The jet will be the main platform for the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) program, the Army’s fixed wing aircraft-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system that will replace the legacy RC-12 Guardrail.

The Army has been on a multi-year journey to develop its own high-altitude ISR platform based on a business jet, somewhat unfamiliar territory for an organization that’s better known for employing ground systems, helicopters and small drones. HADES has relied on several pre-prototype systems that were contractor-owned, contractor-operated to help determine certain needs and requirements.

Those tools included the Airborne Reconnaissance Targeting Exploitation Mission Intelligence System (ARTEMIS), the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System (ARES) and the Army Theater-Level High-Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ATHENA) platform.

Army officials described the delivery of the Global 6500 as a big win for the service.

“It is great day for the Army and a great day for getting after our number one large-scale combat operations gap, and that is deep sensing,” Lt. Gen. Anthony Hale, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, told reporters ahead of the ceremony. “The Army started an initiative about four years ago to get after large-scale combat operations and our deep-sensing gap. And this aircraft coming off the assembly line today from Bombardier is the first step in the process of being able to detect and collect intelligence as far as we can shoot now in our Army. This capability is going to be a great asset for not only campaigning, but for crisis and then support to conflict. It supports our Army commanders as well as our joint force commanders as part of the joint force and the Army.”

The airframe delivered by Bombardier is what officials described as the “workhorse” for HADES.

“It’s what enables HADES to get in position to collect, to have the endurance necessary to provide meaningful station time,” Andrew Evans, director of the ISR Task Force, said. “But the magic of a HADES is what will happen in the back of that aircraft. The next step to this program is integrating all of that equipment in the back and then delivering it up for an operational test to really stress-test the capability in the back.”

While Bombardier was chosen as the airframe builder, Sierra Nevada was awarded the integration contract in August, however, L3Harris filed a protest in September.

As a result, the program is in a “hold” right now.

“We’re in a hold but it was not unexpected … when you’re dealing with a program that’s a potentially multi-billion dollar program like HADES, what you would expect if you’re industry is to ensure that your proposal was fully vetted, fully reviewed,” Evans said. “That’s what industry is doing at this point, is they’ve asked the [Government Accountability Office] to look at that just to make sure that all T’s were crossed and I’s were dotted. And we welcome that.”

He added that the Army will defer to GAO’s findings, which are anticipated at the end of December.

Even with the protest, the service expects the mission equipment integration leading to a full-up HADES system will occur in late 2026 or early 2027.

With the first airframe being delivered Monday, he noted the Army is still in the process of determining when a second will be delivered, adding the estimate is to receive one per year.

However, that could change given world events and priorities for the Army and Pentagon. Officials described that they want HADES to be adaptive to real-world activities and are building it to be modular and software enabled to respond when the environment or adversary changes.

“We’re taking lessons learned from the world and we’re applying them to this program, and we’re accelerating or decelerating as needed to account for what’s happening around the world. The speed, again, to which we deliver HADES will be highly dependent on what’s happening in the world and how we apply resources against those priorities,” Evans said.

Hale explained the necessity of incorporating an open architecture on the aircraft to have the right collection gear to combat the enemy, which could differ by theater or environment in places such as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, European Command, Central Command or Africa Command areas of responsibility.

“As you look around the world today, whether you look in Indo-Pacom, Eucom, you look at Centcom, even Africom, there’s different threats and different technologies that are being utilized in those AORs,” he said. “As the senior intel officer for the Army, I’ve got to make sure we can collect on those requirements for our commanders so that they can make decisions appropriate for their mission. Whether it’s the open architecture, whether it’s the speed, the range, the altitude of the aircraft, that gives us better collection.”

Moreover, adversaries around the world are utilizing technologies, systems and concepts not observed before and the Army must be able to quickly adapt.

“Technology is moving faster than we can keep up with. This aircraft and this system gives us the opportunity to try to stay ahead or at least stay at pace with what the adversary is doing. Whether it’s in the Indo-Pacom AOR, as an example, Eucom, Centcom or Africom, every day the enemy is working in the electromagnetic spectrum. They’re utilizing EW capabilities, they’re utilizing unmanned aerial system capabilities that we haven’t seen before,” he said. “They’re increasing the use of new weapon systems that, quite quickly, we haven’t seen before. And whether it’s the Ukraine or whether it’s somewhere in Africa, our adversary is using these places as battlefields and testing areas to develop and continue to emerge technology.”

