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Current wars distract from future ISR programs

“ISR is the top focus of the Air Force today,” Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the service’s top intelligence officer, told me March 28. “We see it as an integral part of operations.”

Deptula had just gotten back from a ceremony to accept delivery of the first MC-12W, the Air Force’s newest intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. The Air Force plans to acquire 37 MC-12Ws under the Project Liberty program. Deptula said the planes, versions of the twin-engined Beech King Air, will feed full-motion video and signals intelligence data to everybody in a battle in near-real time.

It’s a good thing to increase our tactical capability to monitor the bad guys and relay the results our people on the ground. Moreover, Project Liberty appears to be a sensible and economic program that will serve troops and taxpayers well.

But are we too focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, and distracted from the threat of a conventional “peer” war?

Deptula said we haven’t neglected ISR platforms that monitor worldwide, national intelligence targets. The Air Force has 17 RC-135V/W Rivet Joint aircraft that prowl hostile coasts vacuuming up communications and electronic intelligence.

But British aviation writer Jon Lake told me March 23 that RC-135V/Ws normally used to monitor Russia, China and North Korea have been spending too much time loitering over Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ emphasis on counterinsurgency means strategic reconnaissance planes are too often performing narrow, tactical duties.

The new MC-12Ws may free up Rivet Joints to spend more time gathering the goods on nation-state adversaries. Deptula also said he’s “very excited” about the RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, and mentioned the 450-foot blimp the Air Force is building with the Pentagon’s research agency that could stay aloft, gathering intelligence, for 10 years.

But that blimp probably won’t survive budget realities. Global Hawk is maturing too slowly, and there are too few Rivet Joints.

And there’s an even bigger problem as we try to improve ISR for worldwide, nation-state conflicts: the F-22 Raptor.

We’ve delivered 134 of a planned 187 Raptors without a datalink system on board, making them useless as ISR platforms. An F-22 pilot can communicate with outsiders only via voice radio and cannot relay images or data.

Deptula said that “datalinks ... are part of the development process.” But the first F-22 that reached a squadron years ago should have had a datalink. Nearly all Air Force warplanes have one.

Project Liberty is a good-news story. So is emphasis on, and rapid progress in, ISR. But if troops and taxpayers are to be well-served, we must do better — and we must cast our vision beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.