AUSA 2024 — The US Army is about to approve a new requirement for small high-altitude balloons for sensing deep inside enemy territory, according to a senior official.
“You’ll see it as mHABs, a micro-high altitude balloon. Those are smaller and they carry less payload, but they’re more transportable, so they’re a little bit more tactical in nature,” Andrew Evans, director of the Army’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force, told Breaking Defense today on the margins of the annual Association of the US Army Conference.
“So, imagine them being man-portable, potentially easier to launch from field conditions, potentially requiring less logistic support,” he said.
A formal requirement paves the way for official acquisition of a new capability. According to an Army Space and Missile Defense Command fact sheet on high-altitude platforms [PDF], the land service is looking for a wide range of capabilities to suit both its own needs and help support multi-domain operations across the joint force. In particular, the service has been exploring stratospheric craft to undertake ISR missions for the past couple of years.
The new effort for microHABs is being led by the Army’s Program Executive Office for Aviation, Evans said, which for the moment is the primary acquisition shop overseeing the service’s pursuit of systems that can operate at the upper edges of the stratosphere — roughly between 60,000 and 100,000 feet, and just below orbital space.
“The only way to get there is with balloons or ultra-light, solar-powered vehicles,” Evans said. “Airplanes and things that have big motors can’t get that high.”
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The Army in July issued a request for information designed to provide the service with market research on small, light electronic intelligence, communication intelligence, and radar payloads for “microHABs,” described as weighing under 15 pounds. Those are relatively “micro” compared to, say, the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) system that involved lumbering blimps.
The Army’s Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors has been playing with microHABs and said two weeks ago that some systems “completed a Continuous Uninterrupted Relay Transmission Aerial Intelligence Network over a large distance as part of the Vanguard 24 exercise” in September.
“Although similar to the larger HABs, the microHABs will provide different capabilities due to its variance in size,” the office posted on LinkedIn. “Project Director Sensors-Aerial Intelligence is currently working hard to mature the microHAB to serve as an Army capability that will be readily available to Soldiers.”
Evans explained that the Army’s plans for high-altitude balloons of different sizes aren’t yet set in stone, with the service also still experimenting with other types of platforms, such as solar-powered aircraft. For example, the Army in 2022 undertook a series of experiments with the spindly Airbus-made Zephyr long endurance drone.
He noted that the first funding for the service’s High Altitude Platform for Deep Sensing program will appear in the fiscal 2025 budget — although Army budget documents do not break out an amount.
“It’s all very nascent. So, we just haven’t fully figured out what this is going to be. What we all universally agree on is that we need to do it. We just don’t know to what scale and exactly what the solution will be,” Evans said. “And whether it’ll be a balloon, a solar glider, what we’re fully sold on is we got to exploit the stratosphere.”
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