 We're privileged this morning to be joined by Major General Jack Shanahan, who's a commander of the 25th Air Force. The reason we invited General Shanahan here this morning is simple, and the reason he accepted our invitation is also simple. He and I agree that ISR is increasingly vital to our nation, but it's something that seldom discussed publicly, and it's not really that well understood across the broader defense community. So we're going to try to get some education this morning from the general and get a better understanding of this important issue. I'm pretty certain when the military history of this period is written, the growth and the sophistication and scale of ISR is going to be one of the most important threads. Failure to better understand what ISR is and what it does is a disservice to the Air Force and to the men and women who've worked behind the scenes to give our nation a critical capability and capacity to understand the world in a time of massive change. There's never a dull moment for those managing global ISR. Just think of the challenges that General Shanahan and his colleagues have faced over the past year, supporting U.S. operations and planning for transition in Afghanistan, a new war against ISIS or ISIL in Iraq and Syria, in which they really are the front line, increased Russian aggression and military presence around the globe, continued tensions in East Asia, new levels of Chinese aggression even directly toward U.S. ISR aircraft, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, keeping tabs on non-state groups across Africa and the list goes on. I don't think we can even imagine another military on the planet dealing with that level of operational complexity and it takes incredible leaders and an incredible team to pull that off on a daily basis. They're providing the information that goes to senior leaders from the president down and that guides our international and national security policy. Let me just share two illustrative quotes from senior DOD leaders about the level and national intelligence leaders about the level of demand for ISR operations today. In a news report earlier this week that you might have seen on the 480th ISR reconnaissance wing headquarters in Langley, Virginia, ACC commander Hawk Carlisle was quoted as saying, I've been in the Air Force 36 and a half years. The demand for intelligence has never gone down, ever. It just continues to grow. We have more missions than we have money, manpower or time. Director of national intelligence Jim Clapper said ISR is the coin of the realm. There is an unlimited appetite that won't fade. So let me briefly introduce our speaker. I won't make him endure having to hear his own impressive resume in full but I do want to give you some context about the kind of leader he is and what responsibilities he has on his plate. I came to know General Shanahan when he was a deputy director for global operations, J39 on the joint staff and I was the Turkey desk officer in OSD policy working for Sandy Vershpau. I can't tell you what we worked on together but suffice it to say we did a great job. And chances are if you worked on any operational issue in the world over the past several years you also know General Shanahan. And then you probably know what a terrific collaborator he is and how that culture of excellence, cooperation and understanding of political military context is instilled in all those who work for him. And I see Colonel Soren Jones as somebody who worked for him in the audience. And I am certain that this is why the U.S. Air Force decided that they would entrust him with the stand-up of the new 25th Air Force under Air Combat Command. In this role General Shanahan has purview over 26,000 personnel conducting multi-source ISR products, ISR applications, capabilities and resources, electronic warfare, strategic command and control, and integrating cyber ISR forces and expertise. The 25th Air Force includes the 70th and 480th ISR wings, the 9th reconnaissance wing, the 55th wing, the Air Force Technical Application Center, and the 361st ISR Group. In his position as the 25th Air Force Commander General Shanahan also serves as Commander of the Service Cryptologic Component and is responsible to the Director for the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service as the Air Force's sole authority for matters involving the conduct of cryptologic activities, including the spectrum of missions directly related to both tactical war fighting and national level operations. So without further ado, let me turn it over to you, General. And when you're done speaking, look forward to our conversation and questions. Thank you very much, Sam, and thank you for the kind words and the very warm welcome. And it's interesting, without coordinating our talking points, he hit on many of the same things I'm going to talk about. Now, I will have my preparatory marks for about 20 minutes because there are really a lot of points that I want to hit home on. And then we'll take Q&A and I expect some very difficult questions because Soren Jones is in the audience and I know he's planted some questions there. So Sam and I worked together when we were both in the Pentagon, as he said. He was in OSD policy while I was in the Joint Staff and the J3 Operations Directorate, where ISR was really a major part of my portfolio. We wrestled with a number of thorny ISR problems during our respective tenures. Well, I have to say that in my experience, the adjective thorny is redundant when placed in front of ISR. Every issue we confronted invariably resulted in making someone unhappy. The senior most civilians, four-star generals, oftentimes both. During my two years on the Joint Staff, I confessed that I never once uttered the phrase, win-win when talking about potential solutions to global ISR challenges. And I really want to thank Sam and CSIS for bringing ISR to the forefront of the DC agenda. This is an incredibly important topic at a particularly challenging and chaotic time across the globe. The prominence of ISR, it really grows daily. And I was not the least bit surprised when Senator Feinstein, during a recent appearance on one of the Sunday talk shows, mentioned ISR three times in the space of 10 minutes when referring to our nation's counter-ISIS campaign. And I'm delighted to have the opportunity to address one of the more relevant topics of our age. Though you might find that I raise as many questions as I answer, I trust that is acceptable to all of you since really it is the debate that adds mostly to the dialogue slide. This is what most people who are not intelligence professionals envision when they hear the term ISR. This is understandable, albeit unfortunate, since so much of the public debate these days centers on the term drones more than any other ISR platform, sensor, or person. And by the way, drone is a far less palatable term to us in the United States Air Force than it is to the media and even some of the think tanks. Though I acknowledge that at this point in history, we are at best fighting a rearguard action on use of this term rather than on the preferred remotely piloted aircraft or even simply unmanned aerial systems. From my seat, the glaring problem with this picture is not merely the fact that it does not show the full spectrum of ISR platforms and sensors. It's that it fails to depict the very essence of how data turns into intelligence. The thousands of analysts and linguists who accomplished the processing, exploitation, and dissemination or PED on the back end of these ISR platforms and sensors. Without PED, you