Defining Conditions for the Use of Persistent Surveillance

Currently, there exists no full definition of persistent surveillance in joint doctrine that allows a clear distinction between persistent and non-persistent collection requirements for collection managers to properly resource surveillance assets. Joint Forces CommandJ9 defines persistent surveillance as an operationally focused surveillance approach that uses a full range of strategic, operational and tactical collection methods to dwell on and revisit a target. Persistent surveillance contributes to the detection and recognition of meaningful changes in an adversarys activities that support planning and executing preemptive actions to prevent likely adversary courses of action. The issue with this definition, and all others, is the lack of precision in defining what circumstances warrant the use of persistent surveillance. In addition, currently there are no quantifying metrics to determine the effectiveness of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance ISR collection for the use of the persistent surveillance concept. Without a clear and distinct definition, and metrics, the concept of allocating assets for collection managers to perform persistent surveillance becomes ambiguous. This thesis provides a historical case study of the use of persistent surveillance in the U.S. Central Command area of operations from 2003-2007. This time period was chosen because it illustrates the evolution of the concept from the first years of Operation Iraqi Freedom to the period of 2006-2007, after the concept had been declared a requirement for defeating terrorist networks in the 2006 QDR. The thesis discusses examples of persistent surveillance taken from missions executed by CENTCOM during this period the rescue of POW private Jessica Lynch, the capture of Saddam Hussein, operations in Fallujah in 2004, the capture of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, Joint counter-IED operations, and Army counter-IED operations.