Splitting Up The Army And The Air Force Was A Bad Idea

Forbes reports on a new Army procurement program - Athena, which seeks to turn an existing commercial business jet design into a future Army sensor aircraft, because its missiles and guided artillery rounds can now hit targets further away than ground based sensors can identify.

In other words, the Army needs them because the Air Force doesn't play well enough with the Army to be a reliable source of targeting information for Army artillery units. 

You've heard this story before. The Air Force has also slighted its duty to provide close air support for the Army, and its duty to devote sufficient resources to transporting Army units and gear to where they need to be.

A fierce competition is underway between four powerhouse defense firms to win the development contract for a future Army sensor aircraft. The effort is called Athena, and it involves fielding commercial business jets configured to peer deeper into hostile territory than existing turboprops can.

("Athena," like most of the other program and project names mentioned here, is an acronym. Spelling out what the letters mean would just make the mission sound more arcane than it already is.)

The Army is extending the range of its organic fires to attack distant targets with pinpoint accuracy, but that accuracy depends on having timely information about the location and nature of said targets. The Air Force can provide part of that information, but there are some types of recon ground commanders need that the Army must generate for itself.

The solution lies in a program called the Multi-Domain Sensing System, which subsumes most of the needed reconnaissance capabilities, including a project called Hades. Hades eventually will produce a fleet of airborne platforms that can generate comprehensive targeting data gleaned from diverse sensors.

But the Army needs a bridge from its current, decrepit fleet of Cold War recon aircraft to that beckoning future, and Athena was conceived to be the bridge. It entails leasing contractor-owned and operated sensor aircraft that can fly higher, see further, and remain airborne longer than the legacy fleet. 

The Army's RC-12 Guardrail recon aircraft flies too low and too slow to be effective . . . .

The cost is modest by Pentagon standards. The Army requested $50 million for the entire Multi-Domain Sensing System program in 2023, and Athena is only one facet of the program. But it is an important facet, because Athena will light the way to the long-term solution. If budgets tighten in the years ahead, it might even become the long-term solution. . . .

Leidos has modified hundreds of aircraft, going back decades. One of its recent successes was an early application of the Athena concept to a Challenger 650 bizjet dubbed Artemis. Artemis has provided valuable intelligence in Europe, especially since the Ukraine war began. Last year it performed 220 sorties totaling over 2,000 hours of flight time, collecting information from orbits west of the embattled country.

Like a companion aircraft dubbed Ares that L3Harris has provided for the Pacific theater, Artemis listens in on radio-frequency signals emitted from potentially hostile sources, identifying the nature of the emitter and its location. In Army parlance, it is a signals-intelligence or “sigint” aircraft.

Apparently it is a very useful sigint aircraft, because the Army has elected to buy a second Artemis aircraft even as it moves on to developing Athena. 

Athena comes in two flavors: Athena-R, which is equipped with a synthetic aperture radar that tracks moving targets on the ground, and Athena-S, the sigint variant that provides electronic detection and identification of assets such as air-defense radars and communication nodes.

The ”R” variant of Athena is an active emitter that uses radar waves to characterize potential targets, while the “S” variant listens passively to diverse signals. The Army is expected to award a development contract for Athena-R imminently; it has just released a solicitation for Athena-S.

The Army hasn’t decided yet whether all of these sensing functions will eventually be integrated on a single airframe under the Hades umbrella. Plans call for eventually adding cyber and electronic-warfare capabilities also, but during the bridge phase to Hades it is satisfied to have two different variants. . . .

All of the competing teams will be offering bizjet solutions, because that is what will be required to provide the altitude and speed the Army needs. The mission employs line-of-sight sensors, so the higher the plane can fly the further it can see into hostile battlespace. Legacy turboprops fly at barely half the altitude of business jets. They also lack the speed and endurance to deploy around the world quickly, a challenge that Artemis and Ares have already demonstrated how to solve.