Air Force ISR operations: hunting versus gathering.(Senior Leader Perspective)(intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance)(United States. Army. Air Forces)

An often-repeated axiom attributed to General of the Army Omar Bradley opines that "amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics." This well-worn adage not only contains an obvious element of wisdom and timelessness but also expresses a fundamental shift in the context of today's emerging era of military operations. Specifically, amateurs do continue to talk about strategy, but professionals increasingly talk about information--how to get it, use it, and keep getting it, given the speed, complexity, and character of the challenges faced by our forces abroad and our domestic security organizations at home. This elevation of information in war has closed the gap that existed in the past between those who created intelligence and those who operated with that intelligence. (1) Still, there remains much distance to cover in creating a synchronized and precise relationship between the view of information as the creation of a product and as a seamless element of operations. This article argues that the Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) enterprise--indeed, the US military itself--must undergo a cultural transformation and trade the farmer's view of ISR (methodically producing information) for the hunter's view (anticipating, finding, and fixing an elusive and often dangerous prey) in order to meet the challenges of the coming decades and eliminate the segregation that has historically existed between ISR and operations.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Air Force ISR team does a superb job of collecting, analyzing, and reporting. It conducts both national and theater ISR missions, manages immensely complex collection decks, and operates air and space sensors globally with near-real-time, world-class analysis across service, coalition, joint, and national centers that inform a host of regional and national priorities. (2) This approach, though highly efficient, bears more resemblance to a "batch process" such as farming--preparing the fields, gathering the harvest, and periodically delivering it to market--than to hunting elusive game animals. Even with our theater ISR air assets, we are collecting and providing information to others rather than anticipating and hunting the information we will need next. Air Force ISR today is operations, but in applying it to the emerging context of today's tasks, we have a strategic imperative to do better. We need only review our track record in dealing with Iraqi Scuds, Bosnian SA-3 surface-to-air missiles, high-value individuals in …