Planning Satellite Reconnaissance to Support Military Operations
Abstract
The nations intelligence agencies face a dual challenge: how to come to grips with presidential tasking to become more directly supportive of current military operations, while also adjusting to a new national military doctrine that is still being developed. The presidential order was issued in 1995. The new military doctrine, Joint Vision 2010, was issued in 1996 and amplified in 1997 in a document called Con for Supporting Joint Operations. Meanwhile, the global planning structure to replace the Cold War paradigm, including the role the Intelligence Community (IC) should play, still is unfolding. The fundamental premise of JV2010 is that the operational commander will enjoy information superiority the ability to see and hear virtually everything of importance in any engagement. It may be a decade or more, however, before the military sufficiently understands the implications of the new doctrine to impose the associated intelligence require for targeting, damage assessment, simultaneous operations, and the like. This raises some difficult problems. Our current generation of satellites is reaching obsolescence and will have to be replaced within the next 5 to 10 years. Given design and develop lead-times, decisions about the next generation of reconnaissance satellites generation of reconnaissance satellites are being made now. As a result, by the time the military determines intelligence requirements to support its new doctrine, it may be too late to influence decisions about the very intelligence support systems upon which the doctrine depends. Commanders using the new doctrine would have to do so using reconnaissance satellites extrapolated from the intelligence needs of the early 1990s.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1999
- Accession Number
- ADA524256
Entities
People
- Kenneth Mcgruther
- Thomas Behling
Organizations
- Central Intelligence Agency