabilities that U.S. Army Europe has been integrating into its force posture — and Merops was front and center.
Merops is not a conventional air defense system. It is a counter-drone stack built around the AS-3 Surveyor interceptor — a fixed-wing UAV that hunts and destroys enemy drones mid-flight rather than relying on expensive missiles or electronic warfare alone. Each Merops unit integrates a ground control station, launch platforms, and a fleet of Surveyor interceptors that can operate autonomously or be remotely piloted, equipped with onboard sensors for target tracking, as the Ukraine Defense Tech Community documented. The system reaches speeds exceeding 280 km/h, fast enough to intercept jet-powered drones including Russian Geran-type munitions, according to Defense Express. A standard crew consists of four personnel — a commander, a pilot, and two technicians — and the training cycle runs approximately two weeks, a fraction of the time required for conventional air defense systems like Patriot or NASAMS.
The economics of Merops are what have made it a subject of intense interest at the highest levels of U.S. defense leadership. Each Surveyor interceptor costs approximately $15,000. Army Secretary Driscoll made the cost argument explicit during Congressional testimony, as The War Zone reported: “When the conflict kicked off, within about eight days, we were able to purchase…13,000 Merops, which are incredible. They’re about $15,000 a piece right now. We think as they scale, they’ll get less than [$10,000] and we’re able to take Shaheds down that cost $30,000 to $50,000 [real cost min 48,000], which is amazing because that puts us on the right end of the cost curve, and we will make that trade all day long.” That framing — cost-curve advantage as a strategic asset — represents a genuine shift in how the Army is thinking about air defense procurement.
Merops was developed under Project Eagle, the initiative created by Eric Schmidt that operates through a network of associated companies including Perennial Autonomy (also know as Swift Beat), Aurelian Industries, and Volya Robotics, per the Ukrainian Drone Ecosystem Directory. Schmidt’s involvement extends beyond funding — his companies have recruited engineers from Apple, SpaceX, Google, and federal agencies to develop AI-guided intercept systems, as reported by Complex Discovery. The initiative began under the name White Stork following Schmidt’s meetings with Ukrainian officials in September 2022, before being renamed Project Eagle in 2024, according to Inside Unmanned Systems.
Merops combat testing began by mid-2024, and by November 2025, Ukrainian defenders had credited the system with more than 1,000 intercepts of Russian Shahed-type drones, as Defense Express reported. The platform proved capable enough in combat that when the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran commenced on February 28, 2026, the Army dispatched 10,000 Merops interceptors to the Middle East within five days, Army Secretary Driscoll told Bloomberg. The Merops interceptors deployed to protect U.S. troops from Iranian Shahed-136 munitions — the same one-way attack drones they had been countering in Ukraine, now aimed at American forces in a different theater.
Poland and Romania are also deploying Merops units along the alliance’s eastern flank, and in November 2025, Brig. Gen. Thomas Lowin, deputy chief of staff operations at NATO Allied Land Command, described NATO members’ deployment of Merops as the “first phase” of a two- to five-year effort to build defenses to deter a Russian invasion, according to Wikipedia’s documentation of the program. Training exercises in Poland have demonstrated that the system can be launched from standard pickup trucks, giving it a mobility footprint that fixed air defense installations cannot match.