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ISR general calls for emphasis on sensors

OMAHA, Neb. — America’s national defense spending emphasis should migrate from weapons to sensor platforms, but “fifth-generation” manned fighter aircraft are still needed, according to the three-star Air Force general who oversees the service’s ISR programs.

Speaking Thursday at the first 55th Wing ISR Symposium in Omaha, Neb., Lt. Gen David Deptula, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said “ISR will lead the fight in the year 2025, and will be the key technology to get us from here to there.”

“We can’t imagine what perils await us in the future,” Deptula told the gathering of intelligence officers, flight crews and defense contractors. “All we’re certain of is that the magnitude and speed of change will be the defining aspects of the future.”

“The enemy is evolving and adapting, and is highly malleable, like a liquid that gravitates toward our weakest points and defies our efforts to hold it in our grasp. Infesting urban areas and hiding among the civilian population, just finding the enemy has become our greatest challenge.”

Meeting this challenge, he said, will require a decisive shift from a Cold War mind-set, which placed ISR in a distant, supporting role: “Then, we had the luxury of an adversary that was monolithic and predictable, and peering over the Iron Curtain was all we had to do.”

Deptula said the Cold War left the U.S. with a “shooter-heavy footprint,” that is no longer applicable to today’s fight. What’s needed now, he said, is an investment that makes ISR platforms and programs the centerpiece of the “global war on terror.”

“Today’s enemy is not massing on the other side of the Fulda Gap,” he said. “One of their primary goals is to deny us a target and negate our firepower advantage, so ISR now makes up the majority of our current operations.”

We still need “fifth-generation” fighters such as the F-22, Deptula said, and need to discard the idea that such aircraft are just air-to-air combat platforms. Their capabilities, in his view, run the gamut of Air Force ISR, electronic warfare and precision strike missions. “It’s not just an F,” he said. “It’s also an F/A, an EA, an AC, RC and a G.”

Systems already in the inventory, such as targeting pods used for “nontraditional ISR” are not being sufficiently exploited, according to Deptula.

“We need to capitalize on the investment we’ve already made,” he said, adding that the top priority should be to eliminate ISR as a “low-density, high-demand” asset. “A forward-leaning strategy should be our goal — ISR has never been more important than it is today.”