Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance: Overarching Guidance Is Needed to Advance Information Sharing
Published: 2010-03-17T00:00:00

Fast Facts:

Highlights:
section_title: Why GAO Did This Study
paragraphs: The Department of Defense (DOD) has numerous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems--including manned and unmanned airborne, space-borne, maritime, and terrestrial systems--that play critical roles in support of current military operations. The demand for these capabilities has increased dramatically. Today's testimony addresses (1) the challenges the military services and defense agencies face processing, exploiting, and disseminating the information collected by ISR systems and (2) the extent to which the military services and defense agencies have developed the capabilities required to share ISR information. This testimony is based on GAO's January 2010 report on DOD's ISR data processing capabilities. GAO reviewed and analyzed documentation, guidance, and strategies of the military services and defense agencies in regard to processing, exploiting, and disseminating ISR data as well as information-sharing capabilities. GAO also visited numerous commands, military units, and locations in Iraq and the United States.
section_title: What GAO Found
paragraphs: The military services and defense agencies face long-standing challenges with processing, exploiting, and disseminating ISR data, and DOD has recently begun some initiatives to address these challenges. First, since 2002, DOD has rapidly increased its ability to collect ISR data in Iraq and Afghanistan, although its capacity for processing, exploiting, and dissemination is limited. Second, transmitting data from ISR collection platforms to ground stations where analysts process, exploit, and then disseminate intelligence to users requires high-capacity communications bandwidth. However, bandwidth can be limited in a theater of operations by the satellite and ground-based communication capacity, and this in turn affects the ability to send, receive, and download intelligence products that contain large amounts of data. Third, shortages of analytical staff with the required skill sets hamper the services' and defense agencies' abilities to exploit all ISR information being collected, thus raising the risk that important information may not be available to commanders in a timely manner. DOD is developing and implementing initiatives to enhance its processing, exploitation, and dissemination capabilities, such as increasing personnel, but its initiatives are in the early stages of implementation and it is too soon to tell how effective they will be in addressing current challenges. DOD is taking steps to improve the sharing of intelligence information across the department, but progress is uneven among the military services. DOD began plans for its Distributed Common Ground/Surface System (DCGS), an interoperable family of systems that will enable users to access shared ISR information in 1998. DOD subsequently directed the military services to transition their service-unique intelligence data processing systems into DCGS and each of the military services is at a different stage. While the Air Force and the Navy each plan to have a fully functional version of DCGS by the end of fiscal years 2010 and 2013, respectively, the Army does not expect to have a fully functional system until 2016. The Marine Corps has not yet established a completion date for the full operational capability of its DCGS. To facilitate the sharing of ISR data on this system, DOD developed the DCGS Integration Backbone, which provides common information standards and protocols. Although the services are responsible for managing their DCGS programs and conforming to information-sharing standards, according to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and military service officials, DOD has not developed overarching guidance, such as a concept of operations that provides direction and priorities for sharing intelligence information within the defense intelligence community. Without this overarching guidance, the services lack direction to set their own goals and objectives for prioritizing and sharing ISR information and therefore have not developed service-specific implementation plans that describe the prioritization and types of ISR data they intend to share. Moreover, the inability of users to fully access existing information contributes to the increasing demand for additional ISR collection assets.

section_title: Letter
paragraphs: Thank you for the opportunity to discuss GAO’s recently issued report on  the Department of Defense’s (DOD) intelligence, surveillance, and  reconnaissance (ISR) data processing capabilities. DOD’s numerous ISR  systems—including manned and unmanned airborne, space-borne,  maritime, and terrestrial systems—play critical roles in supporting military  operations as well as commanders’ force protection requirements. In Iraq  and Afghanistan, commanders at all levels depend on timely and accurate  ISR information on their adversaries’ tactics, capabilities, and  vulnerabilities to plan military operations. The success of ISR systems has  led to a dramatic increase in demand for more ISR systems to collect data,  and DOD continues to invest in ISR assets, requesting approximately $6.1  billion in fiscal year 2010 for new unmanned aircraft system capabilities  alone. However, a November 2008 Joint Defense Science  Board/Intelligence Science Board Task Force report on integrating sensor- collected intelligence concluded that the rapid increase in collected  information overwhelms current ISR capabilities and much of the  collected data is never analyzed.
