The Air Force’s current tactics, techniques, and procedures for analyzing and acting on intelligence will not keep pace with a coming onslaught of big data, and the service needs to begin working on ways to operate with allies to establish future tactics, said Maj. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson, Air Combat Command’s director of intelligence, during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event on Thursday. Operations in Syria are an opportunity to test and execute a new generation of tactics, techniques, and procedures based on evolving ways to collect intelligence, through both manned and unmanned aircraft, as well as methods in space and cyberspace, which can then be used to “finish” targets on a battlefield, said Jamieson. In future operations, the mission will be to find, fix, and finish a target. A mission will be the desired effect, instead of a current mission focused on an individual means to collect information or the role of an aircraft. During the event, Jamieson presented a Mitchell Forum paper, called An ISR Perspective on Fusion Warfare, outlining how to use intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance as one part of a “fusion” of systems to help make decisions in future combat.
The U.S. sent Air Force F-16s over central Syria in a show of force following the Dec. 13 killing of two U.S. Army Soldiers and one American civilian interpreter by a gunman linked to the Islamic State group.