merely collect data and information, not turn it into intelligence that allows someone somewhere to make a better decision. PED might be the least understood and the least appreciated aspect of ISR. Next slide. Now, this is what I see when I hear the acronym ISR. It is what the ISR enterprise looks like from my seat, from surface through space and extending virtually through cyberspace. I'll be glad to take a question later on what I would call the inextricable link between cyber and ISR. ISR has never been more important to our Department of Defense. General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently released his ISR Joint Force 2020 White Paper. Next slide. It is unclassified. It's a quick read and should be widely available on the web. I highly recommend reading it. It really is quite good. I'll address a number of the same themes this morning, though I'll also introduce a few other ideas. The term ISR itself begs a brief discussion. Next slide. Generally, in my service, we refer to the indivisibility of ISR. That is to get quality intelligence. You must place your surveillance in the right place at the right time and conduct focus reconnaissance missions. Likewise, in order to know where to place your surveillance and reconnaissance, you need quality intelligence. Not everyone accepts this indivisibility thesis, but I will set aside that doctrinal debate for another time. We also make the important point that in many, if in not most cases today, ISR is operations, not merely support to operations. Our Chief, General Welch, said this about ISR. Next slide. And I'll let you read it. As he describes it so eloquently, 20 years ago when you walked into a room, the only people talking about ISR were intelligence professionals. Now, it is often the first thing, the four-star combatant commanders, senior civilian leaders, and even the National Security Council staff want to discuss. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon these days for disagreements on global ISR allocation to end up in the tank at the Pentagon, resolved only at the four-star level after vigorous debate. It is fascinating to me just how much ISR dominates the agenda today. Why is this? Well, first and foremost, it is because ISR has provided such incredible advantages to warfighters and decision makers at every level. From the soldier on the ground, the airman in the cockpit, up to and including the President of the United States, ISR has been stunningly successful over the past decade, a word that you'll see in the chief's quote. So much so that we might even say we've been victims of our own success, although I am not particularly enamored with that phrase. Next slide. As General Welch remarked at CSIS earlier this year when he talked about global integrated ISR as one of our service's five core missions, most people seem to think that acquiring, fielding, and employing ISR capabilities as as easy as flipping the white light switch from off to on. It is not, of course. Moreover, we have been fielding more and better ISR platforms and sensors with impressive and often exponential improvements in capability over the past five or six years. When you look at what happened in Afghanistan over the past six years, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that history books could apply the label ISR war to Operation Enduring Freedom as much as they could justify applying any other label. At no time in history, none have the United States and our coalition partners allocated so much ISR to one combat zone as we have done in Afghanistan. Yet at the same time, the appetite for ISR of all types remains insatiable. Offering and fielding ISR capabilities begets the inevitable requests for more ISR. Furthermore, you will not find a single combat command commander who will claim to be satisfied with the amount of ISR allocated to them to include United States Central Command, which in deference to its ongoing combat operations possesses the vast share of globally allocable ISR capabilities. Next slide. As you can see from this slide, we cannot possibly meet the global ISR demand signal. What then are the root causes of the problem? To begin with, many of our high-end ISR platforms fall into the category of high-demand low-supply capabilities. Or, as Secretary Rumsfeld so famously said, don't call it that. Call it stuff we didn't buy enough of, although he used a slightly stronger word than stuff. And he was right. Despite the proliferation of ISR capabilities today, we still do not have enough to meet the combatant commander's demand signal. We will never have enough to meet their demand signal, even in the very best of fiscal times. Cost remains one of the driving forces, and it is fair to say that in this era of declining resources, the inherent tension between individual service priorities and broader joint requirements will always be at the heart of any cost-benefit equation. And I'll talk more momentarily about the types of prioritization debates that we need to have to address the ISR sufficiency dilemma. Next, we have never had the ability to map ISR requirements to global allocation of ISR capabilities in the most rigorous manner possible. Too often, this has been more art than science. Fuzzy math would be a generous description. Yet there can be little room for pointillism when deciding who receives the somewhat limited ISR capabilities that are available for allocation. This problem stems in large part for our inability to be as precise as necessary when referring to an ISR thing. Hours of full-motion video collected, terabytes of signals intercepted, number of images taken, and so on. For the combatant command operational plans, while it's never simple to determine exactly how many fighter squadrons, carrier strike groups, or brigade combat teams are needed in those plans, it is far easier to address those needs to nail down exactly how much ISR is needed and of what type. Things are improving, unquestionably moving in the right direction, with the United States Strategic Command and its Joint Functional Command for ISR, which we call JIFIC ISR, working closely with the Joint Staff and OSD to put much more rigor and discipline into the combatant command ISR requirements development process. This includes a renewed, and I would say, overdue emphasis on linking ISR needs to COCOM priority intelligence requirements, or PIRs. In other words, there must be an explicit link between a request for ISR and a COCOM PIR designed to answer that perennial question, exactly why do you need the amount and type of ISR you are asking for? This sounds much easier than it is, especially during the crucible of combat. At the same time, JIFIC ISR is developing tools that allow the combatant commands to visualize alternate means of satisfying their ISR requirements, rather than focusing exclusively on requests for specific platforms or specific capabilities. These sorts of excursion or trade space analyses will be crucial to proving to the COCOMs that their ISR needs can be met in a variety of ways beyond what they might have originally expected or demanded. One other considerable challenge related directly to that point is the global ISR allocation process itself. When Joint Forces Command dissolved several years ago, we lost a four-star functional combatant command commander who played a central role in the adjudication of allocation of all global forces to include ISR capabilities. If you ask me today who the ultimate global ISR adjudicator is, my answer would be the less than satisfying hedge, it depends. More often than not, the decisions are