America’s enemies are sharing tactics and tech, meaning what is observed in one theater could be in another imminently. This portends that systems like HADES must be able to be modular to react across those environments.

Evans described HADES as taking a “software-centric design” approach. Historically, boxes that were mostly hardware-centric were installed on a platform and were difficult to take out and update. Now, officials can insert new capabilities.

“If we have a threat that pops up in Africa, let’s say, that we need to address and it becomes a priority, that might be a different software load than something we would use in another part of the world. We have to be adaptive enough to load that software quickly,” he said. “Software is pretty easy. You can load that in a half a day. That’s what allows something like HADES to be modular to the threat: less heavy integration of hardware and much more adaptive integration software.”

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“We are drowning in data. I see data as both a challenge but also an opportunity. That’s essentially what AI is for our Army. It’s an opportunity. AI presents opportunities for progress more than any other technology we have seen in the last few decades,” Lt. Gen. Anthony Hale, deputy chief of staff, G2, said during a presentation at the annual AUSA conference Wednesday.

To quantify it, the world will have somewhere around 180 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data by the end of 2025, Andrew Evans, the director of the Army’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force, said in an interview at the conference.

The task force — a temporary entity set up initially to act as a cross-cutting enabler that will sunset to a permanent directorate inside the G2 once the newly established all-domain sensing cross-functional team reaches full operational capability — is taking Army senior leadership’s direction to not just throw people at that problem, but use AI to unburden the analysts.

“One of our key missions in the intel enterprise in terms of transformation, is figuring out how to leverage artificial intelligence to attack that data in the right ways, impactful ways and ethical ways, things that you have to consider when you do the data piece,” Evans said. “AI is going to be a big focus for us moving forward. We could put a million humans against that and the data will always grow at an astronomical rate, beyond what the humans can do.”

There is a sense of urgency behind this effort as well. According to Hale, there could be a “fight tonight” in three of the military’s six geographic combatant commands: Indo-Pacific Command, Central Command and European Command.

“This is the driving pace for transformation in our Army. It’s the urgency that you hear the chief of staff in the Army talk about every day,” he said. “We must learn to leverage AI to organize the world’s information, reduce manpower requirements, make it useful, and position our people for speed and accuracy and delivering information to the commander for decision dominance.”

One area the Army is trying to improve is its processing, exploitation and dissemination, or PED, process.

The service wants to reimagine PED to get away from the counterinsurgency era — where assets could loiter over a target for days, develop patterns of life of targets and pass data over a permissive network — towards new concepts like multi-intelligence data fusion and analysis.

“When we talk about multi-INT data fusion and analysis we talk about how do we apply realistic AI-enabled technologies or machine learning models against real operational requirements today,” Col. Brandon VanOrden, chief of intelligence operations, deputy chief of staff, G2, said at the conference. “We need help from this group to do things like vertically layer those ML models and then horizontally, integrate them across platforms and programs to apply again, against real, finite resources and prioritized operation requirements in our assigned theaters.”

VanOrden also explained that the Army wants a “conversation” with data. This means having the ability to ask informed and operational questions rather than looking at data for data’s sake.

In a hypothetical example, he envisions an analyst asking a data set where a unit is, what it’s doing and where it might be going next. The data should also be able to tell the analyst what happens if conditions change and how that might affect the probability of what that unit will do.

Ultimately, it comes down to providing better context for that human analyst.

One of the major hurdles for the military in applying AI for intelligence purposes is being able to train the algorithms against the data that resides in highly classified environments.

“One of the biggest challenges is that you have to train your algorithms against data of military grade. If you’re talking about highly classified data, the algorithms, in most cases, some of the stuff that you would see around AUSA today is trained against commercially available data,” Evans said. “That does not always represent military data. Your algorithm may be trained differently than how it will be employed, if you think about that. One of the things we have to do as intel professionals [is] help bridge that gap. How do we ensure that an algorithm that we may be interested in integrating has been trained against data of military value? We’re trying to work that out right now.”

Hale noted that the Army needs industry as it’s looking for data analytics, security, generative AI and large language models to assist in the service’s challenges.

While there are plenty of AI providers, Evans said, the question becomes, who are the trusted ones that have trained against the right types of data sets, and then when that algorithm is employed, will it learn? Algorithms can’t be a one-and-done thing, he added, noting they have to learn as they go.

According to Evans, one of the first efforts aimed at providing avenues for industry is a governance process that doesn’t stifle innovation or rapid employment.

