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Senate to DoD: Consider manned craft for ISR

The Senate Armed Services Committee criticized the Defense Department’s sluggish attempts to get more airborne full-motion video platforms into Iraq and Afghanistan and said the department could pursue options other than unmanned aerial vehicles.

The committee, in its budget report made public Wednesday, said the department as focused almost exclusively on fielding UAVs such as the Predator, Reaper, Sky Warrior and Shadow but still is unable to meet wartime requirements.

“The Department of Defense appears to have responded belatedly and without appropriate focus to this requirement,” the report says of full-motion video platforms. “The committee believes that manned aircraft could be acquired and modified rapidly from the commercial sector, which would allow DoD to meet operational requirements until the [UAV] programs can catch up to demand.”

The report says that once DoD gets enough UAVs into the field, it could cancel the manned aircraft contracts and transfer the planes to the Iraqi military.

However, the report does not say what type of manned aircraft lawmakers envision as filling the full-motion video gap.

The Pentagon has been scrambling to get more UAVs into theater. The Defense Department’s program of record called on the Air Force to supply 21 Predator orbits over Central Command by 2010, but the service already is supplying 24, and promised to boost that to 27 by September. An orbit entails 24/7 coverage of an area and typically requires four aircraft.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates stood up an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance task force in April to look at the issue.