To deliver long-range sensing, industry says it can make corporate jets survivable

By Evan Ochsner  / October 28, 2022

Defense companies seeking to modify corporate jets to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the Army say they are confident they can make the planes survivable enough to be operationally relevant, even as the Air Force has moved away from a similar capability in recent years.

The Army next year is expected to release a request for proposals for a converted corporate jet that would join the growing array of sensors and processors that the service says will enable multidomain operations. The program, referred to by the Army as the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, appears likely to see at least four companies compete for a contract.

Industry officials told Inside Defense that they expected the Army to buy between roughly 14 and 28 of the planes, likely to be Bombardier Global 6500s, if the idea does indeed become a program of record.

But a key question is the survivability of the aircraft, particularly in a threat environment with advanced anti-platform capabilities from countries like China. The Air Force in recent years moved away from a program that looked very similar to the capability the Army is seeking amid concerns over the relevance and survivability of the platform in great power competition, believing it should shift to a more distributed system of sensors and processors.

The Air Force effort, to reinvigorate the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, was scrapped by the service even amid strong support for it from Congress. That program drew industry proposals based on the Gulfstream G550 and the Bombardier Global 6000, two planes that share similar off-the-shelf specifications to the Bombardier 6500 likely to be used for the Army’s push.

Greg Sanders, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has advocated for the use of unmanned platforms for aerial ISR collection, said the new Army jets under consideration were more survivable than the legacy Air Force planes, although he said the Army likely wouldn’t use the corporate jets in a contested environment.

“I think one of the big advantages of using something corporate in this kind of context is that you could have something that is sufficiently affordable that it might still be worth it if when you get to an active conflict you keep it grounded nonetheless,” Sanders said.

The Army, which has said its modernization push will include expanded aviation capabilities in contested environments, says HADES would be used as part of the Multi-Domain Sensing System. HADES is the first program in that system and “will provide multiple sensing capabilities by developing and integrating sensor capabilities on different platforms that as a system will comprise a survivable sensing suite in MDO,” according to an Army request for information.

The Bombardier 6500 the Army appears to prefer has a maximum operational altitude of 51,000 feet, higher than the 42,000-foot ceiling of the legacy planes the Air Force has begun moving away from and higher than the RC-12 Guardrail planes the Army is likely to replace.

That improvement in altitude offers survivability benefits, Sanders said: “Smaller and higher offers advantages, but it cannot completely eliminate those [survivability] concerns,” Sanders said.

Industry officials are bullish about the survivability of the planes they are developing, which are serving as technology demonstrators and being used operationally. L3Harris is developing a jet for the Army’s ARES program, and Leidos is working on an effort for the ARTEMIS program. Both are intended to inform future Army requirements for a program of record.

Mark Levine, business development representative in L3Harris Technologies' Integrated Mission Systems business unit, said the high-flying capabilities of the Bombardier Global 6500 offered important survivability benefits.

“You get above 40,000 feet, there's survivability benefits of doing missions above 40,000 feet, just the basic physics are how much fuel can you put in a rocket motor to shoot an air defense weapon system,” Levine said.

The ARES jet L3Harris is developing has an active detect and defeat system, and the company is also talking to the Army about integrating survivability systems it has developed to protect the F-16 fighter jet and B-52 bomber, he said.

“That's what makes these commercial aircraft survivable in that space, is the altitude and standoff,” he said. “When paired with the proper aircraft survivability equipment system, it's very survivable.”

The new platforms almost certainly offer better survivability than earlier efforts, but questions about whether they should be manned persist, said J.J. Gertler, a longtime military aviation analyst for the Congressional Research Service: “‘The services keep going back and forth on whether or not that general type of aircraft should be inhabited or not.”

Mike Chagnon, a senior vice president working on the ARTEMIS project at Leidos, said international laws and national airspace restrictions allow manned platforms to fly in places where unmanned platforms legally can’t.

“There are certain places we can fly with the manned platform that they can't fly with an unmanned platform,” Chagnon said.

The Army’s approach to ISR leaves plenty of room for unmanned sensors, and the HADES jets aren’t intended to be an all-in-one solution, he said.

“What the Army's objective is to have a multilayer ISR capability from space to the mud . . . and this is one of those layers, and I'm sure unmanned will be an element of their multidomain ISR capability and multilayer ISR capabilities.”

Leidos’ plane, a modified Bombardier Challenger 650, has been flying operationally since July 2020, Chagnon said, spending most of that time supporting U.S. European Command. The plane flies about six days a week, but, he said, “We currently do not fly in contested environments.”

The jet has a maximum operating altitude of 41,000 feet, aircraft survivability equipment on board, and the company is looking at air launched effects to provide additional protection, he said.

Both Leidos and L3Harris say they plan to compete for the Army’s Athena program, which will bridge from ARES and ARTEMIS to the final HADES project with bulked-up airplanes that will look more like the final product. Leidos’ offering will be a Bombardier Global 6500, Chagnon said.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth highlighted the ISR jets in her opening address at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army and before providing reporters with an update on the HADES program: “I think we'll probably be looking to put out a [request for information] for the HADES platform sometime in the coming year,” Wormuth said. “But right now, we're using ARES and ARTEMIS to kind of learn and experiment and better understand what our needs are.”

That might help answer at least one key question raised by Gertler, the aviation analyst.

“There's a constant question of how close to the front do you want this platform to go,” he said.