Former
Army division commander Barry McCaffrey said March 12 the Air Force ought to be in charge of coordinating and integrating the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. “I think it is patently absurd to not see that airspace ought to be integrated in a joint manner,” McCaffrey said at an Air Force-sponsored defense symposium on Capitol Hill. “There ought to be a single agency doing it,” setting direction both technologically and doctrinally. The Army thinks UAVs should be slaved to division commanders, but “it would be completely stupid to block out huge pieces of airspace, because … the head of [a division] wants to fly Predator overhead,” McCaffrey asserted. “I do not understand why we cannot have a joint commander—probably Air Force—do that.”
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.