The Air Force is suffering a disconnect in full motion video (FMV) intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements because it doesn’t have a good way to the determine the value of additional combat air patrols (CAP), according to a key general.
Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for ISR (A2) Lt. Gen. Robert Otto said Monday the service back in 2006, at the height of two wars, was meeting 54 percent of combatant commanders’ requirements for FMV with 11 CAPs. CAPs are often performed by unmanned aerial systems (UAS) like the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk or by MQ-12 turboprop aircraft.
But Otto said the Air Force today is meeting only 21 percent of combatant commanders’ requirements with 72 CAPs, even though the United States is down to one war instead of two and has significantly decreased the amount of warfighters in that region of Afghanistan.
“How do you measure the effectiveness of an additional CAP,” Otto told an audience during an Air Force Association (AFA) Mitchell Hour presentation in Arlington, Va. “I don’t think we have very good measures right now, which makes it very difficult to make these decisions.”
Otto said the Air Force is “overinvested” in permissive assets, or those that are used in “permissive” environments of unchallenged airspace like that found in Afghanistan. With the Pentagon’s pivot to the Pacific and its challenging airspace environments, Otto said the service needs to “ship some of the expenditures” so it can operate in difficult contested environments. A quandary with CAPs, Otto said, is the Air Force will always perform more than the what’s necessary, which will, in turn, drive demand.
“The more you put out, the higher demand goes,” Otto said.
The Air Force is working on a technology, Otto said, that could help improve the efficiency of FMV data transfer. Called “persistecs,” it can digitally compress irrelevant data such as non-moving background images, jitter or movement of the camera or atmospheric aberrations that increase the amount of data flow the Air Force deals with. Otto called persistecs the type of innovation the Air Force is creating to deal with “big data.”
“If you do that, you can take something like standard video compression and compress it on the order of maybe 30 times, or with ground-based systems, maybe 1,000 times,” Otto said.