We have previously reported on DOD’s challenges associated with ISR  integration, requirements, tasking, and governance. For example, in  December 2005, we reported that some sensors, communications  equipment, and weapons associated with one type of unmanned aircraft  were not always compatible with other unmanned aircraft. In April 2007,  we testified that although DOD had initiatives under way to improve  integration of ISR assets, it had not comprehensively identified future ISR  requirements, set funding priorities, or established mechanisms to  measure ISR integration progress. In July 2007, we reported that DOD had  not been able to fully optimize the use of its unmanned aircraft system  assets because it lacked an approach to allocating and tasking them that  considered the availability of all assets in determining how best to meet  warfighter needs and that DOD lacked metrics to fully evaluate the  success of its unmanned aircraft system missions. Moreover, in March  2008, we reported that DOD’s ISR Integration Roadmap did not include a  long-term view of what capabilities were required to achieve strategic  goals and did not provide detailed information that would make it useful  as a basis for deciding alternative investments. In July 2009, we reported  that while several unmanned aircraft programs had achieved airframe  commonality, most were pursuing service-unique subsystems, sensors,  communications equipment, and weapons and ground control stations.  Further, we are also evaluating DOD’s efforts to support its increasing  inventory of unmanned aircraft systems, including whether it has  sufficient plans and strategies for providing the necessary personnel,  facilities, communications infrastructure, training, and other elements.
My testimony today is based on our January 2010 report on ISR processing  capabilities and will discuss (1) the challenges the military services and  defense agencies face processing, exploiting, and disseminating the  information collected by ISR systems and (2) the extent to which the  military services and defense agencies have developed the capabilities  required to share ISR information. I will conclude with some observations  regarding our recommendations and DOD’s response to our  recommendations.
In conducting our audit work to support our January 2010 report, we  reviewed and analyzed policies, guidance, strategies, and assessments of  the military services and defense agencies in regard to processing,  exploiting, and disseminating ISR data as well as their information sharing  capabilities. We also interviewed officials at the Office of the Under  Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; the Joint Staff; all four military  services; the National Security Agency; the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency; and numerous commands, military units, and  locations in Iraq and the United States. Our work on that report was  conducted from September 2008 to December 2009 in accordance with  generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards  require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate  evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions  based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained  provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our  audit objectives.
To be most useful to the warfighter, intelligence data must be collected,  analyzed, and shared appropriately in a timely manner. The intelligence  data processing cycle is commonly described in five phases: (1) planning  and direction, (2) collection, (3) processing and exploitation, (4)  dissemination, and (5) evaluation and feedback. However, in  implementation the cycle is tailored to mission needs, so the phases may  not always be performed in order. For example, information collected  from an unmanned aircraft system may be disseminated directly to the  user, without undergoing detailed processing and exploitation. Figure 1  depicts the intelligence data processing cycle. My testimony today focuses  on the processing, exploitation, and dissemination of ISR information,  shown in figure 1 as steps 3 and 4 of the intelligence data processing cycle.
Analysts who are responsible for processing, exploiting, and disseminating  ISR data can only use collected intelligence data if data are visible to them.  Making ISR data discoverable in this way can be accomplished through  meta-data tagging—a process in which data are described through other  data (meta-data) that are usually produced at the time the data of interest  are created. For example, a camera may create meta-data for a  photograph, such as date, time, and lens settings. The photographer may  add further meta-data, such as the names of the subjects. The process by  which information is meta-data tagged depends on the technical  capabilities of the systems collecting the information. Most ISR systems do  not automatically meta-data tag the ISR data when they are transferred  from the sensor to the ground station for processing and exploitation  because most of these systems were developed prior to DOD’s emphasis  on enforcing meta-data standards. Since the sensors on these legacy  systems are not able to meta-data tag automatically, it is up to each of the  military services to prioritize the cataloging of the ISR data manually after  collection.
subsections: section_title: Military Services and Defense Agencies Face Long-standing Challenges with Using ISR Data and Recognize the Need to Address These Challenges
paragraphs: The military services and defense agencies face three long-standing  challenges with processing, exploiting, and disseminating ISR data. First,  since 2002, DOD has rapidly increased its ability to collect ISR data in Iraq  and Afghanistan; however, its capacity for processing, exploiting, and  dissemination is limited and has not kept pace with the increase in  collection platforms and combat air patrols. For example, the Air Force  has substantially increased the number of combat air patrols that ISR  collection platforms are performing in the U.S. Central Command theater  of operations. Specifically, the number of combat air patrols flown by the  Air Force’s Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft systems has increased  from 13 to 36 since 2007. Moreover, in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense  Review Report, DOD stated that it will continue to expand the Predator  and Reaper combat air patrols to 65 by fiscal year 2015. This increase in  data collection will also increase the burden on the Air Force’s ground  processing system, which processes, exploits, and disseminates the ISR  information collected by these platforms.