made through a complex multifaceted process led by STRATCOM and JIFIC ISR in coordination with all other stakeholders. In the main, this process has neither been as efficient or as effective as possible. Touching on this very point, the Chairman's ISR Joint Force 2020 White Paper calls for a multi-agency ISR Functional Management Group with the requisite authorities and resources to synchronize DOD and national-level ISR initiatives from the national to the tactical levels, while closely coordinating ISR development, fielding, employment, and automation efforts. This is exactly what we need to do, although I will not claim for a second that it will be a simple or a quick task. It requires dismantling over a decade's worth of bad habits enabled both by the Dissolution of Joint Forces Command as well as the largesse of overseas contingency operations funding. Focusing on my own service for a moment, it's always been hard to build a jury-proof case for saying no to a COCOM request for more ISR. In my experience, it's always been somewhat easier for the other services to make a case for not meeting a given force allocation requirement. Because when it comes to carrier strike groups, brigade combat teams, and marine air ground task forces, it is easier to paint a picture of service red lines than it is to do so for ISR platform sensors and back-end processing. It's even harder to make the case when the platforms, sensors, and PED are in different organizations. Incidentally, that is really one of the big reasons why we recently underwent this major reorganization in the Air Force, where my command transformed from the Air Force ISR agency into 25th Air Force this September, bringing together under one commander, Iron, or as we say, aircraft, sensors, and PED in a way never before accomplished. This brings me back to the question I posed earlier. Just how much ISR is enough? In other words, for every phase of any given conflict, what is the right amount of ISR? If ISR is treated as a low-supply, insatiable demand capability, what are the return on investment questions? Or more accurately, what are the opportunity cost questions that must be asked? What are the opportunity costs of placing more ISR capability in one theater over another? What are the opportunity costs of spending more money on ISR capabilities that are optimized for a permissive environment rather than investing in research and development and acquisition of capabilities that are much more likely to survive in a contested, degraded, operationally limited environment? And what are the opportunity costs associated with putting all our ISR eggs in a few baskets instead of investing in a more balanced portfolio of diverse high and low-end platforms, sensors, and information architectures that will provide more ability to absorb risk when our potential adversaries and adversaries uncover our critical vulnerabilities? These are among the most fundamental imperative questions we must address and attempt to answer over the next few years. It is extremely hard to address such questions when American and coalition personnel are dying every day in combat and when ISR is considered critical to success in the fight. The default position, understandably, is often to send a lion's share of allocable ISR to the theater engaged in ongoing combat operations. And the difficulties associated with postulating counterfactuals are self-evident. For instance, how can the commander of United States Pacific Command make an airtight, evidence-based case that ISR gaps in his theater will introduce unacceptable levels of risk that will lead to strategic surprise, loss of strategic advantage, or even worse, great loss of life when the next conflict breaks out? Yet we must tackle these opportunity costs and cost-benefit questions dispassionately. At their very core, these become questions of risk, both risk to mission, current and future mission, and risk to force. This may seem on the surface to be an esoteric, even arcane discussion. It is anything but. We need better tools and more rigorous processes to provide warfighters and national decision makers with the best data possible to allow them to make the hard calls on what ISR capability should or should not be developed, acquired, fielded, and allocated. Now, to accompany those improved tools and processes, we also need a far more structured approach to assessment of fielded ISR capabilities. Over the past 20 years, we largely lost the ability to perform disinterested analyses of ISR performance. All too often, the Tennessee has been focused almost exclusively on ISR measures of performance, hours flown, images taken, signals collected, number of orbits, and so on, rather than on measures of effectiveness. The former can be useful, the latter is far more compelling. And as I mentioned a little earlier, any disinterested analysis of measures of effectiveness demands that we link mission results directly to a commander's priority intelligence requirements. Absent this kind of analysis, we risk flying ISR for ISR's sake rather than drawing that irrefutable connection to a warfighter need. Notwithstanding progress and developing better tools to assess opportunity costs and perform these trade space analyses of various ISR capabilities, while simultaneously improving our ISR assessment processes, there are some other initiatives being considered to better employ the ISR capabilities current fielded. Next slide. One of these results revolves around the concept of what we call dynamic presence. This slide depicts the current framework of MQ1 and MQ9 platforms that are globally allocated. It is much more about cocom ownership than it is about flexibility and agility. It is, in fact, relatively inflexible. There is a different way of approaching the low supply high demand problem. Next slide. Here the focus is on placement, not allocation or ownership. For now, take RPAs or drones, if you will, as the ISR capability under consideration. Dynamic presence would involve establishing a number of fixed global locations postured to accept RPAs unreasonably short notice. Bases would be maintained either in active, warm, or cold status. There would be enormous benefits with this approach mostly manifested in the form of global agility. It would enable rapid response on a truly global scale. The ISR capabilities would not be everywhere all the time, but instead could be anywhere when needed. We would build the capability for rapid shifts between cocoms. This would, of course, require a real-time arbiter at the right level with the requisite authority to shift assets around the world. While this sounds like an enticing concept and is currently under further development within the Pentagon, you can appreciate the difficulty of getting combatant commanders to buy into a framework that could potentially pull ISR capabilities from them on relatively short notice. In the interest of time, I want to introduce just a few teasers, and I'll be glad to talk any more of these in the Q&A. Next slide. To begin with, in terms of advanced technologies, we know we must develop more low-observable, long-range, long-endurance, multi-int ISR platforms. Yet, at the same time, the tenets of simplicity, reliability, and quantity are as important as ever. You will find plenty of intelligence professionals who are concerned that, as a department, we may be overinvested in hardware and underinvested in the headwear required to take full advantage of existing capabilities. We must be careful that we do not devolve into a despiral of complex, fragile, unsustainable systems that demand