An ISR Paradigm Shift: Shaping Cost Effective Capabilities

By David Deptula

In thinking about the context of all that’s going on in the world today—politically, economically, militarily, and in the information domain—its time to highlight the need for new intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) concepts for the 21st Century.  All the ingredients are in place, but the recipe for a step change to dramatically improve the output of ISR is waiting for completion.  The ingredients consist of three critical elements that if embraced, and actualized will lead to the next significant step in achieving greater ISR capability using fewer resources than if we simply continue to add legacy ISR capabilities, and/or use legacy, manpower-intensive approaches to analysis of collected data.

These three elements are first, greater persistence; second, sensor integration and the automated, machine to machine, sensor-to-sensor cuing enabled as a result of that integration; and third, on-board processing as a solution for dealing with the increased data from those integrated sensors.  Combining these three elements in a complete fashion that optimizes their capabilities on-board a single airborne platform is what will lead to the “next big thing” in airborne ISR.

Persistence

Greater airborne persistence is the first ingredient.  If there is any one thing that has catapulted the utility of remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) to the forefront of interest of governments today it is the persistence that RPAs provide.  In the realm of airborne ISR, persistence provides the ability to observe an area, people, or activity of interest for extended periods of time.  Those extended periods of time provide an opportunity to detect, identify and characterize change in the structure, status and behavior of targets of interest.  The capability for conducting persistent ISR against time-sensitive or sporadic activity significantly increases the likelihood that the users of that information will obtain their objectives.

Today airborne systems provide persistence that varies from hours to days, with some space-based systems in geostationary orbits providing continuous over-watch of areas of the earth.  However, a critical element affecting the value of persistence is the type of sensors that can be carried on the airborne systems providing the persistence.  Those geostationary satellites at 22, 236 miles above the earth don’t provide the kind of resolution that a high definition video camera operating at a range of tens of miles or less can.  This is an area where fixed-wing RPAs have achieved a sweet-spot over the last decade in terms of ISR payload and duration.  However, they also have some significant drawbacks—they are relatively small in terms of payload capacity, duration, range, operating requirements, and logistics.

The rate of detectable change generated by an object being observed will drive update rates at which the ISR process will be required to operate.  Targets such as individuals, ships, or other vehicles, change location rapidly, driving the need for a high degree of persistence.  Furthermore, ISR systems must increasingly discern whether change is due to random natural occurrences or if a target is using denial and deception, or hides in complex environments, essentially lowering the strength of his detectable signatures relative to his environment.  This amplifies the need for persistence in order to detect more subtle changes.

The nature of the users’ objective will also affect the requirement for persistence.  If the objective is to determine the general location of a ship, then a lower update rate may be acceptable.  On the other hand, if the objective is to closely monitor a specific moving ship, then there will be a premium for persistence to ensure up-to-date information.

When speed is not a priority, lighter-than-air-aircraft, or airships are the most cost-effective form of increasing persistence today.  Direct operating and support costs are historically fractions of equivalent fixed-wing and rotary-wing capability.  This is due to less fuel consumption, smaller equivalent power plants, and less complexity.  Lighter-than-air-aircraft provide much greater capability trade-space between altitude; persistence; and payload, and are accordingly more flexibility than fixed-wing aircraft in permissive airspace.  They provide unique capabilities such as much greater stability and lower vibration as a better host for sensors; and they are often large enough to allow for one-platform triangulation.  This is particularly advantageous for achieving improved signals intelligence (SIGINT) accuracies.

Airships are less sensitive to small changes in drag, and properly configured allow for very easy integration of new payloads, enabling plug-and-play capability, and a degree of modularity simply not achievable in other aircraft.  By no means are they “be all” or “end all” solutions to hosting airborne ISR, but many of the historical weaknesses of lighter-than-air-aircraft are addressed by modern systems.

Integration of sensors

The second element of next big thing in ISR is sensor integration.  The collective history of conflict throughout the last century—the world wars, the Cold War, and the conflicts of the last quarter of the 20th century—exemplified industrial-age warfare, and today’s approach to ISR springs from this legacy.  In the industrial-age model, intelligence was a massive, personnel-intensive operation aimed at supporting national and military decision-making.  What we wanted was information, and we rapidly pursued the technologies that enabled us to get it.

