SHAPING THE FUTURE OF ISR MILITARY
an upgraded version of the technology
incorporated in the Digital Electronic Locator
System that will be retro tted to German
Luftwaffe and Italian Aeronautica Militare
Tornado ECR (electronic combat and
reconnaissance) aircraft starting in 2018.
The direction of future ISR sensor
technology is shown by a modular, ight-
line con gurable, multispectral sensor pod
currently being developed as part of the
Air Force Research Laboratory’s AgilePod
programme. Risk reduction tests, own with
an AgilePod carried on board a Douglas DC-3
Dakota, concluded in July 2017. Flight tests,
on a Reaper, are planned for later this year.
The modular approach will allow international
users to order pods that can meet their
precise needs.
Unspeci ed datalinked, multispectral
sensor pods have reportedly been ordered
by Qatar for its 36 advanced Boeing F-15QA
Eagles (a modi ed version of Saudi F-15SA
version), announced in June 2017.
Other pods have gone into service on Cessna
208 Caravans modi ed by L3 Technologies.
The aircraft and pods, donated by the US
Government, were delivered to the Philippines
in July and used for counterinsurgency
operations on Mindanao: an example of an ISR
pod with a datalink that enables a light aircraft
to function as a manned UAV.
The future
While advances are emerging from multiple
international sources, the US Air Force has
been the major player in the ISR mission area
in coalition air operations for decades. This
includes the current Operational Inherent
Resolve against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria,
and 2011’s Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya.
Currently, ISR aircraft represent 9.9% of the
US Air Force inventory, two-thirds of them
unmanned – up from 3.2% as recently as 2007- and has some 35,000 personnel assigned
to and conducting ISR missions; more people
than in the entire Royal Air Force.
However, the future follow-on types to
today’s US Air Force ISR aircraft, manned
and unmanned, are uncertain. The service is
starting to consider whether scarce resources
should be invested primarily in follow-on
platforms similar to the aircraft they are
replacing, or whether the Air Force should
develop a network where different parts of the
mission can be split among multiple platforms - perhaps cheap and expendable UAVs,
perhaps on satellites – all linked and fused
together off-board, at a remote location, by
a process making extensive use of arti cial
intelligence enabled by machine learning.
Because of the size of the US Air Force’s
commitment to the ISR mission, the decisions
it makes will inevitably have an effect on
international air arms.
Brigadier General Alex Grynkewich, who
led the Air Force’s Air Superiority 2030
Flight Plan study, speaking at the Mitchell
Institute in Washington DC, on July 10,
said: “For airpower, the biggest gap is in
nd and x capability, rather than the ability
to create kinetic effects on targets. Rather
than replacing current aircraft, manned
or unmanned, with improved versions of
themselves, the most ef cient approach is
to disaggregate capabilities rather than have
them in one place.”
Grynkewich thinks that rather than looking
at mission-speci c platforms, the future
will see General Goldfein’s ones and zeros
delivered from multiple networked platforms:
“We always get criticised about not thinking
about families of systems and families of
capabilities, and that while we may think
about families, we end up building platforms.
That is not how we operate in Syria. What
matters is the network of capabilities.”
The US Air Force is launching a year-long
study comparable to the Air Superiority
Flight Plan to provide guidance on the future
of ISR for the next 30 years; guidance that
will undoubtedly have an effect outside
the service. If the future of ISR is to be
more about the networks rather than the
aircraft – “focus on the highway, not the
truck”, as General Goldfein said – then this
may open up new avenues for international
opportunities in ISR.
Future advances in ISR, and especially
networking, are likely to apply advances
coming from the commercial sector, because
that is where most of the investment is and
because, generally speaking, the commercial
sector has demonstrated, in recent years, its
ability to produce technological advances
quicker and at less cost than defence
research and development. Origins of the new
technologies that can make network-centric
ideas into realities do not have to be in the
United States, but may re ect the globalised
nature of commercial high technology. If
2017 ISR development has been about the
international adoption of F-35s, UAVs and
pods, the future may see technologies
moving in the opposite direction.The Air Force Research Laboratory’s AgilePod performed a series of fl ight
tests aboard a Douglas DC-3 aircraft in preparation for integration on an MQ-9
Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle later this year. Reconfi gurable on the fl ight-line,
the AgilePod enables operators to meet a variety of mission sets with multiple
sensors on a single platform. The 1943-model DC-3 used, N92578, is owned
and operated by Airborne Imaging Inc, based at Midlothian, Texas.
David Dixon/US Air Force