Bombardier Global 6500 business jet, as used for the Army ATHENA surveillance program. (Bombardier image)
AUSA 2023 — The Army awarded an unusual “ISR as a service” contract to Sierra Nevada Corporation on Sept. 28th, aviation acquisition official Rodney Davis announced this week at AUSA.
The contract, called ATHENA-S, is part of a multi-year, multi-phase effort to move the Army’s fleet of fixed-wing Intelligence, Surveillance, & Reconnaissance aircraft from propeller-driven platforms to converted business jets. The company estimates the total contract value at around $600 million, with multiple options over multiple years.
Sierra Nevada will own the two ATHENA-S jets, on which it has already spent about $280 million of its own money, Sierra Nevada executive VP Tim Owings told Breaking Defense. Those expenses cover everything from the Bombardier Global 6500 airplanes themselves to buying and installing the high-powered radars to track moving targets on land and sea. Even the crew will be Sierra Nevada employees, an arrangement known as “Contractor Owned, Contractor Operated” (COCO).
A contract protest from the losing bidder, a teamup of Leidos and L3Harris, is still possible, and even an unsuccessful protest would delay parts of the program — but the fact that the jets are privately owned means a GAO stop-work order wouldn’t affect the company’s physical work on the jets themselves, according to Owings.
However, it is on the government to provide most of the high-tech sensors, Owings said in a sidebar conversation at AUSA. That includes electronic and communications intelligence systems to track and crack enemy transmissions.
“We’re integrating the jets now in Hagerstown, Maryland,” Owings said. Assuming there’s no successful protest that derails the program, he went on, “we’ll be done early next year with integrating the platforms. But at the same time, there’s testing and certification, and a lot of that relies on the government.” So, he said, the timeline to actually deploy the ATHENA-S jets on real-world missions is uncertain.
A spokesperson for Leidos said in a statement to Breaking Defense that, “We are disappointed with the outcome and are eager to receive our debrief to understand how we can enhance future strategies. Fortunately, the assets we had earmarked for this mission are fully engaged supporting a contract with the U.S. Army. We remain dedicated to delivering excellence and value to our customers.”
The two ATHENA-S jets will join ATHENA-R, another pair of converted Bombardier Global 6500s awarded in August to MAG Air and L3Harris. The four-plane, two-contract ATHENA effort is itself a follow-on to ARTEMIS, a single aircraft integrated by Leidos on the smaller Global 650 airframe which was spotted operating near Ukraine in the early days of that conflict. The ultimate goal, Owings said, is a fleet of at least 14 ISR jets upgraded to a standard the Army is calling HADES.
(ATHENA stands for Army Theater-Level, High-Altitude Expeditionary – Next – Airborne; ARTEMIS, for Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-Mission System; and HADES for High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System.)
“We’ve learned a lot from the two Artemis aircraft,” said Davis, the Army’s Acting Deputy Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Aviation. “It’s a bridge [to] HADES.”
ARTEMIS proved that “high performance business jets actually can collect a lot of information,” Davis said. And, he added, while the Army’s legacy fleet of propeller-driven planes must deploy overseas in stages with multiple refueling stops, “these jets can fly back and forth in a day.”
“It’s designed to be able to deploy anywhere in the world in 24 hours, unlike the [turboprop] King Airs that have to hop [in four or five hour increments,” said Owings. Greater range allows the jets to fly further, loiter longer over the target area, or a mix of both. They also let the jets fly higher, extending the horizon of their sensors and keeping them somewhat safer from anti-aircraft weapons on the ground — although no one expects to fly these converted business jets into seriously contested airspace.
“These platforms are not intended to fly at the highest intensity conflict. That’s not what they do,” said Owings. “They’re in the shaping phases.”
Likewise, the jets will complement surveillance satellites, not replace them. “We believe in the space application [for ISR], too,” Owings emphasized. “We’re launching our own set of cubesats, the first four in November, for doing very specialized space collection of the RF spectrum.”
“But all that said, there’s windows where the space stuff is not as good [as aircraft],” he went on. With a limited number of satellites following fixed Newtonian orbits, “you can only collect during certain times,” he said, “so this fills the gap.”
Michael Marrow and Ashley Roque in Washington contributed to this story.