“How do we create governance that’s rapid and responsive, so that when we do integrate AI, it’s being done ethically, but it’s still keeping pace with technology?” he said. “Then, how do we give vendors a space where they can come, bring their algorithms and models, test it and validate it against military-grade data, and then deploy it and allow users to download it and use it on their data set?”

The program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors is in the process of building an AI and machine learning ecosystem to allow for a trusted and safe environment for other program managers and Army elements to bring their models to go against curated and trusted data. It will be in an environment where they’re trained and verified, ensuring the right security wrappers to understand if there’s any types of drift or things getting out of tolerance from those models, Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the PEO, said.

“As we build that out and establish that trusted environment we’re looking at ways to really get at what we’ve talked about a little bit here with regard to PED,” he said. “The goal is really to do that hard work and not have, through AI and ML, and not place that burden on our analyst. Really allow that analyst to get at the high-level analysis that we want them to, to provide that context right that really only the human can do.”

Barker noted there are uses cases that officials are working with U.S. Army Pacific, partnering with the National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Chief Digital and AI Office to help solve the PED problems in the Pacific region.

Ethical principles

Officials noted that AI won’t totally replace military service members, especially when it comes to targeting. They stressed that the Army will apply ethical principles to these algorithms and ensure the technology is never responsible for pulling the trigger, but rather, aiding humans’ decision-making processes.

“We must also execute these efforts responsibly. Like [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin says, responsible AI is the place where cutting-edge technology meets our timeless values,” Hale said.

Evans noted that machines do computation very well while humans apply discretion and values-based assessments.

Guarding against AI hallucination and building trust against those algorithms with be a big challenge and focus for the Army.

“Hallucination, it is a thing right now. We are probably technologically capable … of doing a lot of things fast, but I know from the way the U.S. wants to fight by laws of armed conflict, we are quite a distance right now from trusting AI and the ability to automate our targeting in that respect,” Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, director of the long-range precision fires cross-functional team, said during the conference. “We must build trust.”

Providing hypothetical examples and potential use cases for how AI can aid analysts, Evans said the machines can alert humans to look at a particular problem for which the soldier can apply discretion.

“Is this a problem? And if it is, how do I want to respond to this problem?” he said. “What we need humans to do is look at what the machine has nominated as a potential hotspot, problem, target, threat, name your condition, and then to apply a value to that and say, ‘Yep, that is and yes I’m going to take action.’”

One example could be in the vast expanses of the Pacific ocean, where an analyst could be tasked to track hostile or aggressive ships across a 700,000 square mile set of satellite imagery. Rather than task humans with looking at blue squares for endless hours, the algorithm can identify almost instantaneously where ships are.

In setting up certain rules for the AI, it could determine based on the data set the most important areas for human interrogation. If humans aren’t happy with that or want more data, they can ask for more nominations.

A tricky issue going forward, however, is what if the AI didn’t make a nomination?

“[My] personal view of this is where we’re going to find the deepest learning on AI is not … when it provides a nomination, it’s what happens if it didn’t. How do you know if it didn’t nominate? Is there still a threat out there that you need to go look at?” Evans said. “That’s where we’re going to have to just learn as we go on this … Trust is going to be about repeatability and then verifying that the information provided was complete. No one really likes to talk about that, but a complete assessment from a machine is a vital part of building trust. If it’s incomplete, you can take action, you can do all the right ethical things, but you’re still actioning on an incomplete data set. We have to make sure that it’s looking at the totality [of] what you need it to look at.”

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The service has been on a multi-year journey to develop its own high-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform based on a business jet, somewhat unfamiliar territory for an organization that’s better known for employing ground systems, helicopters and small drones. The ultimate program — the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) — relied on several pre-prototype systems that were contractor-owned, contractor-operated to help determine certain needs and requirements.

Those tools included the Airborne Reconnaissance Targeting Exploitation Mission Intelligence System (ARTEMIS), the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System (ARES) and the Army Theater-Level High-Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ATHENA) platform.

“Since we deployed ARTEMIS to the Pacific for its validation flights and then onward to [U.S. European Command] … what we’ve learned first and foremost is these are in-demand systems. When combatant commanders get them and Army theater commanders get them, they say, ‘This is a big key part of my collection strategy,’” Andrew Evans, director of the Army’s ISR Task Force, said in an interview Monday at the annual AUSA conference. “Knowing that we have the right type of system out there is very important. We’ve iterated on the system — so ARTEMIS, then ARES and then we’re about to deploy some ATHENA assets as well … We iterated it on these systems and optimize them to the point that we’re addressing theater commander collection requirements.”

