By Warrior Maven Staff — Center for Military Modernization
Today, the Army’s Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) community shoulders a critical mission – to provide quick, applicable, and precise intelligence to commanders operating at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. However, the current fleet, consisting of more than 60 ISR aircraft, are mostly made up of technology echoing the Cold War era.These aircraft, built to tackle Cold War and Counter-terrorism threats, struggle with today’s multi-domain operations and shifting geopolitical scenarios. Additionally, as threats to secure communications grow, the need for new strategies and solutions that can adapt without relying on allied military bases increase.
The answer to these challenges is a cutting-edge system – the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES. This solution promises to modernize ISR capabilities, helping to keep pace with our evolving world. A new fleet of high-altitude business jets equipped with signals intelligence sensors and a synthetic aperture radar.
The Army is moving quickly to operationalize new innovations in the realm of long-range precision sensing by working with contractors such as MAG Aerospace to build and operate a new generation of surveillance aircraft.
MAG Aerospace recently won the Army’s Theater-Level, High-Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne ISR-Radar (ATHENA-R) program contract, which is a first step in the Army’s transition to HADES. The ATHENA-R program will provide the Army with a sensor testbed to further help define requirements for the follow-on HADES acquisition and provide a short-term capability to fill a surveillance gap in the Army ISR fleet until the HADES program enters service later this decade. The two programs are complementary. Through ATHENA-R, MAG will provide the Army with the ability to detect and track targets at long ranges while identifying critical areas of improvement for future sensor technology for use on HADES . HADES is the long term Army program of record that will be a fleet of business jet platforms that will collect a wider range of ISR data to give the Army a more complete picture of the battlefield and allow it to make better decisions.
Part of the advantage of the deal with MAG is to harness jet technologies for increased speed an improved performance beyond typical turbo-prop ISR planes.
MAG operators, builders and engineers are increasingly able to build and integrate a wide range of sensing and information analysis technologies to provide a “turnkey” ISR as a service to the Army with maximum efficiency.
The Army has worked with industry partnerships to refine much of this technology, which likely draws upon new EW technology to identify and “jam” enemy RF communications. One of the platforms is called Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-Mission System (ARTEMIS). This was tested and refined in the Pacific as part of a developmental effort to advance current ISR efforts as a precursor to the award to MAG Aerospace.
The term Exploitation is significant here, as MAG IT and sensor engineers are increasingly building AI-enabled computer processing systems able to not only gather and collect incoming information but also “exploit,” organize, analyze and transmit an integrated battlefield ISR picture.
The Army further advanced this technology with yet another demonstrator in 2022 called the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, (ARES), which further advanced data integration, exploitation, and EW technologies to prioritize what commanders needed.
Some of the critical technologies MAG will leverage and operate include long-range, high-fidelity EO/IR cameras tracking both visual targets and enemy movements along with infrared heat signatures to identify otherwise obscured targets. Most of these kinds of surveillance systems also include Synthetic Aperture Radar, which sends electromagnetic “pings” off the contours below to deliver a rendering of a given combat area to decision makers. Army and MAG innovators stress that range and information integration are critical to this effort, as technology has enabled targeting sensors and ISR systems to operate much longer-range, high-fidelity, high-resolution imagery. Also, the data collection systems increasingly performs analytics at the point of collection, meaning incoming data from otherwise disparate sensor systems is aggregated, pooled, and analyzed in relation to one another in order to present a comprehensive intelligence picture for commanders. AI-enabled computing can take otherwise incompatible data formats arriving through different “transport layers” and use “gateway” systems to essentially “translate” and integrate otherwise disaggregated pools of data. Once aggregated and organized, integrated incoming data can then be bounced of a seemingly limitless database to solve problems, perform analysis, draw comparisons and deliver a comprehensive, integrated assessment to commanders. This can include video data from ISR cameras, RF gathered data from key radio systems and datalinks, incoming satellite data, radar and other forms of wireless information transfer.
Through its current effort with MAG, the Army will advance all of this technology to a new level to use jet-propulsion technology, computing and data exploitation to achieve breakthrough results previously not available with legacy turbo-prop platforms.
“The one thing that I’m noticing is … the ability to add different capabilities if necessary and being able to tailor them to whatever theaters we’re in, which isn’t really something we’re able to do with the older platform,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Amber Cornelius, the ARES processing, exploitation and dissemination officer in charge with the 104th Military Intelligence Company; Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination Battalion, 116th Military Intelligence Brigade, said in an Army essay earlier this year. “Some of the signals we are going after on an unclassified level in specific theaters, we weren’t able to detect with the older platform. With these newer [platforms], just being able to go after those combatant commanders’ top priorities has been one of the biggest game changers: especially going from a tactical focus to a more strategic focus.”
Kris Osborn is the Military Affairs Editor of 19FortyFive and President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in /lComparative Literature from Columbia University
