By Marina Malenic
The Air Force will dedicate a larger portion of its budget to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) than ever before as all the military services prepare to “rebalance” their capabilities for irregular warfare, officials have said.
Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said earlier this week that his service is in the midst of building a robust, long-term ISR capability.
“This commitment to ISR is something that I see as a long-term commitment,” Schwartz said Feb. 17 at a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
One senior service official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that commitment will be reflected in the Air Force’s forthcoming Fiscal Year 2010 budget request.
“There is a very healthy allocation of funding for ISR,” the official told Defense Daily yesterday. “It’s fair to say this will be significantly more than in years past.”
Citing one example of the effort, Schwartz noted that the service will expand its MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial system combat air patrols (CAPs) from 32 to 50 over the next two years.
“That represents a major commitment on the part of the Air Force that I think is symptomatic of the kind of shift which is needed and which can be accommodated,” he said. “What we want to do is achieve a reasonable balance here.”
The shift he spoke of has been discussed publicly in recent months by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his civilian deputies. They have repeatedly made the case for a new “balance” between conventional and irregular warfare systems in all the military services.
“Clearly there is a need for us to have a more robust capability in the irregular warfare area than we had before,” Schwartz acknowledged.
But building up irregular capabilities comes with opportunity costs at a time of finite and shrinking budgets. Several important acquisition challenges for conventional Air Force capabilities loom, including a replacement for the aging aerial refueling tanker fleet and calculating how many F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets the country can afford.
Earlier this week, Schwartz said the service has officially lowered its expectations for F-22 purchases. Officials had previously been wedded to expanding the fleet of Lockheed Martin [LMT]-built stealth jets to 381 airplanes (Defense Daily, Feb. 18).
“There are some things we know are in high demand, and we’re going to find a way to provide that capability,” Schwartz said. “ISR is a case in point, and if that means we need to make some adjustment to our existing force mix, we will do that in a measured, dispassionate, analytically driven way.”
At the same time, the general said the Pentagon’s civilian leadership is not directing the services to neglect their conventional capabilities.
Gates “certainly is not suggesting doing away with, or doing major surgery on capabilities in any of the services that deal with nation-state actors or major combat operations,” Schwartz said. “What he’s talking about is tailoring those in ways that either improve their versatility or, in those cases where you have to have dedicated capacity for irregular warfare, to do that where that’s required.
“The demands of the joint force at the moment…require exquisite intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability in order for the joint team to be successful,” he added.
Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. Dash Jameison, a top Air Force ISR official, said the service’s goal is to bring a “transparent and immediate picture” to both “the lowest do-er to the highest decision-maker” with its expanded ISR capability.
“Unlike in the past, when we fielded platforms and thought solely of hardware…the future in air, space and cyberspace…is about how we partner and link all these capabilities,” she said during a Feb. 17 Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association event in Washington.