The Air Force deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) yesterday dispelled the idea that major ISR programs would languish under tighter budgets given recent hard looks into deferring funding from some big ticket programs while smaller ISR systems seem poised for substantial growth.
“Looking into what’s going to come out of the machine before the sausage has been made is probably premature,” Lt. Gen. David Deptula told attendees at the annual Air Force conference at National Harbor. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate way to characterize the decisions with respect to the ISR capabilities that are coming down the pike.”
The Air Force will look at all the systems that are out there and then make decisions accordingly, he said. Those decisions might not all be based simply on a growing and rapid need for ISR because there are other pieces that go into the equation and factor into those decisions, he added.
Hard choices that balance risk will have to be made and the U.S. has seen the high water mark on defense spending in the near future, Deptula said. ISR however, is an area that people are recognizing demands more attention than in the past, he added.
Still, the Air Force has to get to a point with its acquisition system that it can become much more agile and rapid in terms of delivering ISR capability, he said. “We have to change. Our acquisition system is too long and requires too many parts and pieces…I think we’ve got to figure out, in the 21st Century, a better way of doing business.”
Deptula said there are all kinds of options, and that the Secretary of Defense shares this frustration, which led to the establishment of the OSD ISR task force to help deliver capabilities rapidly.
Additionally, Air Force A2 just finished a one-year effort building an ISR Flight Plan, he said. “What that Flight Plan does is identify all the ISR capabilities resident in the AF today, what’s in the POM and what’s out there beyond the POM in terms of ideas.”
Deptula said the Air Force has lashed up this Flight Plan with each one of the combatant commands and major commands so they can have direct access. “By giving the COCOMS direct access into our database, they can feed us their requirements now, not once every year when the ‘XX Board’ goes out to visit each one of the MAJCOMs and COCOMs to get their inputs…but it’s a continuous flow of information so we can rapidly adapt and modify our plans again.”
This doesn’t lay out a set of “here’s the way you’re going to do it…but what it does allow us to do is lay out options,” he added.
As an example, he said that in the ground moving target indicator (GMTI) world there are other options than traditional fixed wing aircraft for carrying radars. “There’s the whole issue of lighter-than-air aircraft and dirigibles…integrated sensor and skin, so you have an entire aperture that’s on a thousand-foot long airship. That’s an option. Is it a near term option? No. But it’s something that provides us one way to do business that’s a little bit different than before.”
Deptula’s main theme was that potential adversaries are going to have capabilities that the U.S. has never operated against before in terms of ISR, surface-to-surface and especially surface-to-air missiles, missile defense, space and cyber space.
“We’ll be facing an entirely different set of threat capabilities in the future,” he said.
Part of it is the increase in quantity and quality of fighter aircraft, Deptula said. Russia leads world in production of 4th generation fighters and their export to other nations. In the quantity available today, these systems are no match for our most modern fighters, he added. “But as their numbers increase our edge will erode.”
While U.S. strategic goals include developing friendly partnerships with both Russia and China, it behooves everyone to remember the success of the Russian MiG-21, the most widely produced and exported jet fighter in history, operated by more than 50 countries, he said. While 4th generation plus fighter production will never reach the production level of the MiG-21–at more than 12,000 built–Deptula said that the U.S. needs to be prepared to deal with advanced fighter technology in quantities and locations beyond Russia and China.
“5th generation systems that aspire to rival our F-22 are also being pursued by Russia and China. Export of both fighters will likely take place and the prices they’ll charge will likely undercut the F-35,” he said.
“This provides the opportunity for both nations to acquire near-F-22 performance while attempting to proliferate the systems with perhaps near-F-35 like performance,” he added. He said that Russian and Chinese development timelines for these aircraft are not that far off the timelines the U.S. set for the F-22 and F-35, and that they were not that far off into the future in terms of initial operational capability.
“These advanced systems are no small matter because they’re specifically designed to rival our 5th generation systems in every way,” Deptula said. Over 50 nations now flying Russian or Chinese 4th generation fighters and with the emerging potential for export of 5th generation technologies, the United States may be facing a fighter threat capability in qualities and quantities we’ve never experienced before, he added.
Deptula said that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) remain huge, a growth industry very applicable to the current fight and that they are not a fad. UAS yield some very large advantages over inhabited aircraft. The biggest one is persistence, maintaining position for a long period of time. “That persistence can be translated into a large number of things, the ability to stare at a particular location or the ability to rove over a large area…they’ll continue to be with us,” he said.
“But we will not always be operating in permissive airspace,” he added. We need to be thinking about fielding UAS…and give these systems the capability and capacity to operate in denied or contested airspace.”
Another thing with remotely piloted vehicle systems (RPV)–Deptula’s preferred term over UAS, since there is nothing unmanned about such systems–is the current tendency to define requirements in the context of CAPs, or combat air patrols. “It’s not CAPs that are delivering the need that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen on the ground want. It is what they provide,” Deptula added.
Right now what is in high demand is motion video, he said. Today RPV systems are generally only providing one video image per aircraft. “We are in the process of developing wide area airborne surveillance system, or a pod, that will be carried on the MQ-9 that will allow us in its initial variant–which will come out in the spring of 2010– to look at up to 12 different video images transmitted to 12 different users on the ground equipped with remotely operated enhanced video receivers,” Deptula said. The next variant will provide up to 30 different video images, and the one after that will go up to 65-plus and maybe even a 100 different video images over a very wide area, he added. “The point is what to think about is not CAPs, but capabilities, and then measure our requirements in that regard,” he added.
Another challenge to recognize is that some of the terminology that used to describe aircraft in the past has really has lost its meaning and adds to the confusion of what the capabilities are of systems with certain resident technologies, Deptula said.
“I would suggest to you that a long range, high payload vehicle that operates in the atmosphere is better characterized in terms of an ISR strike platform than a bomber, because a bomber conjures up images of past times, when in fact technologies have allowed us to incorporate a variety of different mission capabilities on one vehicle,” he said.