Army Breaks Through With New “HADES” Spy-Plane Technology

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.