Article Entry
30 Oct 2008
Comments:3
Game Changing Vision from General C. Robert Kehler, U.S. Air Force
Added by USGIF Category: Daily Intelligence Brief, General
We were honored that General C. Robert “Bob” Kehler, U.S. Air Force, Commander, Air Force Space Command, sat down with us and a number of other media outlets after his keynote speech at GEOINT 2008. One potentially game-changing vision he touted and discussed with us was the option of building a separate space platform for intelligence and one for the warfighter and integrating both on the ground.
In a “one size does not fit all” approach, General Roberts basically said that there are too many requirement right now for only one platform and that it would be ideal to building out multiple platforms tailored to the specific needs of the warfighter. And that ideally all of these platforms can come together on the data level.
He mentioned that this is all a conceptual idea right now, more of a vision if you will. What do you all think?
Tags: Air Force, geospatial intelligence, USGIF
I don’t think much about the idea. What specific needs do warfighters have that require a different platform from intelligence? If it’s a question of scheduling conflicts then put up additional resources that are dedicated to covering a smaller sector.
The other problem is the pipes on the ground. Integrating two sources requires other resources like processing capability and comms capability. And hopefully storage capability for future trend analysis. Need to fix these problems before they start talking about a separate warfighter vs intel platform.
Overwhelming evidence is all around us that this is a common sense idea: diversification targeting specific needs that have commonality in requirement threads.
At the risk of being quaint, we all enjoy a specific restaraunt specializing in a group of foods. We all purchase vehicles to commute to work and for entertainment. A growing number of internet users take advantage of the myriad capabilities of the Firefox browser.
Inversely, its common sense to us we do not expect ONE restaraunt to have all foods we wish to enjoy, or a cement manufacturer to purchase a Honda Civic to deliver concrete, nor do we typically find many users utilizing their internet browser “add-on’s” to accomplish the creation of word documents or presentations. Government is big, and getting bigger. But no one branch is designed to satisfy the requirements of all the users of government. Our govt is specialized, while working jointly (no puns, please!).
The greatest observable successes in govt’s, nature, capitolism, and even socialistic to dictatorships aptly illustrates specialized groups, powers, products, entities…you get the idea. But we somehow fall into the expectation that we can “design” something to accomplish vastly different tasks – one tool for everything even closely related to the topic.
When creating and capturing requirements, its fundamental to observe not only differing requirements for similar goals; but actually deal with numerous contradictory requirements. To succeed for all parties, one of three things usually seems to happen: specialized functionality (even an additional specialized product) is approved and built, tremendous complexity/cost/and maintenance is driven into the product to accomplish not only differing but contradictory rqmts, or relief from the Customer mission need is granted (completely aleviating the requirement).
Of course the IC and DoD have overlapping similarities in space based requirements. But their stated mission goals on their public internet websites are vastly different, with varying levels of urgency and focus. Having commonality in products on the ground is common sense. To the extent practical, common products empower greater knowledge sharing and utilization…and even new phenomonologies would be expected to result. Sharing ground processing is already a great success in commercial markets where old servers and appliations have been rehosted on new platforms built specifically to empower co-hosted environments.
It appears the General’s discussed concept is not only practical, but may come with less overall expense, faster R&D, increased diversication of products and gleaned intelligence…all of which may translate into less cost / faster delivery and utilization / probable longer product lifespan (less complexity often = less DB interactions; longer observable service life); and most of all, greater potential derived intelligence value for each reqmts owner set.
I’ll end with this. If a business, person, govt’, intelligence agency, or DoD can do its overall mission faster with greater likelihood of success, that always translates to less resources needed to do more than previously possible. Automakers use robots where possible because the overall cost of ownership a robot is drastically lower than its human counterpart – because more final products (automobiles) are produced in shorter time with less resources, which translates to lower final cost for the company. But a robot is a long ways from completely replacing even the other varieties of robots on the assembly line (welding, assembly, painting, automatic lifting and forging, etc.). So does that mean companies should hold out replacing each of their manufacturing robots until one massive, super complex robot can be designed and fielded that does all the jobs? Of course not.
I believe its not only a good idea to diversity space assetts, its common sense.
It could work like any unregulated free market (aren’t we in a world-wide economic crisis?). But if history is any guide, a more likely outcome is creation of new cultural and information silos accompanied by duplicitous and incompatible business architectures, duplicitous and incompatible technical infrastructures, competing doctrines and policies, new bureaucratic swamps, all capped by organizational distrust and driven more by personal or corporate gain than by meeting the needs of the commonwealth.
Another (and arguably harder) approach is to expose and repair existing agencies, processes and systems. This requires re-evaluating, clarifying, and re-focusing missions for all Civilian Agencies, Services, and Commands. It also includes repair of existing prioritization mechanisms, continuous quality feedback to existing processes, enforcement of standards compliance, new methods to remedy systemic problems, new acquisition guidelines that encourage development of new space-based capabilities (or in any environment) that meet business and technical interoperability requirements. This acquisition approach has already led to very successful commercial space ventures offering new capabilities that effectively serve different communities.
Agreed that we need to solve the “one-size-does-not-fit-all” problem, but it should and can be done by fixing root causes that stem more from an organization’s culture than by material solutions (DOT_LPF – i.e. non-Material solutions to fix “people” who become overly-indoctrinated into an organization’s viewpoint and methods. Working primarily in this mode tends to decrease an organization’s overall IQ and de-value individual contributions).
Perhaps the author is mostly arguing to reduce the number of “competitors” for tasking any given asset. Given that space-borne assets are dropping in price, it might better-serve the country to form communities around specific capabilities – and then determine methods to make those assets work better together. But we should not divide and conquer this problem along arbitrary administrative divisions such as DOD vs. Intel. We may need to invest more in collection assets and cross-platform tasking methods, but it seems premature to stand-up a new silo of excellence with inherent inefficiencies.
At least we’re having this discussion using a social networking tool, which is a great start for breaking down these cultural barriers. As H.B. Phillips (MIT head of mathematics) said in 1956, “…when the proper course is not known, each individual should be free to go his own way to provide the greatest diversity of action and therefore the greatest probability that somebody will be right.” We all have the privilege of exposing our ideas here and being wrong, but at least these ideas become visible to decision makers. I commend General Kehler for asking this question in a public forum instead of building another solution using many $500 hammers.