Those set of capabilities—imagery, communications, and signals intelligence from air, sea, land, and space, human intelligence, and every other variant, all spawned separate organizations and separate processes for tasking, collection, handling, analysis, and dissemination.  Those organizations and processes became cylinders of excellence at what they did individually, or said another way—they became stovepipes.  Accordingly, in true factory-like, assembly-line form, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance were each individually organized around very specialized inputs and outputs: take a photograph, process the film, interpret the information, create a picture, write a report, deliver it to the relevant decision maker.  The intelligence cycle was sequential, so it comes as no surprise that ISR was similarly divided.

Look at how some of the major airborne ISR platforms were built along those lines: RC-135s, RC-12s, and EP-3s for SIGINT; U-2s, RF-4s, SR-71s, Constant Hawk for imagery intelligence (IMINT); JSTARS for ground moving target indicator (GMTI); E-3s for airborne moving target indicator (AMTI), and there are many others that were designed primarily as single intelligence (INT) focused aircraft.  Over the past decade or so we have seen a variety of different sensor types put on one aircraft.  Examples include variants of the U-2, Global Hawk, MC-12 Liberty, MQ-1 Predators, and MQ-9 Reapers with an assortment of electro-optic, infrared, radar imagery, electronic intelligence (ELINT), and SIGINT sensors on-board the same aircraft.  However, the processing, exploitation, and dissemination of the data collected from these different sensors is generally still accomplished in a stove-piped fashion to ground stations, analysts, and organizations associated specifically for a particular ISR type.

For the vast majority of today’s ISR systems, integration, change-out and reconfiguration of sensors on airborne platforms are an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.  This is because here-to-fore sensors have been seen as a system unto themselves, and not as a component or subsystem with an increasingly complex collection and reporting system.  The result has been to customize platforms to fit the particular mechanical, power, and data interfaces instead of having the sensor meet interface requirements of an airborne collection system.  A contributing factor to this costly legacy is that a substantial number of sensor providers embrace “one-off” customization as an important part of their ISR business model.  This is why most sensor providers continue to feature proprietary technology in their product line.  By developing proprietary data formats, feeds and interfaces, vendors have “forced” aircraft to adapt or customize to host their particular sensor.  This has the effect of driving initial procurement and recurring costs up while further entrenching sensor-oriented rather than effects-oriented capability development.

To address this issue, some have proposed a standard interface specification for ISR sensors and adherence to that standard as a prerequisite to sensor integration. The problem with this approach is the time it takes first; for achieving agreement on the standard, and second; promulgation and compliance.  It can take years to implement a standard due to the time it takes to reach consensus within the community, and resistance by sensor vendors who view standardization as adverse to their business.

An alternative that promises the benefits of standardization while avoiding the challenges to its acceptance is called “Service Oriented Horizontal Information Exchange” (SOHIX).  This is a methodology for enabling sensor integration by mitigating the impact of unique and proprietary interfaces.  It can be quickly implemented because it is not a standard per se, but rather a method for facilitating the transfer of interface information via standard technologies, namely “Extensible Markup Language” (XML).  For those that use computers but don’t design them, XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.  In the same way XML is used to define and present web pages on the Internet, it can be used to identify how sensors communicate with the collection system to include the extraction and passing of command and control and collected ISR data.  In this way, it reduces cost and time-to-implement because customization is mitigated at the data level thereby obviating the need for highly specialized, “one-off,” hard integration.

SOHIX does not require the sensor vendor to change configuration elements such as software, firmware, signal output schemes, or communications protocol.  Consequently it protects the vendor’s intellectual propriety and allows for technological “big leaps” because it’s not architecturally restrictive.  SOHIX promotes the concept of multi-use platforms and mission-tailorable sensor suites.  Meaning, one platform can support several ISR missions because it can quickly and efficiently change-out sensors in hours instead of the weeks and months associated with current aircraft hardware-oriented integration.  Also, mission planners are able to configure sensor suites that are tailored to meet the specific collection requirements of a mission as apposed to using a suboptimal set of sensors hard-wired to a particular platform.  Plus, it can provide the means to achieve automated cueing by enabling rapid machine-to-machine interactions for example between SIGINT sensors and high definition electro-optical/infra-red sensors that can rapidly solve high priority operational and intelligence objectives.

