Vice Adm. Kendall L. Card, U.S. Navy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence during a panel discussion at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference April 26. (Thomas Brown/Staff)

The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance community is facing a time of change, of both platforms and missions, and it is coming in an age of budget austerity. This requires a change in thinking, top ISR officials from all services said at the closing of the C4ISR conference this afternoon.

Service branches are going to need to work more closely together as they face new mission challenges, including a shift to the Pacific and the draw down in Afghanistan, while analysts and operators used to working in permissive environments will need to adapt to working in possible anti-access, area denial situations.

“You’re going to see more integration and more sharing, and that’s going to drive our solution set overall,” said Vice Adm. Kendall Card, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

For the past decade, intelligence gathering has largely focused on what’s flying above, with unmanned aircraft and other air frames such as the manned MC-12 Liberty providing surveillance largely free of danger, and providing that information in “mall security" type video feeds.

“As we think about where the strategy is taking us in the future, which is in contested environments ... and focusing on broader areas of the Pacific, it really requires different thinking and different capabilities,” said Lt. Gen. Larry James, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for ISR.

A necessary change in thinking will be to move away from a focus on the solely on the air frames, who is flying them, and how often they are flying. Instead, the focus needs to shift to the capabilities that can be provided to the troops on the ground when they are needed.

“We have to stop measuring capability in terms of input measures,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and moderator of the discussion. “The soldier, sailor, airman, Marine does not give a hoot about the number of (combat air patrols) or orbits that are airborne. They care about do they have an increase in their situational awareness that is provided by something.”

Additionally, the focus needs to increase on the ground level and the military increases its focus on areas such as Africa and South America, officials said. This includes more emphasis on human intelligence and expansion of programs such as the Distributed Common Ground System-Army.

“It’s a huge mission,” said Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, the deputy chief of staff of the Army for intelligence, of Africa. “There’s huge opportunities from the non-traditional ways of getting at things.”

Chris Biow CTO - Public Sector & VP, MarkLogic Corporation during a panel discussion at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 26. Thomas Brown/Staff

The exponential growth of intelligence data need not hamper agencies' ability to share and analyze it in real-time, industry experts said Friday at a C4ISR Journal Conference.

Companies like Google have mastered the ability to serve up queried data in sub-seconds, and that should be the expectation for ISR, said Chris Biow, chief technology officer for public sector at MarkLogic Corp. Speaking on a conference panel, Biow said agencies should expect that level of service from big data tools and services from industry.

"Google has done a great job of building expectations even as the data gets bigger," Biow said. "The size of the Web doubles every so many months, [but] Google doesn't get twice as slow."

The growth of intelligence data isn’t a new phenomenon, but the variety of data from videos, sensors and photos are forcing agencies to contend with issues like bandwidth and larger quantities of data being produced rapidly. "In C4ISR, bandwidth is not a commodity, it's precious, said Biow."

Cloud computing is not the answer to all big data problems, he said. He suggests agencies invest in automated tools and techniques that enable data to be analyzed and tagged in the field where data is being created. Soldiers may not have network access or the ability to transmit large amounts of data up to a repository, but they can send subsets of data or even a description of what data they have collected when connectivity is available.

Where agencies stumble with big data is relaxing their expectations, Biow said. Big data projects should not take years to provide value, and agencies should redirect their focus if they're not seeing results.

Agencies must first have a business case for using big data, said Kapil Bakshi, chief solutions architect for Cisco Public Sector. Big data is being used for mission capabilities, such as cybersecurity, delivering health care and scientific research, all of which are data-intensive fields, Bakshi said. But only a small fraction of the data produced is being analyzed.

"The rest...is just there," Bakshi said. Agencies must bridge the gap between complex and variable data and structured data to create a full picture for decision-making.

"Be evangelists of your data and show value," he said.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, addresses the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 26. (Thomas Brown/Staff)

Unmanned aircraft are good for surveillance and reconnaissance, but the best way to learn about your adversary is through human intelligence, said Army. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“We can think about ISR platforms and we can think about the different ways that we will collect and the kinds of stuff that we need … but we really do have to have some folks that are studying and know when we get out into these environments what is happening out there,” Flynn said on Friday at the C4ISR Journal conference.

