TENCAP Still Going Strong

Officials, past and present, involved in the Air Force’s tactical exploitation of national capabilities program recently gathered at Schriever AFB, Colo., to celebrate the program’s three decades of successes. TENCAP was born in 1977 as a small, outside-the-box organization to get valuable intelligence information collected by sophisticated and highly classified sources across the US intelligence enterprise into the hands of the warfighter in a timely manner. Over the course of its existence, TENCAP has had some 150 programs examining ways to do this, of which about 68 were transitioned to users. “The bread-and-butter of Air Force TENCAP is that we don’t build anything new,” said Col Bob Wright, commander of Air Force Space Command’s Space Integration and Development Center under which TENCAP now resides. “We take existing capabilities and adapt them to new problems.” One recent success is the Talon Namath program under which the Air Force improved the GPS delivery accuracy of the small diameter bomb. TENCAP is now studying how best to apply space situational awareness capabilities, including exploiting the data from space-based infrared system satellites. (Schriever report by Ed White)