The Hellfire Armed MC-208 Guardian: A “Complete” JADC2 System

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

(Washington, D.C.) Lurking above enemy fire to support attacking infantry, beaming time-sensitive target specifics to maneuvering armed vehicles and processing seemingly limitless volumes of incoming data to find critical targets … are a few of the missions small, armed, fixed-wing surveillance planes are built to fly.

Increasingly, surveillance aircraft are able to draw upon smaller form factors, higher resolution, longer-range cameras and high-speed on-board computer processing to find, analyze and transmit pressing, time-sensitive target specifics amid fast-moving warfare.

Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft integrators such as MAG Aerospace have in recent years been stepping up efforts to engineer manned & unmanned surveillance platforms able to introduce new abilities to perform crucial time-sensitive sense, network and attack missions. 

MC-208 Guardian

Aircraft such as MAG’s MC-208 Guardian aircraft have been specifically built for this process in support of the Pentagon’s high priority Joint All Domain Command and Control effort (JADC2) intended to massively expedite the often-discussed “sensor-to-shooter” warzone decision-making process.

The Guardian is built to leverage advanced computer automation, AI and a new generation of sensing technologies to support the JADC2 process, which relies not only upon an ability to find targets with full motion video cameras but consolidate, organize, analyze and “network” data across a disaggregated force of land, air, sea and space manned and unmanned war platforms.

The tactical advantage associated with high-altitude drones is both established and well known, yet a lesser understood phenomenon is the extent to which high-tech, armed manned surveillance planes can process key information at the point of attack, reducing latency and optimizing critical warzone decision-making. The concept is to architect a platform capable of itself completing the entire kill-web process, yet also operate as a critical node within a dispersed, meshed network of combat “nodes” able to share data across the force in real-time.

MC-208 Guardian: A JADC2 System

“The MC 208 is armed. We see it as a JADC2 system in and of itself. You can see the data you are collecting. You can have it back on board the aircraft and you can launch weapons from that aircraft. We’re working on the networks, designing the communications architecture, to support JADC2, and we are supporting data exploitation. We’re doing the training for people to understand how to utilize FMV feeds coming off the aircraft,” Justin Janaskie, Chief Technical Officer, MAG Aerospace, told Warrior in an interview.