Latest news with #HADES
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Army halves spy plane fleet before first takeoff
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The U.S. Army is planning to buy half the spy planes it had previously planned to procure, according to an executive order outlining initial plans of an Army secretary-directed transformation initiative. In the May 7 document obtained by Defense News, the order requests an implementation plan within 30 days on how the Army will adjust to build six High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, as opposed to buying 12 of such planes. A year ago, then-director of Army aviation Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen showed a slide during the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference in Denver, Colorado, indicating the service planned to field 14 HADES aircraft by 2035. While the executive order appears to represent a slash to the program, 'We never had a defined number in any document about how many HADES we were going to build,' Andrew Evans, Army Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force director, told reporters in a Thursday briefing at the AAAA conference in Nashville, Tennessee. 'We will build to the condition of the threat. We will build to the conditions of the budget,' he said. 'What the Army is committed to is this mission of deep sensing. How many systems we need in the future will be a decision for the future based on the threat that we think that we're going to face.' While the Army is still in the early planning process for the program, any potential decision on the number of aircraft is 'not going to change a single thing about the capacity or capability that we're delivering,' Evans said. Sierra Nevada Corporation won an Army contract to serve as the lead system integrator for the HADES program in August 2024. The award for HADES integration work covers a 12-year period worth $93.5 million initially and potentially up to $944.3 million. HADES is the service's effort to overhaul existing fixed-wing aircraft that perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, missions. The service has retired roughly 70 aircraft — its entire ISR fleet — recently divesting its last legacy aircraft. And while HADES is expected to rapidly deploy and provide deep-sensing capabilities, the task force is learning the aircraft could provide even more capability than it initially imagined, including the ability to disable enemy space-based capabilities and carry launched effects. The Army is using a large-cabin business jet, the Bombardier Global 6500, as the airframe for the spy plane. The service awarded Bombardier a contract in December for one aircraft, with an option to buy two more over a three-year period. Buying more or less aircraft will not cause unit cost to grow or reduce because they are produced by hand by craftsmen at Sierra Nevada, Col. Joe Minor, the Army's project manager for fixed-wing aircraft, said. Sierra Nevada already has the first prototype aircraft delivered from Bombardier and is working in the integration piece prior to delivering the platform to the Army in September 2026, followed by a second prototype in mid-2027. The Army has spent more than six years assessing ISR fixed-wing prototypes using high-speed jets to inform the HADES program. It began with the deployment of the Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-mission System, or Artemis, which has flown in the European theater near the Ukrainian border. Leidos built Artemis using a Bombardier Challenger 650 jet. The service then deployed its Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, or ARES, to the Pacific region in April 2022. L3Harris built the aircraft using a Bombardier Global Express 6500 jet. The Army is also building four more prototypes that will inform the requirements for the HADES program. The service chose Sierra Nevada and a MAG Aerospace and L3Harris team to deliver two jets each with spy technologies to advance long-range targeting plans. MAG and L3's prototypes use a Global 6500 with ISR sensors for the Army's radar-focused Athena-R effort, while Sierra Nevada is providing RAPCON-X for the service's signals intelligence-focused Athena-S project. RAPCON-X is also the basis for HADES. When the first HADES prototype is ready, the Army will deploy HADES for a limited period of time and then start building more aircraft as the early prototype remains deployed. Tim Owings, executive vice president for Sierra Nevada's Mission Solutions and Technologies business area, likened it to 'sudden-death playoffs.' 'We have to deliver prototype one. We deliver prototype one, and it delivers the value that we think this platform is going to provide. We think it becomes a no-brainer decision to add more quantities down the line,' Owings said. 'This is like a newlywed couple arguing whether they wanted to have a fourth child when they haven't had a first child, or a second child or a third child yet,' he said. 'Those are decisions that are down the road. They're reserved for our senior leaders, and we're working closely with industry partners to be able to manage that, but to freak out about what's going to happen in the future, it's probably a little bit unnecessary.'