Evans said one of the biggest lessons is that while bigger jets can fly higher and see farther — meaning they can collect much more data — the Army must ensure it has the right bandwidth on and off the aircraft.

“We started with insufficient SATCOM capability and then we upgunned that, so we’re in a better position there. We have learned how to optimize collection tracks as a result of this,” he said.

These platforms are necessary to achieve one of the Army’s top priorities: deep sensing. Top service officials have said a fixed-wing jet for ISR, separate from what the Air Force has, is necessary for the Army because it has specific requirements that must be met. As the Army plans to fight against more sophisticated adversaries over greater distances, it must be able to see and sense farther in the physical and non-kinetic realms.

Evans explained that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, it was a wake-up call highlighting a potential peer competition engaging in larger-scale combat than what the U.S. military confronted during the Global War on Terror.

A subsequent study identified 19 large-scale combat operations gaps, with the first being deep sensing.

“We got our start as a result of what Russia did with Crimea and deep sensing. [It] was all about identifying what the threat was doing in the deep battle, because what happens in the deep battle is all shaping operations that affect what happens in the front end of the battle. We knew we had a significant gap in our capabilities, which is, how do we see into that deep space to affect what’s about to come at you 72 hours or 96 hours later? As a result of that, the Army started to double-down on this concept of deep sensing,” Evans said.

“HADES, the program itself, is just about how do we optimize deep sensing in organic ways for the Army? How does the Army ensure that it’s never caught by surprise? How do you see far enough in, with enough persistence to ensure that you’re informing commanders before they’re faced with the threat that they may not know is there?” he added.

The Army in August announced that it selected Sierra Nevada Corp. to serve as the lead system integrator for HADES, which will be the first Army jet and replace the RC-12 Guardrail. The eventual system will be government owned and government operated.

SNC will integrate a variety of sensors for communications intelligence, electronic intelligence, synthetic aperture radar and moving target indication onto a fleet of Bombardier Global 6500 business jets.

L3Harris filed a protest for the award in September.

Evans noted that one of the other key lessons from the pre-prototypes is how to employ these capabilities.

“One thing that’s unique about something like an ARTEMIS, ARES or ATHENA is you don’t fly them like the Guardrails that the Army used to fly. You can fly them in different ways, in different areas, potentially. And there’s different considerations for how you might employ a high-end system like that. We’re learning, our formations are learning, our soldiers are learning how to do that. Collection managers are learning how to employ these systems as a part of the bigger collection matrix in the theaters,” he said. “All of these lessons that we’re learning are being ported over into how we design HADES.”

The pre-prototype platforms can see three times farther, in some cases, than what the Army has been able to see before, Evans said.

“The idea that we can see three times further, that we can stay twice as long, that our mission availability rate — which is not something most people talk about, but we know when we go out to that jet it’s going to do its mission that day,” he noted. “When you operate an aging fleet of aircraft that the Army’s had with the with the old legacy fleet, we were successful if we could launch eight out of 10 times, 80% operational readiness rate. We say success is 10 out of 10. We’re seeing that every day with the jet.”

Given all these lessons, HADES won’t be what Evans termed a “cold start.”

“HADES is a five-year running start, so when we design the first HADES, it’s with five years of lessons learned. Some people say, ‘Hey, Army, how can you claim that you’re going to architect the HADES and then deliver within 24 months?’ Well, because really we’ve had five years of learning. We’re going to take that five years, architect in over the next two years and then deliver our first HADES by late ’26,” he explained. “We’ll continue to work on HADES. We believe we’ll deliver an initial prototype of HADES by late 2026. We’ll put it into what we call an operational test or user assessment at that point. We’re using the middle tier of acquisition approach for HADES, which means we’re using some flexible congressional authorities, which gives us a lot of room to move fast on this. We’re using an abbreviated [capability development document] as a requirements backbone. We’re moving fast.”

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As the U.S. military is preparing for potential battles with sophisticated nation-states, the way in which wars will be carried out is expected to be much different than past conflicts. Units will be dispersed across vast distances and the forces that act the fastest will be successful.

“We will be operating disaggregated and dispersed in the next fight. One hundred percent true. The speed and that fight will be the difference in whether we win or lose. Whether our nation is going to win or lose the next war will be about how quick we can action targets. We got to close this kill chains fast,” Andrew Evans, director of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance task force, said during a presentation at the Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, Wednesday. “To do that we have to understand the ecosystem in which we’re operating and we have to find ways to connect distributed sensors quickly at the classification level that a warfighter needs — not an intel professional maybe, but a warfighter.”

