What is still needed to complete that equation?

Persistence on an area of interest and the ability to rapidly translate what is being observed in real time, then get it to the user who can do the most about it. Which takes us back to the importance of UAVs, which can watch an area and pinpoint elements of interest.

There are a bunch of issues – capacity, persistence, integration – because you need to use a lot of sensor modalities to deal with weather and day/night and you have to observe in a variety of spectra because the enemy is trying to deny you access. Then you have to offboard all that data, so the third challenge is processing.

I would say the next big thing in ISR is a combination of three elements: greater persistence, sensor integration, and onboard processing to deal with the increased data that results from automated machine-to-machine, sensor-to-sensor cueing.

In terms of extended persistence, the government is looking at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) five-year solar-powered UAV, airships, and satellites. How do these compare?

There are a lot of problems with satellites. Those low enough to provide the resolutions you may want can only give you a given view for a few minutes; higher altitude and the resolution drops significantly.

This is where matching modern technology with proven concepts and vehicles, such as airships, yield a capability that, when put together, can provide a dramatic increase in persistence and other capabilities at a fraction of the cost. You can put a variety of sensors on an airship and, if it is big enough, also carry a super computer and do sensor-to-sensor cueing, process the data on board, and download only what the users need. And you can keep that system airborne for days at a time, compared to hours for our current remotely piloted aircraft.

How do the needs and equipment/systems developed to meet ISR differ among the Department of Defense (DoD) services?

The services do not fight – they organize, train, and equip to execute operations and provide forces to dominate their particular domains. And you have a joint task force commander who can pick and choose from each service to organize to meet the needs of a particular contingency at the time. But each service must craft its systems to deal with what’s unique in its domain.

In addition, with increasing resource constraints, we need to avoid duplication of efforts among the services. This is a very emotional subject, which gets to the issue of control. We would be wise to embrace the concept of interdependency, which would reinforce the tenets of jointness.

And that’s where you really achieve effectiveness as well as efficiency. Any service that tries to achieve self-sufficiency by building everything they need is the antithesis of jointness.

How about non-DoD users – the Department of Homeland Security, intelligence agencies, commercial interests, etc.?

ISR is not just limited to DoD; frankly, you will see greater and greater commercial use of these assets to increase the benefits to the civilian populace. Imagine if you put an airship over every major metropolitan area with a wide-area airborne sensing pod. You could apply that to traffic control, law enforcement, disaster response – an enormous amount of civil applications for ISR resources.

Given the rise of cyber attacks and capabilities, what other security requirements are now being addressed, whether the threat is an official nation-state apparatus or some bored 12-year-old in Bosnia?

They are extremely important and we’re at the nascent stage of figuring out the optimal way to deal with these kinds of challenges. The real question is how to defend the critical infrastructure of our nation that is not associated with DoD. Forests of paper and lots of electrons have been expended on this subject, but we need to increase the focus and begin to resolve the policy issues, because this is an area of enormous importance given our ever-increasing dependence on operating in the cyber domain.