Second, transmitting data from ISR collection platforms to ground stations  where analysts process, exploit, and then disseminate intelligence to users  requires high-capacity communications bandwidth. However, bandwidth  can be limited in a theater of operations by the satellite and ground-based  communication capacity. An insufficient amount of bandwidth affects the  ability to send, receive, and download intelligence products that contain  large amounts of data. For example, intelligence products derived from  ISR geospatial data have high bandwidth requirements—the higher the  resolution of the product, the longer the transmission time via a given  bandwidth. DOD officials have acknowledged that limited bandwidth is a  continual challenge in Iraq because of the warfighter’s reliance on  geospatial data. GAO and others have reported that DOD continues to face  a growing need for communications bandwidth in combat operations.
Third, the military services and defense agencies are challenged by  shortages in the numbers of analytical staff available to exploit all of the  electronic signals and geospatial ISR information being collected, raising  the risk that important information may not be analyzed and made  available to commanders in a timely manner. For example, according to  U.S. Central Command officials, the command exploits less than one-half  of the electronic signals intercepts collected from the Predator. According  to DOD officials, finding native speakers of the collected languages to  successfully translate and exploit data collected in those foreign languages  is difficult, and training language analysts takes time and is difficult to  manage with the deployment schedule. In addition, language analysts who  translate and exploit electronic signals intelligence data must qualify for  security clearances that require rigorous background examinations. The  National Security Agency has experienced difficulties in hiring language  analysts who can obtain clearances and have the appropriate skill levels in  both English and the language for translation.
DOD has recognized the need to enhance its processing, exploitation, and  dissemination capabilities and is developing and implementing initiatives  to do so, but its initiatives are in the early stages of implementation and it  is too soon to tell how effective they will be in addressing current  challenges. For example, in the short term, DOD has placed its priority for  processing, exploitation, and disseminating electronic signals intelligence  on the information collected in Afghanistan because the Commander of  U.S. Central Command has designated those missions as a high priority. In  the long term, DOD has taken several actions intended to sustain, expand,  and improve processing, exploitation, and dissemination capabilities. For  example, DOD has studies, such as an ISR force-sizing study, under way  which include examining how to improve the management of its  processing, exploitation, and dissemination capabilities. However, DOD  has not set dates for when all of these studies will be complete and it is too  soon to know whether they will lead to the desired effect of increased  support to the warfighter for current operations. The Air Force and the  National Security Agency also have plans to increase analyst personnel in  response to the increase in ISR collection. The Air Force, reacting to  scheduled increases in Predator and Reaper combat air patrols, is planning  to add personnel who process, exploit, and disseminate ISR data. The  National Security Agency also has taken steps to address shortages in  language analyst personnel. For example, to better target its hiring effort  for language analysts the agency is using U.S. Census Bureau data to  locate centers of populations that contain the language skills needed to  translate and exploit the foreign languages that are collected. According to  National Security Agency officials, these efforts have helped increase the  number of language analysts available to process and exploit collected  signals intelligence data. DOD is also working on developing technical  solutions to improve processing, movement, and storage of data. For  example, files from wide-area sensors have to be saved to a computer disk  and flown back to the United States for exploitation and dissemination  because current networks in the theater of operations cannot handle the  large amounts of data these sensors collect. U.S. Joint Forces Command is  currently designing and testing technology already in use by the  commercial entertainment industry to improve storage, movement, and  access to full motion video data from wide-area sensors.
section_title: DOD Is Taking Steps to Improve Intelligence Information Sharing, but Progress Is Uneven
paragraphs: Although DOD has recognized the need for maximizing the efficiency and  effectiveness of the information it collects and has been taking steps to  increase information sharing across the defense intelligence community,  progress has been uneven among the military services. DOD began plans  for its Distributed Common Ground/Surface System (DCGS), an  interoperable family of systems that will enable users to access shared ISR  information, in 1998. DOD subsequently directed the military services to  transition their service-unique intelligence data processing systems into  DCGS and each of the military services is at a different stage. As shown in  table 1, the Air Force and the Navy each plan to have a fully functional  version of DCGS by the end of fiscal years 2010 and 2013, respectively, and  the Army does not expect to have a fully functional system until 2016. The  Marine Corps has not yet established a completion date for the full  operational capability of its DCGS.