Data management at the point of origin.

The third part of this trinity is data management at the point of origin—or on-board processing.  To grasp the degree of the ISR revolution we are facing, from the beginning of time until 2003, there were five Exabytes of information created.  We now create five Exabytes of data every two days, and that rate is accelerating.  This large data problem is significant and we are not going to solve it by continuing to do data management the way we have been doing it in the past.

Given a SOHIX architecture on a high-payload platform that can stay airborne days at a time, how are we going to meet the challenge of processing all the data that will result, and getting it to users in real-time?  As sensors’ field of view and video capture rate increases, the amount of data that must be stored onboard the platform has grown dramatically.  The next family of sensors deployed will exceed the Giga-pixal threshold and operate at multi-Giga-Hertz rates.  This will result in the data capture rate on the platform exceeding the capacity of current radio frequency data-links.  This requires that high-speed processing, and massive storage become part of the platform’s payload to ingest, process, and store the imagery onboard.  Simply put, onboard ISR computing solutions are possible today with high performance computing capabilities, supercomputer-like input/output, and big data storage capacity in a small, light-weight, low-power package that can operate in an austere computing environment, and, with airship-enabled payloads, size, weight, and power required to deliver the required computing capacity is not a problem like it is on fixed-wing aircraft.

Today we are expending vast sums of money to acquire more motion video and single dimension intelligence using current systems and concepts when newer technologies and innovative techniques are available.  The good news is that the ISR community has friends in industry like Facebook, Amazon and YouTube that are solving similar problems in their own domain that we can learn from, and leverage to, as we embark on this future.

The “next big thing” is a 21st century ISR system that provides vastly more ISR per dollar than with currently deployed manned and/or remotely piloted ISR aircraft.  With two modern airships, the capability can provide 24/7/365 persistence at not less than five days between aircraft sorties.  The capability could simultaneously host the following sensor payloads: wide-area electro-optical (EO); wide-area infrared (IR); long-range EO/IR; motion video providing individual motion images to tens of multiple users simultaneously; multi-mode radar with GMTI performance; and SIGINT that can provide precision geo-location at ranges over 300 kilometers.  All of this with an open-architecture modular payload infrastructure that supports field expedient installation, exchange, or sharing of sensor payloads.

With respect to communications, the capability can provide air-to-air and air-to-ground bandwidth to transmit loss-less compressed sensor data to a local or remotely-located multi-mission ground station while supporting omni-directional transmission of image chips to individual hand-held smart devices.  Data processing can be accomplished on-board with sufficient storage to correlate and fuse data from all desired sensor payloads.  This capability can include sufficient on-platform processing to minimize air-to-air and air-to-ground data communications requirements, maximize sensor-to-sensor cueing, and reduce sensor-to-user latency to seconds.  In other words, dramatically more and better ISR capability at a fraction of the cost, and without anywhere near the number of additional personnel required by conventional remotely piloted aircraft.

Given the economic pressures our Nation is facing an innovative ISR approach can actually play a role in the solution to austere defense budgets ahead while at the same time actually increasing intelligence production.  The bottom line is that today, we have it within our capability to merge platforms of great persistence—airships—with open architecture design that allows multi-INT payload integration enabling sensor-to-sensor cueing using increased SIGINT accuracy due to large antenna arrays; with on-board processing that reduces bandwidth requirements for wide-area sensors.  Along with a modular payload approach that allows for rapid sensor and data link change-out, it is a game changing ISR capability that in terms of ISR payload—endurance, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the ISR RPAs, segregated ISR-specific aircraft, and unchangeable ISR payloads carried by satellites that are in use today.

In the face of disruptive innovation, we can maintain the status quo, or we can embrace and exploit change.  I suggest that the latter is preferred.  The Department of Defense needs to learn better how to rapidly adapt new technology to the innovative concepts of operation that technology enables and deliver the next big thing sooner rather than later.

Lt Gen Deptula (Ret) was the first USAF Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and is now CEO of Mav6, LLC.  This report is compiled from a presentation he made to the Mid-East ISR Conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE on Feb 5th, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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