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Army explores ultra-long-range launched effects to spy from the sky
NASHVILLE, Tenn. − The U.S. Army is pursuing concepts to deploy ultra-long-range effects to surveil deep in the battlespace, according to the service's Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force director. 'We may have to have standoff capability that we've not yet envisioned today,' Andrew Evans said Wednesday at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual conference. The Army is already focused on developing launched effects from both ground and air platforms for short, medium and long-range distances. 'What we're going to do in the intel space is demonstrate what we call ultra-long-range launched effects,' Evans said. 'What we're looking at doing is something that represents a thousand miles past the prime mover, so imagine a system that can deliver a launched effect that can get itself into a position of launch and then a thousand miles beyond that, which is over-the-horizon sensing. You're getting into some game-changing capabilities.' The ISR Task Force plans to conduct a user demonstration in 2026 exploring what this concept could look like using a commercial aircraft to then deploy a long-range launched effect. 'We believe industry has solved a lot of these problems already. What we have done is get all the right industry partners together to try to figure out how to build the ecosystem around that,' he said. The Army's approach will likely first focus on the 'glide body itself, the propulsion vehicle,' Evans said, then the service will layer in sensing capabilities. Lastly, it will focus on 'backhauling' or transporting the data off of the platform to the relevant command and control interfaces. 'The sensing and the backhaul are not trivial,' said Lawrence Mixon, special assistant to the Program Executive Officer for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. 'Our integrated sensor architecture folks within the PEO have already been working in that regard with standards from data that should help in partnering with industry to get through that backhaul piece,' he said, adding, 'it also ties back into next-generation command-and-control and standards there to enable that information to get to decision makers, to commanders.' Earlier this year, the Army issued a call to industry looking for unmanned aircraft systems to launch from medium- or high-altitude platforms that would perform tasks like ISR, according to the notice posted to the federal business opportunities portal A demonstration of operational capability is planned for the fiscal 2026 timeframe. This effort will also help inform the work in which the ISR Task Force is engaged. While the task force's demonstration would not use the Army's emerging high-speed spy jet called HADES, which is short for 'High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System,' one concept for an ultra-long-range effect uses the long legs of that platform to deeply penetrate over enemy territory, followed by an even deeper journey using the launched effect. HADES is currently in the prototyping phase. 'We're in a situation where we may not even be able to move out of a port of the United States without some sort of threat to our force projection,' Evans said. 'As intel professionals, we ha[ve] to figure out a way to overcome that because sensing has to lead that capability, to answer those questions you [have] to know where you're about to project those forces and what kind of fight they're about to get into,' Evans said. 'And something like HADES or the other work that we're doing in [Multidomain Sensing Systems] allows us to self-project, which is why ultra-long-range effects, that becomes also important.'
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
ME-11B Official Designation Of Army's New Intelligence Gathering Business Jets
The U.S. Army has formally given the designation ME-11B to its forthcoming High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) intelligence-gathering aircraft. The modified Bombardier Global 6500 business jets will have extensive sensors suites that include the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System-2B (ASARS-2B) and could have the ability to launch drones. Last August, the Army awarded the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) a contract valued at just under $1 billion to modify Global 6500s into the HADES configuration, as well as provide other support and services. Work under that contract was suspended until January of this year due to an ultimately unsuccessful protest by L3Harris, which had competed for the HADES deal as part of a team with Leidos and MAG Aerospace. Bombardier separately delivered the first Global 6500 for conversion in November 2024. 'The military mission design series designation of ME-11B was assigned to the Army's future aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft, which will be based on the Bombardier Global 6500 platform,' a spokesperson for the Army's Program Executive Office for Aviation (PEO Aviation) confirmed to TWZ earlier this week. The designation here reflects that there is another militarized Global 6500 already in service with the U.S. armed forces, the U.S. Air Force's E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) aircraft. It's also worth noting here that the aircraft in the Air Force's initial fleet of E-11As were based on older Bombardier BD-700 and Global 6000 business jets. The BACN jets provide highly specialized communications capabilities that allow for the rapid transfer of data between various aerial platforms, as well as forces on land and at sea, which you can read more about here. The Army has also been