Airborne Intelligence Surveillance And Reconnaissance

The changes in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) capabilities over the past two decades have led to ever-increasing demand from warfighters. Commanders, planners, and operators across the U.S. Air Force (USAF) ISR enterprise face difficult decisions about how to best meet ISR needs at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Yet USAF currently lacks a consistent, quantitative, empirically grounded method of assessing the value that the service's airborne ISR provides-which is essential to good resourcing decisions. This report presents an approach to ISR assessments that seeks to articulate the costs and benefits of USAF airborne ISR in specific operational contexts. Though aspects of this may be applicable across different USAF ISR organizations, this work focused primarily on the Distributed Common Ground System and the operational theaters it does or could support. The assessment methodology is designed to be flexible enough to support ISR resourcing decisions at different echelons, yet consistent enough to foster feedback, standardize data collections, and make use of empirical analysis methodologies.