AFA had another successful Air Force Breakfast this morning,
with Lt. General Larry
D. James, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, as the guest speaker.
In his position, Gen. James is
responsible to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force for policy
formulation, planning, evaluation, oversight, and leadership of Air Force
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. He leads more than
20,000 ISR officers, enlisted and civilians across the Air Force ISR
Enterprise.
At today’s event, Gen James highlighted
the current role of the Air Force ISR enterprise, the capacity and
capabilities they have in the globally integrated ISR system, the progress it continues to make and the challenges of the way
ahead.
He described the global ISR enterprise as possibly “the most
capable intelligence apparatus that the department has” with over 20,000 people
strong across the globe, setting up an “impressive worldwide capability.” This
says a lot of the department that flies 1500 hours worth of
ISR across the globe each day, providing direct support not only for the Air
Force, but all other services and other government agencies.
“It’s
a national system that supports national needs … across the globe,” he added.
But
he went on to discuss some of the tremendous success of ISR aircraft, such as
the MC-12 and the RC-135, as the Air Force has been fully submerged in pushing
ISR capacity to the war fight.
The
latter part of his speech highlighted the challenges the department has been
tasked to uncover. The challenges came out of the Secretary of the Air Force’s ISR
Review requested of the department last spring.
He
painted a picture of the future ISR enterprise, describing it as one that will
be a network-centric, sensor-agnostic environment that focuses on how to pull
data to answer the problem you have been given. It would also be an all-domain effort,
spanning over space, airborne and cyber domains.
Among
the challenges that they face include: transporting the data while keeping it
secure; developing the ISR personnel; identifying the tool sets needed to handle
the “big data problem” (the massive quantity of data); and many more.