a higher degree of operative training and knowledge than we can currently sustain across the force. Next, I would submit that we have entered an era in which the distinction between tactical and strategic ISR is largely an artificial one. I can provide myriad examples of so-called tactical ISR platforms generating intelligence that is useful to strategic and even the national level. And likewise, we have a number of strategic ISR platforms that were once optimized for the Cold War, yet which have performed magnificently in the tactical fight thanks the ability to remain agile through rapid fielding of new software, what we call quick reaction capabilities or QRCs. Today, what matters far more than any attempt to drop ISR capabilities into convenient and distinct tactical operation of strategic bins are the concepts of interoperability, integration infusion, and data discoverability, and more on this shortly. Swarming is one of those concepts that I expect will gain a lot of traction over the next decade. Putting cost aside for now, the goal is to invest in smaller, more diverse ISR platforms working in formation and synchronize with larger systems. Humans will be in or on the loop with control inputs focused on tasks for the swarm rather than on single maneuvers by single platforms or sensors. From there, it would be a short leap to weaponized swarms and link or integrate them with ISR to generate a truly potent tool for warfighters. Swarm technologies include nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and learning systems, dynamic and self-healing networks, formation controls, dynamic sensor cross-queuing, cloud computing, deployment, and recovery strategies, and swarm survivability strategies. Think, if you will, the climactic scene in Ender's Game. My penultimate teaser concerns reinvigorating the debate of organic versus non-organic ISR. I will only mention for now that there should be continued discussion on how to get the biggest return on investment for our low supply, high demand capabilities. Part of the equation could involve a discussion about more centralized control, but it is equally important to consider how this rapidly evolving information environment will allow broader sharing and discoverability of any ISR platform's collection, even those that would normally be considered organic. And finally, I have a difficult time envisioning a world in which we will ever fight alone again. Our allies and coalition partners bring extraordinary capabilities to the table when it comes to ISR, both in terms of platforms and sensors, but also through PED capacity, linguists, and analysts. There is no question that when it comes to intelligence professionals, other nations offer inherently superior theater knowledge and cultural understanding of the threat, often as important as any hardware that we could offer. We are making very good progress building these partnerships across the globe, although I readily acknowledge we have a lot more work to do. Next slide. In closing, I recently asked over 40 of my best, deepest thinkers, a simple question. Where should we spend the next dollar on ISR? Or put it a different way, if we are running out of money, what would offer the best return on investment in terms of future ISR capabilities? Not one person's answer centered on ISR things, very little in other words, about the next exquisite ISR platform or sensor. Instead, when I combined the inputs from these deep thinkers with my own distilled thoughts, I ended up with this word cloud. Next slide. Which I call my five-I slide, a pun only an intelligence professional could love. Interoperability. And these will be very brief. Moving rapidly away from proprietary hardware and software and toward open architectures and common standards. Similar to what the intelligence community is doing with something called ISITE, the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise. Integration and Fusion. As we see every day in combat operations in the Middle East and phase zero operations around the world, the real power of intelligence resides in the integration and fusion of multi-int capabilities from human, open source intelligence, signals intelligence and so on. ISITE will push us even faster in this direction. This is about automating our ability to ped staggering amounts of data that is developing new tools, tradecraft and analytical methodologies associated with big data. Tedding data. Making all data discoverable and rapidly advancing the concepts of something we call activity-based intelligence to increase the odds of discovering the unknowns. As one of the respondents said to me, the first step in connecting the dots is ensuring you have all the dots. And at the same time, we must invest in tools and sensors that compress the time between collection and discovery. Accelerating the process of discovery and allowing time-dominant fusion and analysis as close as possible to the point of collection. The I in ISR. Rebuilding core intelligence capabilities. In particular, the kind of analytical skills that we need for a much different future fight. Skills that atrophy due to over a decade of focusing on counter-terrorism in a regular warfare. Individuals. Intelligence is a carbon-based discipline. Very much related to what I just mentioned, we must provide our analysts the time needed to develop their skills. Acknowledging the superior talents inherent in a generation of people entirely comfortable operating in the 21st century information environment. But who lack the time and mentoring needed to grow into world-class analysts. Intuition is of course a lot more art than science. But intuition is not nurtured primarily through the amount of time spent on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. It is nurtured through time on the job. Finally, ideas and innovation. In short, people and pet are more important than platforms and sensors. As we transition to this new and unexpected environment, we need to give our intelligence professionals the room to explore new and different concepts to train to failure, to shatter stale operating models and to explore new and potentially risky ideas. I can give you examples of we're actually doing this today with great success. And it's never easy to challenge the status quo, but I'll tell you the results speak for themselves. And so I'll just say that I've covered broad swaths of ISR territory in a very short time and admit that I only scratched the surface of this incredibly important topic. But at this point, I will stop the prepared portion and we'll turn it over to back to Sam for the moderation in the Q&A. Thank you. Thank you very much. A lot there. I've filled up the page with notes. Just wanted to ask a few follow-on questions. The first of which is you alluded to the opportunity cost of ISR supporting the current operation versus we could look at ISR as a preventative measure. Could you talk a little bit about how you think I'm not going to ask you to speculate on where the international security environment is going because if we tried to do that a year ago, we would have been completely wrong. But do you think that we are making good use of ISR as a preventative tool? That was one of the four P's of the 2010 QDR. And I just haven't heard a lot of discussion about it. And I think part of that is because the security environment is much more stressing than we'd like it to be. But are there good examples that come to mind where you see some utility and some application of ISR on that preventative side? Well, the answer is yes. But if any of the combatant commanders