The Air Force informs us that it is no longer providing the daily airpower summaries that we used to generate our Air Sorties in Southwest Asia table, which has been a popular component of the Daily Report column. Accordingly, the table in Wednesday’s column, with data current through Dec. 19, 2010, is the last one under this format. We will continue to work with the Air Force to illustrate the contributions of airpower to the fight in some similar or new format.
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.