Evans noted how traditionally, the concept of sensing has been intelligence focused, meaning the military and intelligence community built exquisite systems and collection mechanisms that mostly served the IC, which operates at higher classification levels and different authorities than average warfighters.

In the future, this intel must be readily available to troops at the tactical edge to be able to act upon conditions to thwart adversary activities.

“If you’re a warfighter you would say, ‘I’m sure we have great things, I just don’t get it. Right. I don’t get it at my level.’ As we talked about what it means to be ready to fight a war in the next fight, we got to move past that. Sensing for multi-domain operations, I think, is going to look different,” Evans said.

The Army, through the new cross-functional team — which was announced this week — and the deputy chief of staff for intelligence will have to hold the IC accountable to ensure tactical requirements are being addressed.

“One example is if you leave it up to the way it might exist today, an IC partner might deliver data down to a reasonable place on the ground that might not be good enough for the Army. The Army needs that data to be moved to the last tactical mile, if you will,” Evans told reporters. “This CFT in conjunction with the G2 will engage the IC often to ensure that tactical needs of the Army are being addressed, because this is again about warfighting … But we’ve got to keep the focus on tactical warfighting needs.”

He said the Army is already seeing a demand for so-called sensor-to-shooter activity tapping into data below the top secret level, and in some cases, the unclassified level.

“How do we make that shift to more traditional reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition?” he asked.

One way to do that at speed is thinking differently about what a sensor is, including what Evans called non-traditional sensors.

“Most of our major combat systems today either are, or will be, built on digital backbones, which means they are running on thousands of micro services and micro sensors. We got to find a way to connect all that because those are sensors across the battlefield,” he said. “Those are not your big, exquisite, expensive intel sensors of old. These are sensors that help us optimize combat systems. Why can’t they help us optimize the way we sense in distributed ways?”

A perfect example is radar warning receivers on helicopters that help pilots survive by looking for enemy radar. At its core, these receivers are signals intelligence systems, Evans said, adding that the Army will begin to connect those types of capabilities to a larger architecture to make that data more available and actionable to forces in the fight.

The first line of effort for the new CFT calls for multi-sensor “dominance,” which deals with prioritizing, integrating and shaping sensor technologies.

“We have sensors or things that can sense all over the battlefield today. We have capabilities, we have all kinds of different things that sense,” Michael Monteleone, director of the cross-functional team, told reporters — noting that journalists’ phones, not traditionally thought of as sensors, are now sensors being used to record his remarks. “We may not be taking as much advantage as we could of all the sensing capabilities that we have out there today. Which means not only just hey, we can capitalize on that, but also in some cases we don’t always have to build something either. Sometimes having three of something of less fidelity is just as good as having one of very high fidelity and very high cost.”

Another major shift the Army is gearing up for is in the processing, exploitation and dissemination of intelligence information, or PED.

With more and more sensors being delivered to the battlefield, PED will become more daunting. However, the answer to the problem should not be more people, but rather, artificial intelligence and machine learning to help make sense of what is and isn’t important, officials have suggested.

“You know what a lot of are really, really smart analysts would do? They’d spent an entire shift reporting, ‘Sir, there was nothing significant to report.’ An entire shift. We cannot do that in the future,” Evans said. “We have to take our humans and we have to apply judgment and discretion to whatever the machine presents to them for evaluation. A machine should tell you there was nothing important to look at, but these few things you really need to go take a look at. Then the human should look at those few things. That’s how you keep up with data in the next fight.”

Evans said when building new capabilities, the Army should start by asking what AI or ML needs to be developed to optimize them, which will ultimately better optimize the human enterprise.

“When we combine the data literacy training that will be needed for our humans with this, what I’ll call an intel version of human-machine integration, we will generate exponential enhancements in the speed of decision-making and that will allow us to match the tempo of a data-driven” operation, he said.

The Army will also need to develop stronger edge computing capabilities to enable this type of intelligence and PED to process back and forth from static, remote hubs to soldiers on the ground.

“Edge compute has got to be a piece of that. We think that bandwidth will be limited and contested, certainly,” Evans said. “We have to figure out how [to] operate in those environments. And that’s going to involve doing as much of your compute forward as you can, as much of your processing of the sensor as you can and bringing back the relevant data.”

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