were in here other than central command, which as I said does get right now anyway, a lion's share of the allocable ISR, the rest would say they don't have nearly enough which worries them in the predictive ISR. So that forces us to what are some alternative methods of getting that ISR? What are the creative methods? Cyber would be one of them. Space, of course, is another. You might, I have looked at cyber as potentially one of those ultimate denied area ISR capabilities that you might bring in cyber in ways that we haven't done in the past. It's no panacea, but as we look at the integration of all these intelligence disciplines, I would certainly put space and iron and cyber and human all together in that same integration bin. I will tell you that it gets back to this very difficult, complex question that somebody like Admiral Locklear is asking is how do I know what I'm missing by not having the persistent ISR across the theater? It's improved. There's no doubt it's improved over the last couple of years as some assets have begun to shift to the Pacific. But there's no question if he was in this room, he would tell you that not nearly enough. And what more do I need and where do I get it from? This brings into that whole follow-on which would be the partners and allies piece of it. In both, on the Western side and the Pacific side, come up with really, really good examples of what we're beginning to do in one case with the UK, the Italians, the Netherlands, and a number of countries, Canada is now coming on board saying they'd like to do it more and in the Pacific between South Korea, what they've been doing for a long time with a side-by-side, truly literally side-by-side up in our operating areas in the peninsula. But also Japan and Australia and Australia is beginning to come strongly into DCGS. A little bit different approach than we do but the concept is the same. So now we're focusing on the interoperability aspects of information sharing, releaseability. I can tell you that the combatant commands would say the ISR they have on all levels, national to the RC-135 rivet joint that may be in flying in theater down to cyber is extraordinary helpful in shaping the battle space in phase zero operations and understanding that predictive part. But nobody would say that they have enough to do it. That is the opportunity cost question. And when you go into the tank and try to make a decision to say do I take something out of central command and I reallocate it to Pacific command both four stars will make compelling cases. The compelling case more often than not is I have people dying on the ground in Afghanistan. Hard one to turn down. That's where we need more the models and the tools that I talked about these trade space analyses. If I could offer additional or alternative ISR capabilities to a given combatant command they would I would trust be convinced to get away from the I just need this platform. It's tendency is natural tendency for all of us is ask for I need an MQ-9 or I need a rivet joint whatever the platform is. And Colonel Jones back there very familiar with working this with Jific ISR is coming up with some models to be able to do that. To be able to go into that process in the tank and say I can't give PECOM this capability. However, if their intelligence requirement was this it's to know this about a given problem in theater. Here are some other ways we can satisfy it to scratch the itch that they have. We have a long way to go to convince anybody. They have to be a little more proof than just a model. But that's what I would say is working on very much at the DOD level right now. Terrific. Let me ask one more question and then we'll turn it over to the audience. What do we call what all of this is now? There's some debate out there. Is it C4 ISR? As you said, you see an integral link between cyber and ISR. Do we even have the right words to describe it? If you look at the coding and the comptroller budget we still stack it under C4 ISR. It's very difficult even to tell what we're spending money on then. These appear to be separate capabilities. We've created separate bureaucratic structures to house them, although in the case of the Air Force it appears that we're actually moving to bring them back together in some ways. So first of all, are we calling them the right thing? Have they evolved to be something else? And then organizationally, how are we responding to those changes and how does the 25th Air Force reflect all of that? Well, I'd say some of the challenges are similar to what we're finding in cyber. When I was on the Joint Staff, cyber was another part of my portfolio. If I didn't have enough with ISR, then cyber was equally challenging. And that is what bins are shown in the programming books for cyber. Now, I found out very quickly, and I'm not in the programming side, but OSD found out very quickly. We didn't have a very clean picture of where the money was in cyber. ISR is, I'd say, less of a problem. We do have bins, more well-established bins in terms of capabilities for ISR and where the budget lines. But you bring up which I would say is a next really important point. I like to say that we're getting to the world in which every platform is a sensor. But the more I think about this, that's not to say that every platform is an ISR platform. And there's a fundamental distinction when I say those two things. If we have an F-35, for example, it's out there collecting as much as it possibly collect, that's ISR. But the mission of that airplane is not an ISR mission. So how do you get the take off of that airplane? How do you do something with that ISR? That is an ISR capability, but it's not an ISR platform. So if you were opening the Air Force books, you would not find the F-35 listed in any ISR column. However, what it would provide is I would expect right now, knowing what I know about the platform, to be an extremely high-end capability in terms of ISR. Because of that sort of changing nature of our platforms, it is not convenient that often to say where it fits on the budget books. That's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder. I would say mostly for the United States Air Force that in terms of programming, we do have a well-established binning process for where ISR capabilities are placed. It's where you start getting into the multi-end capabilities that it becomes more challenging. And cyber is a perfect case. Where is cyber, cyber net exploitation? Where is it ISR in cyberspace? Where is it offensive cyber operations? Where is it defensive? Those are tough lines right now to draw a fine line between any of those. It's really a combination. And really it's about explaining to OSD and to the Hill where we're spending our money. I think that's really what this comes down to. In 25th Air Force, this is the beginning of what our Chief, when he said he wanted to normalize the management of ISR and Cyber United States Air Force. So we were a direct report under the Air Staff, not where any other numbered Air Force or where we normally run operations. Operations in the Air Force are run out of a numbered Air Force. So by pulling it out of a direct report to the Air Staff and now putting it on a major command, a four-star major command who's organized, trained and equipped for operations and presenting forces to the combatant commanders. This is a first step. The Chief's vision is 1-800-ISR. We do not have all ISR capabilities under 25th Air Force. If you listen to General Welch in his AFA speech, there's a 10-minute block where he really comes in and talks about ISR and cyber in