NASHVILLE — The Army plans to award vendors contracts in the next few months to experiment with “ultra long-range” launched effects that will ultimately outfit spy planes like the future High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), an Army senior official told Breaking Defense today.
Andrew Evans, director for the new Strategy & Transformation Office inside the G-2, said the initial set of awards are likely to be short-term experimentation contracts ahead of a planned demonstration later this year. Longer-term contracts for the effects, meant to fly up to 1,000 km (620 miles), are expected to follow next year, likely to go to more than one vendor.
“Everything we do currently in the future has to be teams-of-teams, and it has to be, I’ll call it, a hyper-competitive environment. So here’s where we lose as a Department of War, when we lock in with somebody and we’re beholden to that one, somebody for the rest of our future,” Evans said. “We’re going to force people to continuously compete in the space, which includes teams, lots of teams, lots of people.”
The teams-of-teams approach is something the Army has adapted in the last several months with programs such as with the new M1E3 tank, the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, Next Generation Command and Control and more. Under such an approach, there’s not one lead company for an initiative, but multiple vendors working together, and it allows for both large prime vendors and smaller non-traditional vendors to become involved, Evans said. He said that having multiple vendors on the contract allows for not only innovation but also accelerated timelines.
“Our secretary and our Army leaders are interested in pathways to the small companies, in addition to the bigs that can scale better, they’re interested in those pathways, and we want to be part of that, right?” he said.
For the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions like those that HADES will undertake, “that’s where we’re finding some breakthrough technologies [from] small companies that literally have to have the breakthrough or they can’t pay their staff the salary. That’s the type of people you want to partner with, because they’re passionate to deliver the right results,” Evans said.
The mandate for a launched effect that can go 1,000 km, he said, is the kind of thing that drives innovation and creative solutions.
“If you give industry a standard that seems a little bit out of reach, you’d be surprised at how they mobilize around it,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the business of defining somebody’s objective criteria, because they will build to the objective. That’s it. That’s all they’ll do. They might be able to say, well, ‘I could go like, three times further, but you only asked to go this far.’”
He added that they don’t know exactly how far the launched effect can go, but it is “further than we thought,” and they may be able to do it for a lower cost as well.
“If you don’t constrain a company, and you just tell them, I want this as cheap as possible, give me your best possible product, typically they’ll respond in meaningful ways,” Evans added.
After the short-term experimental contracts are awarded, the Army will start testing the launched effects from the ground and eventually work up to air-launched effects when the tech is advanced enough, Evans said. The goal is to start launching those effects from the sky within a year.
“We cannot get this wrong. The nation’s security depends on our ability to get this right long term,” he said.
