The U.S. Air Force wants its airborne sensors to do some preliminary analysis work automatically before transmitting that information back to intelligence analysts, a service official said.
Currently, the service’s analysts who monitor intelligence feeds from unmanned aircraft watch mundane video footage for hours on end without ever seeing anything of value, a waste of both time and resources. But if the sensors could do some of the analysis before transmitting that data to the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground Stations (DCGS), that would save the service time and manpower resources, Brig. Gen. Scott Bethel, deputy commander of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, said at a conference hosted by Marcus Evans on June 27.
“What I would prefer is that by the time it gets to the analyst’s space, that he has something purposeful to look at,” he said. “In essence, what I want is Phase I analysis to be done onboard.” That would eliminate the need for forward-deployed processing, exploitation and dissemination, Bethel said. Only the important information would be sent back for humans to look at, but that extraneous data would be available if the computer made a mistake. That would enable the service to get more utility out of its five DCGSs, he said.
Having that information at a more centralized location allows for better collaboration between analysts and makes the process much more efficient, Bethel said. “I want to push the brain power further up the food chain,” he said. It would also make the system more responsive to a greater range of threats across the spectrum rather than being focused on counter insurgency, Bethel said.
For Phase II and Phase III analysis, information could be passed back to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). “We’re starting to look at them to be this bridge between the DCGS and the larger Phase II and III architecture,” Bethel said. The centre would use some of the same tools as the DCGS, but would be directly linked to NASIC’s small army of PhD-level analysts.
Source: Defense News