the middle of that speech. And he said this may be an evolutionary step towards something in the future where all non-kinetics effects of some type might be under one common commander. As it is now, this is for me an incredibly powerful first step by bringing the two ISR wings that were not under 25th. The 9th wing with its U-2, Global Hawks MC-12, the 55th wing with a variety of very special capabilities by now putting that together with what I would say the back end, this ped piece of it, we now can operate as an entity other as in stovepipe. Now we've always done very good at integrating, but it helps when you're under a common commander. But we're not at 1-800-ISR yet. That is certainly where the vision would be. It's just going to take a little bit more and to figure out what other capability should be resident under that number of Air Force. And I just want to say for those not familiar with Air Force ISR agency, which I expect a lot of people in this room would not be in 25th Air Force, we present forces in two different ways. One is what I call the Title X chain, United States Air Force chain, but also have over 7,000 people that are involved in the combat support agencies national intelligence communities. Billets belong to me, but the work they do is on behalf of those agencies. That's a line that must be preserved whatever happens and it's a very important distinction between the Title 15 and the Title 10 piece. In addition to being 25th Air Force under Air Combat Command, I maintain these lines to these other intelligence community combat support agencies. Thank you very much. Let me open it to questions. If you wouldn't mind, please wait for the microphone to come around. Please identify yourself and your organization. And yes, sir, in the back there. Thank you. Peter Flory with Kinetic North America. General Shanahan, great to see you again. Thank you very much. Great to see you in that important new job proof that there is actually life after policy. Barely. A couple of points. First of all, having spent countless hours in the room setting up the monthly ISR book for the secretary and having gone through a lot of the arguments and discussions you've described there, I guess I'm not shocked that that has not been resolved yet. I'm just glad that I'm not there anymore and better you than me because that's a perennial problem. I'm sure things have gotten a lot better, but it was certainly an inexact science before and I wish you luck in that enterprise. Looking forward more, when I was at NATO Headquarters, one of my programs was the AGS, the Alliance Ground Surveillance Program, which finally was dragged kicking and screaming over the goal line a couple of years ago. And it was envisioned both as a program in and of itself, a specific set of capabilities, but also as the hub of a broader joint ISR initiative, which is now headquartered down in Sigonella with the actual UAVs. But I know there's an enormous amount of potential to build again, not just on the system, the hardware, but on the overall system, the overall analytical capability, the TPED aspect and the key element of that as always is going to be how to link that in with U.S. capability. And you mentioned the plumbing aspects of that as well as information sharing and everything else. And I know that at Rammstein you have work going on. I think there's partners. I know there's a lot going on. I'd love to hear what's your vision for this? What are other programs? What are other ambitions that might be out there to tie these things together and really make as much of a win-win proposition out of this as possible? Thank you. Thanks very much and really great to see you again. One of the major lessons learned of Odyssey Dawn Unified Protector was really big shortfalls in coalition ISR. No surprise to anybody. It's just targeting was one of the biggest challenges, but beyond targeting was just ISR at large. Not nearly enough and everybody had little bits and pieces. Nobody had what the United States could bring. And one of the tasks after those Libya conflict was to put something together to get further down the road, farther down the road of coalition ISR, partner ISR. So what was stood up by UCOM, by European command was something that I think you're referring to is the European Partner Integration Enterprise. We call it EPI. And it's an enclave. It's not part of Air Force DCGS, but we associate the two of them because it's also at Rammstein where you have an enclave that's tied to Bices. Bices is the information sharing system that we use with our partners in Europe. That we have, it's on the ground floor, but have done some very successful pilot projects where different countries have come in in this enclave, have done the PED part of an MQ-9 flying somewhere in the Mediterranean, or in one of the biggest success stories is Unified Vision 14, which in RQ-4 flew from down in the Mediterranean all the way up to the Baltics area as a beginning demonstration of what are we talking about when we talk about AGS? What's the future of AGS? RQ-4, AGS, really similar capabilities. So that's the start of it. There's so much more to be done on the partner side of it, but the things we're really focusing on now is the interoperability aspect, the information sharing part of it, and then the standardization. And of course, every country has serious concerns about connecting national systems to something else. It's a matter of guards and security enclaves and all that. Those are technically very, very soluble. We're close to doing that in a lot of places. The Afghanistan Mission Network is a strong success story of where that worked as advertised. So by having this place in Rammstein, where we can go in and try some of these, that's the starting point of this partner opportunities for ISR in the European theater. More often than not, in Pacific theater, it's more on the bilateral side working over time, perhaps toward more multilateral opportunities. But so far with the UK, Italy, now France is interested in EPI, the Netherlands has been involved from the very start on the capabilities in EPI, and more and more as countries are buying these ISR capabilities, they want to buy into the broader enterprise. This is the starting point of it. Just to give a brief mention of the UK, they have the UK Rivet Joint Program, which they have purchased three airplanes as part of the 20 fleet for the United States. So they have, it's not 17 and three, it's 20. So what we're trying to work through with the United Kingdom right now is, how would they offer up some of that capacity? Not through the United States system, that's a sovereignty issue, but together it's 20 airplanes. How do we offer 20 airplanes to solve ISR shortfalls somewhere around the world? And same with their MQ-9s, as they come out of Afghanistan, they're very interested in joining in where else are the MQ-9s needed? Of course, a thousand different places they're needed, the whole Africa continent needs a whole lot more ISR. Those are the things we're working through right now. Again, relatively nascent, but a lot of progress since Unified Protector and Odyssey Dawn, where we just had glaring shortfalls in ISR. EPI is the start. I'm concerned a little bit from the Air Force seat that I occupy programmatically. This is a programmatic question of Air Force DCGES. Where does DCGES end? Where does EPI begin? Where does that connection need to be made? But it was, I would tell you, very successful in this last unified vision. And from there, we're starting to put together some of these plans for future