Persistent ISR Would Allow U.S. Military to Function as Strike Force
By MEGAN SCULLY
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Scott Mahaskey, Defense News Media Group
Edward Bair is Army program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors.
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The U.S. military must cast an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance net over the world to keep a watchful eye on the current threat — a smart and patient enemy with access to commercial technology, a senior Army official said Nov. 17.
“We have to put a globe, if you will, a sphere, over the world from an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability standpoint,” said Edward Bair, Army program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors. “We must be able to see, be able to hear, be able to smell, be able to feel what’s going on anytime, anyplace in the world.”
Maintaining persistent ISR around the globe would allow the military to continue to function as a “strategically relevant, continental United States-based projection force,” Bair said during the Defense News Media Group conference, ISR Integration 2003: The Net-Centric Vision, in Arlington, Va.
The “sphere over space” would include joint force and national ISR assets working in tandem to give a complete picture of a specific operation or region.
The assets should be “available to whoever gets on the network,” Bair said. “It shouldn’t matter to you or the commander making decisions where that information came from as long as you know the relevance and timeliness of that information.”
Joint assets would then make up a complex sensor grid populated by human intelligence, ground-based signals intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles, unattended ground sensors, and robotic and unmanned sensors.
One of the military’s biggest ISR challenge lies in taking information gathered by troops on the ground beyond the “local level” to the theater level, Bair said. An expanded network of human intelligence information would allow commanders to look for patterns and trends to “see what might be happening.”
Another primary challenge is converting the information gathered by the various sensors into actionable intelligence for all commanders, not just those from a certain division or corps, Bair said.
“How do we take that information and make it available to a bunch of different commanders making decisions,” Bair said. “That’s our No. 1 shortcoming.”
The Distributed Common Ground System eventually will serve as the filtering tool that will ensure information is available to ground commanders, enabling them to make “decisive decisions at the right place, right time,” he said.
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