Business jets are the new spy planes for militaries worldwide
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A pair of GlobalEye airborne early warning and control aircraft. Photo: Courtesy of Saab
What do militaries and the rich and famous have in common? A taste for business jets.
- Aircraft once the domain of world-touring rockstars are now being converted into spy planes of the future, outfitted with sensors that discern electronic signals, troop movements and more.
Why it matters: Just like Ukrainians building drones from parts found online, more buyers are turning to everyday outlets to beat supply-chain woes and red tape.
Driving the news: The U.S. Army in August picked Sierra Nevada Corporation to lead its High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System program, part of an overhaul of the service's aging intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance fleet.
- The 12-year contract is worth almost $94 million up front, but could total nearly $1 billion in the long run.
- The backbone? A commercially available Bombardier Global 6500 jet — not a niche airframe that will take a decade to develop (and might still disappoint).
Bombardier's aircraft serve as the basis for many more military programs. They include:
- Hades predecessors known as Artemis and Ares, which have flown a combined 1,000-plus sorties across Europe and the Indo-Pacific. (Artemis kept tabs on Russian buildup.)
- The Air Force's Battlefield Airborne Communications Node, colloquially known as "WiFi in the sky," which relays critical communications.
- GlobalEye, an airborne early warning and control platform configured by Swedish defense firm Saab.
- Germany's Pegasus, a signals intelligence fleet.
What they're saying: "We're very much trying to present that this is not a one-trick pony," Steve Patrick, Bombardier Defense's vice president, told me. "This is a Swiss Army knife that can have multiple different capabilities as the needs evolve."
- Lines already up and running make all the difference, he added. The company foresees no problems satisfying demand.
- "It's not like we have to go and launch a whole new set of production orders to build the airplanes."
Catch up quick: Motivating the Army's pivot to jet-based spying is a shortfall observed in 2014, as Russia clawed at Crimea.
- "We weren't transforming at the time, but we were certainly watching what was happening in the world," Andrew Evans, the director of the service's ISR task force, told me.
- "The No. 1 gap that we identified across the Department of Defense, and certainly the Army, was this idea of 'deep sensing.'"
That stratagem, backed by service leadership, boils down to seeing farther from farther away. Doing so can fine-tune targeting and help predict when and where reinforcements will arrive.
- "It's a bit of a chess match," Evans said. "We believe we're going to have to fly a long way to get to the fight. We also believe that when we get there, we have to have the right tools in our tool bag."
- Drones, with limited range and sensor capacity, solve only a part of the problem. The Army wants eyes and ears in all environments, what's been described as "from space to mud."
- As part of that effort, the service established in March the All-Domain Sensing Cross-Functional Team.
The bottom line: The speed of technological change and battlefield evolution demands that militaries lean on commercial, nontraditional suppliers.
