The US Army has formally launched what one official calls the “most significant” transformation of the service’s fixed-wing aerial reconnaissance fleet in history.
Nevada-based aviation systems integrator Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has secured a contract worth nearly $1 billion to provide the army with a new surveillance jet intended to dramatically improve the service’s capability to monitor potential threats.
The aircraft, officially known as the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), will be based on the Bombardier Global 6500 business jet, which offers increased speed, range and payload over the army’s current fleet of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) turboprops.
Under the $991 million deal, SNC will modify Pentagon-owned Global 6500s to provide so-called “deep sensing” capabilities targeted at peer and near-peer adversaries. The new aircraft are also meant to be tailored to the specific needs of regional theatre commanders around the world.
“SNC’s HADES solution is based upon rapid configurability so the aircraft is swiftly adaptable to specific recon missions based on tactical and operational needs,” said SNC vice-president of programmes Josh Walsh on 26 August.
The HADES platform will offer “transformational increases” in flight performance over existing systems, he adds. The army’s current ISR fleet includes derivatives of Beechcraft King Air 350s and De Havilland Canada Dash 7s and Dash 8s.
The Pentagon has already contracted with Bombardier for the delivery of up to three Global 6500 jets over the next three years to start building out the HADES fleet. The first of these will serve as the programme’s prototype aircraft.
Integration work will take place at SNC’s facility in Hagerstown, Maryland, where the company is supporting another aerial surveillance programme: the Army Theater-level High-Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne-Signals Intelligence (ATHENA-S).
That effort, which was billed by the army as a precursor to HADES, has Sierra Nevada converting two Global 6500s for ISR missions similar to those HADES will undertake. The ATHENA-S aircraft will be offered to the army as a contractor-owned, contractor-operated ISR capability, including pilots, flight operations and logistics support.
Alongside several other Greek-themed airborne ISR development programmes awarded to other industry players, the ATHENA aircraft will serve as a bridge between the legacy turboprop fleet and the new HADES jets.
“Effectively, the entire fixed-wing ISR fleet is being divested,” said Colonel Joe Minor in April at the army’s yearly aviation summit. Minor serves as programme manager for fixed-wing aircraft procurement.
The divestments will not come with one-for-one replacements. Instead, the army plans for a smaller fleet of the new HADES jets, with the vastly improved capability of each aircraft offsetting their lower quantity.
The service’s current fleet of King Air-based MC/RC-12s numbers around 70 examples. By contrast, the HADES fleet may ultimately reach just 14 aircraft, with deliveries taking place over 12 years, according to the contract.
In addition to improved sensor payloads and flight performance, the army says its new surveillance platform, once delivered, will be able to operate effectively across the full spectrum of global theatres – a feat the turboprops could not match.
“This is the most-significant aerial ISR transformation in the history of the army,” Andrew Evans, director of the army’s ISR task force, said in April, also during the army conference.
Evans revealed the origins of the HADES effort to be in 2018, when the service was directed by Pentagon leaders to shift its focus away from counterinsurgency and toward threats posed by China’s rapidly modernising military.
To begin that process, the ISR task force undertook an assessment of its portfolio to determine which systems developed for counterinsurgency could be re-purposed for conducting surveillance of a near-peer adversary in the Indo-Pacific region.
“Our answer inside army ISR was, ‘nothing’,” Evans recalls.
Although he describes the existing King Air-based solution as “very capable”, Evans says the fundamental limitations of the twin-engined turboprop make it unsuitable for tackling the vast expanse and limited airfield options of the Indo-Pacific.
“You cannot take a King Air and range any of the problem sets that you need to range off the coast of China,” he notes.
Enter HADES, which Evans says industry partners were challenged to develop in a “completely different” manner. This included the costly and risky development of the company-owned and funded ATHENA demonstrator aircraft.
“They’re all taking enormous financial risks,” Evans says of the firms supporting the army’s ISR transformation, which alongside Sierra Nevada include L3Harris, Leidos and MAG Aerospace.
L3Harris and MAG are building a separate Global 6500-based platform called ATHENA-R, while systems named Artemis and Ares – operated respectively by Leidos and L3Harris – are already deployed.
Ultimately it was Sierra Nevada that prevailed to secure the final HADES contract, which chief executive Fatih Ozmen attributes to accurately predicting the Pentagon’s shifting geopolitical concerns.
“We saw the shift in operational theatres coming and we worked from the beginning to understand the army’s true needs,” Ozmen says.
As the company nears the conclusion of integration work for ATHENA-S, it will move into flight testing for that programme and begin work on HADES.
The contractor-operated aircraft will help the army determine how best to employ its own HADES jets once they enter service. Evans says the Pentagon already has a framework in place, which calls for ISR aircraft to look deep into the territory of potential adversaries and monitor the movement and activity of enemy forces in the weeks and months before a conflict erupts.
Notably, the business-jet-turned-spy-craft is not meant to operate in contested airspace against threats such as guided missiles launched by fighters or ground-based air defences.
“HADES is not going to be designed to ever be a stand-in asset,” Evans says.
Instead, the jets will support “active campaigning short of conflict”; they would retreat to safer airspace if a shooting war were to ignite. The army hopes that tactical choice will allow it to spend significantly less on the HADES programme than it would developing a new combat-capable platform.
“We do not believe that we could afford… even if we wanted, to create some sort of stealthy capability,” Evans says. “That’s not the mission it is designed to do.”
Story corrected 27 August to reflect Nevada as the headquarters of Sierra Nevada Corporation
