matched up with an appropriate program of record to fully transition the
effort,” Villanueva states. “Work is still
ongoing to find a program of record to
transition this capability.”
Currently, as operators receive various ISR requests, they have to consider a wide array of variables, including
which assets are available and mission
appropriate, as well as combat conditions, such as weather and the locations
of hostile forces. Essentially, the system
narrows down the available options
so that warfighters can make more
informed decisions at a faster pace.
The Reaper was one of the aircraft, along with Predator and Global Hawk, used to demonstrate the D2ISRM prototype earlier this year.
The system works with both deliberate and dynamic command and
control. “Deliberate command and
control of ISR planning is done on a
daily basis to build an overall ISR plan.
These plans can be quite complicated,
as they involve many assets, airspaces,
collection targets and so on. The plan
must orchestrate all of these variables
in order to maximize collection coverage and sensor utilization,” Villanueva
explains. “Dynamic command and control occurs when the deliberate plan
must be disrupted because of changing
needs—for example, an emerging high-priority collection target. The ultimate
goal of dynamic ISR management is to
make changes that service the new collection while minimizing perturbations
to the rest of the plan.”
The D2ISRM prototype was evaluated earlier this year during an operational demonstration. For demonstration purposes, warfighters from the
102nd Air Operations Group at Otis Air
National Guard Base, Massachusetts,
simulated an intelligence cell and found
that the system significantly decreased
data processing time. “D2ISRM has the
potential to work with a wide variety of
piloted and unpiloted ISR. In the April
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