opportunities. Thanks. Great. Another question. Josh. Hi, Josh Kirschner speaking of Global Strategies. You were discussing the trade-offs inherent in different platforms and things like that and the opportunity costs. Just generally, and take this sort of, where you like, what have you heard from Congress? On the questions of trade-offs and resource restraints based on what Congress is or isn't doing. Thank you. Yeah, well, great question. When I was on the joint staff in my J39 job, in 2012, the HIPC put out a report, which was somewhat damning, but I thought, excellent. I mean, it made many of the points that I made in my prepared remarks about, we're just sending things to, you had OCO, there were needs, go-do. I mean, it was a clear, we must put more ISR against the fight in Afghanistan. And nobody was going to challenge that it shouldn't be done. It was, now what? Now what do you do with it? As we see, as assets are coming out of Afghanistan, where are they going? Well, a lot of them are not programs of record. There's not a long-term sustainment tale to them. What people thought would be an ISR dividend coming in Afghanistan, obviously, our adversary gets a vote in Iraq and Syria, is case in point that there is no ISR dividend. It's immediately shifted from one theater to the next. And if we talk about a 10-year problem with counter-ISIS, then we have a 10-year ISR problem as well. So I thought that hipster report enailed some of those really key points that I talked about. The whole idea of we need a more rigorous, disciplined process to work through the trade space analysis, that opportunity cost, that risk-benefit calculation. And that's why JIFIC ISR and others, there are a number of people working on some of these models to do it. I haven't seen anything that has been compelling enough to go back into the tank and make a case to one of the other combatant commanders why we can meet the requirements in other ways. The Hill is doing what I expect the Hill to do and hold us to account on where the money is being spent, service, potential service, duplication of programs. Nobody in this room will be shocked that that's always a problem from congressional or budgetary point of view, is why are we all spending on the same thing? We seem to be getting much better at that in coordinating between the services on our respective service capabilities that meet service requirements. So the Hill is watching this closely and I thought the Hipsley Report has some very, very powerful recommendations. I've been out of the building so I can't tell you how many of those are in process. But the Chairman's Joint Paper, it also hits on the essence of the same thing the Hipsley Report said, which I mentioned a couple of them. It's really, it's like a eight-page paper. But if you read it, the Chairman is now putting his imprimatur behind this. We've got to fix this for the next 20 years. But beyond that, no day-to-day scrutiny beyond individual programs about maybe some service duplication on some individual programs, less on the big platforms right now. And of course everybody wants to know about RPAs. And that I will digress very quickly if you allow me just to joint pet. The services have come together in a way that I am thrilled by and it was started with the Army and the Air Force coming together and saying, hey, why can't we not offer a pet capacity and our platforms to each other? For the Army, it was a significant change where they now have a reach-back operation out of Fort Gordon down in Georgia called the Aerial Intelligence Brigade. That was a complete change in the typical Army model had been organic ISR. They still of course have organic ISR for the brigade combat teams, but this is now offering up additional capability. Where the services are coming together, we've had these four pet summits just this year alone to talk about what can we offer each other. Now we're right back into that interoperability information sharing standardization question whose standards are we using to produce an image or a signals intelligence report, whatever. I'm encouraged by, I'm extremely encouraged by its recognition that the world is getting the budget constraints are tightening things even more. We have to come up with some creative ways and this idea of joint pet and joint ISR is I tell you where we need to go in the future. So that's the best I can give you on the hill part right now. Great. And all the way in the back of the room there, Paul. Thank you. Paul Schwartz at CSIS. Obviously ISR is not developing in a vacuum. There's constant interaction with our adversaries and potential adversaries who are feverishly developing their own counter ISR technologies. This must be a major input into the planning process. I was wondering if you might speak a little bit about how this is factored into the equation and what merging or existing enemy counter ISR capabilities are going to be of greatest concern over the near term. Thank you. Okay. First of all, yes, the United States Air Force is focused on that future threat. The dilemma that we face, again, no surprise to anybody in this room, the dilemma is the current fight versus the future fight in this ISR dividend that nobody is expecting to happen now coming out of Afghanistan because it just shifted, shifted up to Iraq and Syria. But at the same time, if we look at a future fight, I don't know crystal ball here, but if you take a Pacific fight of a higher end variety of which you now have very robust integrated air defense systems, cyber attacks, let's face it, our adversaries and potential adversaries have had about 13 years to study us very, very closely. They know our tactics, techniques and procedures. They know our strengths. They know our limitations. And I would expect they're focusing very heavily on those limitations. We understand that. What we're now trying to do as a service in support of the combat man requirements is build ISR capabilities for that future threat environment. And there are some in the works. We'll just say that the United States Air Force has some capabilities in development that will be more tailored to that higher end environment. If you were to ask me, where do I expect some of our greatest threat to come in that environment? A couple of thoughts. First of all, communications. They know one of our great strengths is communications. If I can take out your communications, what can I do to you? So we're working very hard on the idea of resiliency, combat cloud concepts, self-healing networks, all good terms, but really what we want to do is continue to survive in a degraded operational environment where we've lost the ability to communicate with higher headquarters. That gets into a lot of different doctrinal pieces, but on the technology piece, counter communications is a big one. Also, and if you look at potential game changers, I'm not saying black swans, maybe not quite that term, is directed energy weapons, hypersonics, hypersonic capabilities against our defenses. Hypersonics are very difficult to defend against given today's defense of capabilities and anti-space capabilities. Some of the near peer competitors are really looking at counter space capabilities. So counter space, directed energy weapons, robust integrate and air defense, and I would throw cyber into that same as well. Every country's got some cyber capability. Some near peers are much more advanced than others, and we know they're in our networks every single day. Well, if they're in our networks and stealing F-35 blueprints from one of our companies, what, where else could they be? Admiral Rogers, of