Airborne Reconnaissance: The Leveraging Tool for Our Future Strategy.

Information, in the form of intelligence will be a critical element of our national power in future conflicts. One specific form of intelligence collection, airborne reconnaissance, can provide exceptional leverage for our future force structure. A strategy to task analysis, beginning with our national security strategy, produces some very specific missions for our reconnaissance architecture. From these tasks, or missions, flow the requirements for our reconnaissance systems. Our current reconnaissance architecture, however, has some critical requirement shortfalls from both a warfighter and systems perspective. Some of these shortfalls include the limited ability to locate mobile threats, the lack of all-weather, daynight capability, and the inability to monitor large areas for long periods of time. To correct these shortfalls, we must first analyze how reconnaissance can provide total situational awareness for our forces. Fusion of sensors and rapid dissemination of intelligence data are the keys to this awareness. Before we reach total or dominant battlefield awareness, however, major changes must occur in the current airborne reconnaissance architecture. Besides consolidating the myriad of duplicate systems, we must also look at ways to effectively integrate the new endurance unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs into our future reconnaissance structure. MM