DOD has developed a system of standards and protocols, called the DCGS  Integration Backbone (DIB), which serves as the foundation for  interoperability between each of the four military services’ DCGS  programs. However, the services have not completed the process of  prioritizing and tagging the data they want to share in accordance with  these standards and protocols or developed timelines to do so. As a result,  the services are not sharing all of their collected ISR data.
Although the Air Force has the capability to share some Air Force- generated ISR information with other DOD users through the DIB  standards and protocols, it has not developed timelines or taken steps  to prioritize the types of additional data that should be shared with the  defense intelligence community.
The Army also has the capability to share some of its intelligence data  with other users, but has experienced difficulties tagging all of its data  because of its large inventory of legacy ISR systems. Moreover, the  Army has not established timelines for sharing data.
The Navy and Marine Corps are not currently tagging all of the ISR data  they intend to share and have neither developed timelines nor taken  steps to prioritize the types of data that should be shared with the  defense intelligence community.
The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence has responsibility for  ensuring implementation of DOD intelligence policy, including monitoring  the services’ progress toward interoperability. Although the services are  responsible for managing their DCGS programs and conforming to  information-sharing standards, according to Office of the Under Secretary  of Defense for Intelligence and military service officials, DOD has not  developed overarching guidance, such as a concept of operations that  provides needed direction and priorities for sharing intelligence  information within the defense intelligence community. Without this  overarching guidance, the services lack direction to set their own goals  and objectives for prioritizing and sharing ISR information and therefore  have not developed service-specific implementation plans that describe  the prioritization and types of ISR data they intend to share with the  defense intelligence community. For example, a concept of operations  could provide direction to the military services and defense agencies to  select data to prioritize for meta-data tagging and sharing, such as  electronic signals intelligence data. As a result, it is not clear how much of  the collected data are not being shared. Until DOD identifies what types of  ISR information should be shared and assigns priorities for sharing data, it  is unclear whether mission-critical information will be available to the  warfighter. In addition, the inability of users to fully access existing  information in a timely manner is a contributing factor to the increasing  demand for additional ISR collection assets.
Therefore, in our January 2010 report, we recommended that the Secretary  of Defense take the following two actions:    Direct the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, in coordination  with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretaries of the  Army, Navy, and Air Force, to develop guidance, such as a concept of  operations that provides overarching direction and priorities for  sharing intelligence information across the defense intelligence  community.
Direct the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to develop  service-specific implementation plans, consistent with the concept of  operations, which set timelines and outline the prioritization and types  of ISR data they will share with the defense intelligence community  through the DIB.
In written comments on our report, DOD agreed with our  recommendations overall and stated that there is guidance either issued or  in development to address our recommendations. However, this guidance  does not fully address the intent of our recommendations, and we believe  additional guidance is necessary.
section_title: Concluding Remarks
paragraphs: DOD officials cite ISR as vital to mission success in Iraq and Afghanistan,  and Congress has responded by funding additional ISR assets. However,  until all participants in the defense enterprise successfully share ISR  information, inefficiencies will hamper the effectiveness of efforts to  support the warfighter, and ISR data collection efforts may be  unnecessarily duplicative. While the focus of my testimony has been on  the processing, exploiting, and disseminating of ISR data, our prior work  has also shown that collection taskings are fragmented in theater and  visibility into how ISR assets are being used is lacking. These challenges  increase the risk that operational commanders may not be receiving  mission-critical ISR information, which can create the perception that  additional collection assets are needed to fill gaps.
Mr. Chairmen and members of the subcommittees, this concludes my  prepared statement. I would be happy to answer any questions that you  may have at this time.
section_title: Contacts and Acknowledgments
paragraphs: For further information regarding this testimony, please contact Davi M.  D’Agostino at (202) 512-5431 or dagostinod@gao.gov. In addition, contact  points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may  be found on the last page of this statement. Individuals who made key  contributions to this testimony are Margaret G. Morgan and Marc J.  Schwartz, Assistant Directors; Grace A. Coleman; Gregory A. Marchand;  Erika A. Prochaska; Kimberly C. Seay; and Walter K. Vance. In addition,  Amy E. Brown; Amy D. Higgins; Timothy M. Persons; and Robert Robinson  made significant contributions to the January 2010 report that supported  this testimony.
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