After running red team exercises looking at what some of the biggest future challenges might be for the Air Force, leaders concluded that the Predators and Global Hawks of today are not far away from becoming mere museum pieces.
“What we see is that the traditional big wing ISR has been routinely losing effectiveness over time,” Kenneth Bray, the Air Force’s deputy chief for ISR today told an audience at the Mitchell Institute here this morning. “As we look forward and project on the trends, [it is clear] it’s going to continue to do so, but we’re not going to wait for them to become completely ineffective.”
So, what’s the plan?
The service — like every other office at the Pentagon — is rushing toward a mix of almost-ready and yet-to-be-developed technologies, including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, hypersonics, swarms of small drones, and clouds of tiny cubesats capable of sucking up data and beaming it back down to operators the ground in real time.
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