My fourth and final area of focus today in describing our support to the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy is in coalition integration.
As we know, our military operations involve working with allies and coalition partners. The defense intelligence enterprise must continue to effectively integrate the capabilities of long-standing allies, while maturing its agility to rapidly interoperate with current and future coalition partners. This is especially important for the GEOINT community. In order to transform the huge volumes of collected data into a decision advantage, we must enable federated processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) with our allies and partners.
The military will increasingly rely on IT information-sharing architectures such as the US BICES and BICES-X capability to enable this coalition intelligence information-sharing imperative. BICES provides critical coalition data and information sharing to our warfighting commands and coalition partners while meeting a high priority demand for GEOINT data sharing. In fact, it has been so successful at meeting combatant command needs that demand is exploding. We need to continue to expand our ability to share data with our coalition partners and we need DoD and industry to partner to fully optimize the effect this capability brings to the overall intelligence enterprise.
Integration with partners and allies can provide immediate coverage in areas where the U.S. lacks sensing capability, particularly airborne and manpower; and enhance specific target area knowledge, leading to superior battlespace awareness.
The GEOINT community is a critical link in this and your involvement in the annual USD(I) sponsored Enterprise Challenge exercise allows us to showcase emerging multi-intelligence ISR capabilities that improve joint and combined ISR interoperability. With your help, we can achieve effective data integration with our Allies and Partners.
Conclusion
So these are four areas where we at DOD believe we all need to shape the revolution in GEOINT in order to make it most beneficial to the military.
In closing, let me again review the strategic context that shapes my thinking and focus as a Pentagon leader.
Our nation’s defense leaders believe that as we examine both current and future operating environments, we see our margin of technological and combat superiority at risk of eroding. Addressing this is one of our most important strategic tasks in order to preserve our ability to deter conflict and preserve international peace and stability, disincentivize competitors from preemptive actions, and preserve our edge in any future US military operation.
That’s why we’re exploring new “offset strategies” – new combinations of technologies, operational concepts, and organizational constructs to maintain our ability to project overwhelming combat power into any theater and at times of our own choosing.
Key to this Third Offset is our defense intelligence capability, particularly the great strengths we derive from GEOINT. And it is therefore imperative to continue to: transform our GEOINT enterprise to maintain the nation’s strategic advantage, to make our space architecture more resilient and survivable, to harness the full creativity of the commercial and academic sectors, and to seamlessly integrate with coalition partners in unprecedented ways.
I’m encouraged by the GEOINT community’s forward leaning focus and excited about the future of our GEOINT enterprise, enhanced by innovation that will provide timely, relevant, and decisive intelligence to counter our adversaries advancing A2AD technologies and capabilities.
Deterrence depends on preparedness. The blunt reality is we must prepare to deal with adversaries who are willing to fight in every domain, including space.
Today our nation is face with many challenges – but with every challenge comes opportunity. We are in an exciting era for defense intelligence – an era where the defense intelligence enterprise has the potential to become the most capable intelligence system the world has ever seen.
It really is an honor to spend some time with you today. Our future success can best be achieved with the close partnering of government, industry, allied and coalition partners, and academia. Thanks for all you do to make this community’s contributions so vital to the defense of the nation.
