Sheila Vemmer / Defense News Media Group Clyde Walker is director of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile & Space Intelligence Center.

A senior intelligence official said today the U.S. military and intelligence communities must learn to work together if they ever want to be successful at tracking and killing mobile enemy missile threats.

Despite years of coordination, the United States was no better at locating and destroying time-sensitive, mobile missile targets during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 than it was during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, said Clyde Walker, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile & Space Intelligence Center.

Walker’s agency is putting together a consortium of U.S. organizations to address this problem, he told government and defense industry representatives April 27 at the 2006 Cruise Missile & IED Defense Conference: Joint Engagement of Time-Critical Air & Ground Targets, sponsored by the Defense News Media Group, in Arlington, Va.

One challenge of taking on such an endeavor is that “it takes a large number of moving parts to solve this problem,” Walker said.

In addition to gathering intelligence, locating the target and launching an attack, there must be improvement on target identification and confirmation that the target has been destroyed, he said.

“There are a lot of factors involved beyond technology to address this problem,” Walker said.

One goal of the consortium of to create a “community of interest” that stays dedicated to this mission on a continual basis, rather than repeating past efforts, which mostly have consisted of coming together at conferences every three years, Walker said.

One new development is the planned launch of an Internet portal on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network this fall to help multiple agencies share databases.

His agency is also relying on simulation to help pilots better understand what targets will look like from the air, Walker said.

“We find that if we can brief people on the ground before they fly about what things look like on the ground — about what a SCUD site would look like or an SA6 site would look like — they are much more likely to locate the target,” Walker said.

Beyond technology, though, the key to this problem is better coordination between agencies and clear, committed leadership, he said.

“It’s a pretty simple message,” Walker said. “We have come a long way, but we are not there yet. We need to do it in a more structured way than we have done in the past.”

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