While he’s a “huge fan of ISR,” human intelligence provides a “fingertip feel” of your adversary, said Flynn, one of three authors of a January 2010 paper arguing that U.S. intelligence efforts in Afghanistan were too focused on killing badguys instead of understanding the human environment in which U.S. troops operate.

“Aerial drones and other collection assets are tasked with scanning the countryside around the clock in the hope of spotting insurgents burying bombs or setting up ambushes,” the paper says. “Again, these are fundamentally worthy objectives, but relying on them exclusively baits intelligence shops into reacting to enemy tactics at the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the insurgency.

After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, U.S. leaders still refer to Afghans is “Afghanis,” which is the name of the country’s currency, showing a persistent ignorance about Afghan culture, he said Friday.

“The best intelligence that I’ve ever had has been [human intelligence]-enabled,” Flynn said. “We’re not going to be everywhere all the time. We’re not going to have forces – in fact, we don’t want to have our forces out there. We want to be very precise.”

The scale of geography is a major limitation for unmanned aircraft, he said. For example, the eastern coast of Somalia alone is the distance between Maine and Florida. Unmanned aircraft also need permission to fly over certain countries, and the U.S. may not be able to count on having air supremacy

“We typically look at things 300 feet above the ground instead of looking at things on the ground,” Flynn said. “In our national security strategy and in our national military strategy, it really stresses the idea of building partner capacity. The more we can enable our partners to take care of their law enforcement and their military and their domestic security needs, the better we’ll be: You develop stronger partnerships, you develop stronger relationships, more enduring – and it’s a lot less expensive.”

Col. Fred Hargreaves, Head C4ISR at UK Ministry of Defence, left, moderates a discussion "International Cooperation and Partnerships" at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 25. (Mike Morones/Defense News)

Coalition efforts to share intelligence will become increasingly important in a world where major powers are undergoing fiscal austerity and other nations are demanding a democratization of intelligence, several intelligence experts said Thursday at the C4ISR Conference in Crystal City, VA.

The experts, speaking as part of a panel on the role of international partnerships, highlighted the need to develop relationships between countries, as well as compatibility of equipment, ahead of potential conflicts.

“A lot of this deals with building relationships ahead of time,” said John Arpin, and intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency.  “A crisis is not the time to start handing out business cards.  Those relationships need to be built and nurtured.”

And the experts agreed that the next crisis is unlikely to wait until the distant future to emerge.

“There’s a lot happening in the world,” said Vicente Echandia Roldan, minister counselor of congressional and security affairs at the Colombian Embassy.  “Everyday you have the fiscal constraints that hopefully after 2015 are going to be less, but you never know.  You’re going to have to rely more and more (on partners) not only because of the fiscal constraint but because countries all over the world are starting to grow and get their act together in every region.”

In the past many of the issues with interoperability have centered around technical challenges, but the experts agreed that the larger issue is intelligence community culture.

“The issues we see tend to be more cultural,” said Joe Ross, principal scientist for the Joint ISR Capability Area Team 5 ath the NCI agency.  “The technology piece is not that hard.  Put a bunch of technicians in a room and say, ‘we’ve got a standard, we need to make this work.’  They’ll make it work.”

Some congressional staffers are confident that growing support for issues such as information sharing will prompt lawmakers to pass cyber legislation this Congress.

"As long as we keep our eyes on the ball, if we get to conference we’ll be able to work an agreement out," Andrew Grotto, professional staff member for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Thursday at the 4th annual C4ISR Journal Conference. The focus must remain on cyber information sharing, not other cyber-related issues such as Internet piracy, he said.

Grotto said there is broad consensus on the parameters of information sharing, including sharing among the private sector and between the private sector and government. There also must be reasonable privacy protections, said Grotto, who spoke on a panel with staffers from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee.

One cybersecurity issue Grotto said he hopes Congress will tackle is the Department of Homeland Security's role in cyberspace. While DHS has jurisdiction to defend the dot-gov domain, there are some federal networks at the Justice Department and other agencies that DHS doesn't have authority to monitor. DHS is challenged in carrying out its mission if it can't access all federal networks, Grotto said.

Another issue on agencies' roles and responsibilities that Congress must address is which agency should directly interface with industry to sharing cyber information, said Thomas Corcoran, senior policy adviser for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House this month, was amended to name DHS as the main point of entry to receive information shared by the private sector.  This may also be a topic for debate in the Senate, if and when an information sharing bill is introduced, Corcoran said.