making use of a small fleet of contractor-owned and operated business jets, including types based on the Global 6500, to help lay the ground for its future ME-11Bs. The 'M' in the ME-11B designation stands for 'multi-mission.' This is something that has been applied in the past to other crewed aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms with multiple sensor systems. This includes the Army's MC-12S Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS) and the U.S. Air Force's MC-12W Liberty, both of which are based on the Beechcraft King Air series of twin-engine turboprops. The first MC-55A Peregrine for the @AusAirForce arrives at L3 Harris Greenville for test flight 2 in its completed, fully modified state. — 𝙎𝙍_𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙤𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 (@SR_Planespotter) January 22, 2025 The Army says the ME-11Bs will feature 'signals intelligence, synthetic aperture radar/moving target indicator [SAR/MTI], and additional built-in capabilities.' The main sensor system the aircraft will carry that we know about so far is the ASARS-2B radar, which was originally developed as an upgrade for the ASARS-2A used on the Air Force's famed U-2 spy planes. The Royal Air Force's (RAF) now-retired Sentinel R1s, which were based on the Bombardier Global Express, also carried a radar based on the ASARS-2A. The ASARS-2B radar will allow the HADES aircraft to collect SAR imagery, which are highly-detailed ground maps, and offers ground moving target indicator (GMTI) functionality to spot and track vehicles on the ground. ASARS-2B can be employed in either mode regardless of cloud cover, smoke, dust, or other obscurants down below, as well as at night. The GMTI data can be used for general intelligence purposes, as well as for mapping patterns of life and targeting. It can be overlaid on the SAR images to help further refine intelligence collection areas. The M part of the ME-11B might also point to additional capabilities or the potential to add them down the line. For instance, Australia, which designates military aircraft in a style similar to the United States, is in the process of acquiring a fleet of MC-55A Peregrine aircraft based on the Gulfstream G550 business jet that will be capable of performing ISR and electronic warfare missions. When it comes to the HADES jets, the use of the multi-mission designator could be, in part, a nod to Army interest in being able to employ so-called 'launched effects' from the aircraft. The Army uses the term launched effects as a catch-all for uncrewed aerial systems that can be deployed from aircraft (fixed wing and rotary, crewed and uncrewed) in flight, as well as ground or maritime platforms. The Army has a vision for a family of launched effects drones able to conduct ISR and electronic warfare missions, act as decoys, or even be employed as loitering munitions. The ME-11Bs are also expected to be able to carry additional stores, including ones that could expand the jet's defensive capabilities, on underwing pylons. 'We're looking at that with great interest as well, right?,' Andrew Evans, the ISR Task Force director within the Army's Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), told Breaking Defense about possible underwing stores last year. 'Protecting something like this becomes very important.' Launched effects drones would also allow ME-11Bs to reach deeper into more heavily defended areas without putting the aircraft and its crew at greater risk. There have been persistent concerns about the survivability of the HADES aircraft, especially in any future high-end conflict like on the Pacific against China. U.S. officials only expect the air defense threat ecosystem to keep growing in scale and scope. This includes the prospect of anti-air missiles with ranges up to 1,000 miles, which would be well beyond the line-of-sight reach of the ME-11B's sensors. In general, the ME-11Bs will be able to fly higher, faster, and farther, and do so while carrying a bigger sensor payload, than the turboprop designs that currently make up the Army's crewed ISR fleets. Those capabilities will also allow the HADES jets to get to and from operating more rapidly and remain on station longer. There also continue to be questions about the overall capacity of the future ME-11B fleet, which the Army has said could consist of between 10 and 16 aircraft in total. The service currently has historically operated dozens of smaller turboprop crewed ISR aircraft globally, but has already been in the process of divesting many of them. HADES is just the first part of a planned Multi-Domain Sensing System (MDSS) 'system of systems.' The Army's current vision for the MDSS notably includes a High-Altitude Platform-Deep Sensing (HAP/DS) component. The service says HAP/DS 'will comprise the high-altitude layer and will be a Multi-Domain Operations-capable low-signature, high-altitude platform(s) (i.e., stratospheric balloons/solar fixed wing aircraft) operating in the stratosphere that will enable penetration into highly defended threat operational areas.' TWZ has previously reported on the Army's ongoing push to field high-altitude balloons for ISR and other missions, including launching swarms of drones, as well as the service's experimentation with high-altitude, extreme-endurance drones. The U.S. military, as a whole, is also increasingly looking to space-based capabilities to provide ISR coverage that has traditionally come from aerial assets in the past. As it stands now, the Army is hoping the first example of what is now dubbed the ME-11B, with its suite of intelligence-gathering and potentially other capabilities, will be ready for service by 2027. Contact the author: joe@