course, has this very high on his priority list of where we are at risk in cyber. So those are the ones where I love the MQ1 and MQ9, but they're not necessarily going to be very survivable in that non-permissive environment. Now, if they're expendable to begin with, is there a case to be made for expending expendable assets? Perhaps. If we make them cheap enough, we can expend them. That's not anybody's current plan. We're interested more into, okay, what is the combination of capabilities? What are the combination of some of the more permissive versus the higher end ISR capabilities put together? It's the integration piece that I talked about. I can go out there and collect in a soda straw all day long in an MQ1 or MQ9. It's a soda straw unless I have all the other intelligence disciplines fused together to provide a much more, a richer contextual understanding of the threat. That's what we're working on right now. So there are capabilities being worked aggressively, not just, as I said earlier, not just ISR platforms, other platforms that will have ISR capabilities. What we might call non-traditional ISR, operational reconnaissance, enhanced battle space awareness, it's kind of buzzword things for, hey, I've got something being collected. Where do I need to get it to? Who's going to do something with it? And how do I put it together in a much bigger picture? That's what we're doing now. And let's take just one last question. Maybe if we'll take two together, the last two questions you, sir, and then you. And if you don't mind, just keep it short so we can keep the schedule here. Good morning, Johnathan Daigle. I'm a former ISR professional. You alluded to this in a strict link, between cyber and ISR. Can you expand a little bit more on that, especially how would that play toward increasing our ability in cyber defense, an area which does not naturally go with ISR? Right. I'll try to keep my answer as brief as I can, and you might as well just take two, and I'll answer them together. Sir, yes and no. Sir, a wonderful presentation. Wow. But I'm Andres Ovejo. I'm the Chief Representative in Vietnam for the Interstate Traveller Company. And before that, I had nine years of combat service in Vietnam. Retired Army 06. And so I'm very excited by your presentation. So I want to ask, please, an unfair question. Okay. Unfair because it's not technical in your area of this IRS, but it is because you do associate with such high levels of the government. And you know as well or better than I that many political decisions have been made against the best military advice, you know, go into Iraq with a light front print and on and on. So do you see, but you mentioned intense congressional interest and on the budget, how is money being spent? Yet they won't come back to debate the increasing military actions against the Islamic State. So my question is, do you see any indications or hope that really good intelligence from reconnaissance and surveillance will begin to have an impact on what we do, if anything, against potential hostile forces? Well, I'll answer the second one first. And that is with completely sidestepping any policy questions whatsoever. There is, these are natural discussions going on between OSD right now and the National Security Council. OSD, Joint Staff, National Security Council on do we need more ISR? If we need more ISR, what then do we not buy? That's the opportunity cost question. And if we're looking at a 10-year problem set and I'm not saying it is or it's not 10 years, but how much do we need to buy now versus how much to be more methodical about what's the long-term plan? We can put so much over the top of a country, but we need the other intelligence disciplines, perhaps most likely including human intelligence to give the richer texture to the intelligence we're collecting. So those discussions are ongoing as we speak. I'm not privy to what may come out of those, but the answer is most definitely they're asking for what else is available, what can we do better with what we already have? So I will leave it at that. On your question, this link between ISR and cyber, what a lot of people just don't understand, I wouldn't expect them to, if you've heard about and there's a lot of people writing about Ellen Nakashima in the post and others that talk about the cyber mission teams that are being fielded. About 6,000 people across the Department of Defense now focused on cyber requirements for the combatant commanders. Out of that, the Air Force portion is about 1,700 people. And we have a numbered Air Force that's down in San Antonio. My neighbor, Major General Ed Wilson, is the 24th Air Force Commander. He is the Cyber Air Forces Commander. What a lot of people don't understand is about half of those teams, broadly half of those teams, actually come from 25th Air Force as intelligence professionals. Signals analysts, linguists, digital network intelligence analysts. Again, these seem a little bit complex, but what really is, I make a distinction between, say let's just use offensive cyberspace operations, not my business. That's a Title X, 24th Air Force business. What is my business is what we might call ISR in cyberspace. Is ISR in cyberspace just ISR? Our Chief has said, just say ISR. Others get into a more doctrinal debate, sometimes approaching theology of where is it, C&E versus exploitation versus ISR in cyberspace. I would summarize it as, you need intelligence professionals to understand the network, to understand how to get into the network, and understand what you do with the take that you come out with from the network. So what we have is extraordinarily close bonds between 24th and 25th Air Force, working the cyber piece of 24th, the ISR piece of 25th, and just presenting teams together, and they just work as teams. They're doing it for combatant man requirements. You wouldn't know if you walked into one of these cryptologic centers, who was whom, you would not see a patch, they would just be working together on combatant command requirements. So that's when I talk about this inextricable link, and I'll leave this with the authorities piece, which is equally important. Title 50, SIGIT authorities. Sam mentioned this service cryptologic component, HAT that I wear. It is just like Admiral Rogers wears in his Dernza hat and his commander of U.S. Cyber Command hat. I have this Title 50 SIGIT authorities that I am able to have a line from the director of NSA down to me that allow us to do things in the Title 50, under Title 50 SIGIT authorities that somebody under Title 10 would not have. It's extremely well guarded, protected, intelligence oversight, all the things that you read about the news today are very near and dear to my heart. We're good people doing the right things and being very closely scrutinized for it, but it's the intelligence part of cyber that is the ISR cyber connection. And I just, it's fascinating to me because the more and more we look to the cyber future, the more we realize we need the equal components of cyber professionals, ISR professionals working together as teams. Thank you. That is a huge amount for us to think about and discuss and we look forward to keeping the conversation going. Let me say thanks to Andrew Metric from our team who pulled this together and from your team too for all the great work and have a good trip back to San Antonio. And thank you again, Bill. Thank you very much, Sam. Thanks for allowing me to come in and spend some time. I hope the noise wasn't too distracted. Yeah, I'm sorry about the electronics. No, I know. And I think the mics are still hot too, so.