[National Interest] The U.S. Army Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System aircraft, ARES, just made its first flight. The Army hopes that the multi-engine jet will offer a more capable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability compared to older Army Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconisance (ISR) aircraft.The aircraft in the graphic is not the ARES Platform but rather a Contracted Shorts-360 introduced at Balad and FOB Spiecher (Al Sahra Air Base VIC Tikrit, Iraq) in 2009 as an Army Research Lab (ARL) proof of concept. Constant Hawk conducted Persistence Surveillance platform flying counter-IED missions over Baghdad, Iraq. The Constant Hawk project was extended with AFG missioning flying out of Kandahar utilizing C-12 platforms. The old 360's went home to Milwaukee following the end of the conflict in Iraq.
The ARES platform is based on the Bombardier 6000/6500 airplanes, business jets originally designed for luxury flight, but that offer the right mix of range and payload capacity to serve in a specialized intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) role for the United States Army.
The ARES airplane is serving as a technology demonstrator for the Army’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) program, which the Army hopes can mesh "capabilities from the Army’s existing ISR fleet with capacity to add payloads, sensors and increase standoff ranges."
And in an ISR role, the aircraft would succeed. Boasting brand-new Rolls-Royce engines and a nearly 7,600-mile range, the jet can cruise at over 40,000 feet and has a flight endurance of over fourteen hours in the ARES configuration. "Flight operations above 40,000 feet enhance aircraft survivability and line-of-sight," according to a recent statement, and helped make "ARES and HADES key Sensor to Shooter (S2S) network enablers, the Army’s top modernization priority."