WASHINGTON — Two large defense contractors are teaming as much as work on an intelligence-collecting jet the U.S. Army considers vital to its future long-range spying and targeting abilities.
L3Harris Technologies and Leidos on July 25 said they might collaborate on a proposal for the Army Theater Level High Altitude Expeditionary Next Airborne-Signals Intelligence enterprise, or ATHENA-S.
The Army is within the midst of an aerial reconnaissance overhaul, moving away from Cold War-era aircraft and toward a future featuring advanced sensors, flights at higher altitudes and insights gathered from deeper distances. The ATHENA — of which there are the variants “S” and “R” — is an element of the push.
“The Leidos-L3Harris team focuses each of our firms’ extensive and diverse talents to realize mission success with ATHENA-S,” Tim Freeman, a Leidos senior vp and airborne solutions operations manager, said in a press release. “With our combined integration, investment, engineering and design expertise, we look ahead to producing a highly-configurable platform with more ISR capabilities to create an operational picture of the battlefield.”
The businesses said they might together fit two Bombardier Global 6500 jets with radar, electronic and communications intelligence equipment tailored to ATHENA-S specifications. The aircraft are intended to support Army missions inside European Command’s area of responsibility, which incorporates Ukraine and Russia.
L3Harris and Leidos are already involved with other Army intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance programs, namely the Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System, or ARES; and an airborne reconnaissance intelligence system dubbed ARTEMIS.
The previous has been dispatched to the Pacific, a priority region for the Biden administration. It has logged greater than 130 flight hours. The latter has been sent to Europe, where it’s recorded greater than 2,000 hours of operation.
The Army is beefing up its information-collection arsenal because the Pentagon prepares for a possible conflict with Russia and China. Fights with either power would cover an enormous distance and require mass amounts of troops, a pivot away from the more surgical counterinsurgency campaigns of the past. The conditions are driving a requirement for what’s referred to as deep sensing: the capability to search out, monitor, goal and kill from greater distances and with finer precision.
“In simplistic terms it’s we, as a rustic, who need to grasp the environment that we’re going to operate in as robustly as possible from as distant as possible,” Mark Kitz told C4ISRNET in June, when he was the service’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors. Kitz now leads Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical.
“That’s critical,” he added, “not putting any of our systems or soldiers in danger, and doing it in a way that we will understand the operating space at very long distances, especially whenever you take a look at Indo-Pacific Command, especially whenever you take a look at the goal environment in Ukraine.”
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a day by day newspaper in South Carolina. Colin can be an award-winning photographer.