Air-Intelligence Operations and Training: The Decisive Edge for Effective Airpower Employment

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Air-Intelligence Operations and Training

The Decisive Edge for Effective Airpower Employment

The Changing Nature of War:
Intelligence Moves to the Center

Since the attacks by Muslim extremists on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 (9/11), both the world and the practice of war have changed in fundamental ways. Perhaps the most important of these changes has been an exponential growth in the importance of agile and actionable intelligence. This is so, not just because a new generation of technologies has emerged to facilitate such an alteration, but because the enemies we fight today—elusive, ruthless, technology savvy, and extremist—represent a new kind of threat, one requiring a commensurate change in our intelligence efforts.

Since 2001 the Air Force has quietly taken center stage in the ISR effort, from the employment of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to dissemination of near-real-time intelligence. For example, the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground/Surface System provides well over half of all operational intelligence to the combatant commander.¹ Yet, this contribution would be impossible if we did not have superbly trained Airmen to operate these kinds of vital ISR assets. Without the intelligence schoolhouse at Goodfellow AFB, Texas, these “precious resources”—as General Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, calls intelligence Airmen—would not get the insights they need to mature into the world’s best intelligence professionals.

The changes in warfare since 2001 have included an array of problems that demand sophisticated and precise intelligence analysis. The act of striking time-sensitive targets is an intelligence-dependent process that would be impossible without the ability to track high-value individuals, locate insurgent camps and areas of operations, and engage in many other critical ISR actions that not only act as force-multipliers but also serve as the “forces” that drive our successes. To help defeat our enemies, intelligence professionals are employing sophisticated new training methodologies, technologies, and analytical techniques; sharing sources and methods very effectively; and coming together organizationally in ways not seen since World War II. Our intelligence Airmen are indeed precious resources. We may not win all our wars with them, but we will lose without them.²

Echoes: Intelligence Operations
and Training in World War II

Intelligence has always been a critical force-multiplier, but its importance to operational successes became absolutely vital during World War II. The Allies’ breaking of German ciphers paid huge dividends. Similar successes occurred in the Pacific, where the Allies broke key Japanese codes, resulting in victories from Midway to the submarine campaign that isolated the Japanese home islands from their sources of supply.³

Nearly as important was the development of a sophisticated intellectual infrastructure for Anglo-American air intelligence. This included highly trained intelligence specialists; new technologies such as signals-intelligence systems, advanced reconnaissance aircraft and cameras, and the tools required to exploit imagery; operational experience built on the solid foundation laid by intensive training; and an unprecedented degree of organizational coordination and cooperation that began among British agencies and came to include Americans.⁴

In the training arena, Americans took their lead from the British. For instance, British leaders hired intelligence personnel with the greatest aptitude for their particular specialty. They also put these people in positions that suited their talents after sending them through a rigorous training program. Combat-experienced analysts then returned to train new recruits. Finally, the British held their troops to the most stringent of standards while giving them authority to make analytical judgments. Our countrymen quickly followed suit.⁵

Most important of all, however, the Allies developed an organizational structure in which intelligence sharing and coordination were the norm, and within which one specific organization or agency had responsibility for making the decision on a given analytical or operational intelligence issue. This organizational excellence, along with superb training, proved to be an essential aspect of Allied successes. This was particularly evident during the heavy-bomber campaigns that destroyed the German transportation and oil infrastructures in 1944–45, crippling the German military, reducing Allied casualties, and speeding the end of the war in Europe. Sadly, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this article, and despite the development of some relatively sophisticated targeting capabilities within Strategic Air Command during the Cold War, the air-intelligence expertise amassed during World War II withered until only a shadow remained.⁶

For the first time since 1945, the Air Force is once again moving rapidly in the direction of a vigorous intelligence program, establishing new organizations such as the ISR Agency with specific mission sets as well as making each intelligence organization within the Air Staff and other commands responsible for specific programmatic, operational, and training responsibilities. Most importantly, Air Force senior leaders recognized the rapidly increasing importance of intelligence by creating an entirely new deputy chief of staff position, the USAF/A2, with authority to make the changes required to bring intelligence into the twenty-first century. In fact, the chief emphasizes that the first step in this process will be “to realign functions within the Headquarters Staff to establish the AF/A2 as the single focal point and lead for all Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance capabilities.”⁷

Renaissance: Terrorist Attacks of 9/11,
a New War, and the Air-Intelligence Resurgence

The long post–World War II neglect of air intelligence came to an abrupt end on 9/11. With the United States at the center of targeting efforts by Muslim extremists, the enemy appeared easy to identify—at least at the macro level. However, once the initial campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq ended, the nature of both wars changed. We and our allies found ourselves mired in counterinsurgencies, nation building, and anti-civil-war duties. Consequently, these campaigns demanded entirely new air-intelligence capabilities. Fortunately, the same building blocks that made the 1944–45 air campaigns so successful are reemerging. Perhaps the key elements of this new intellectual infrastructure are air-intelligence troops and the sophisticated technologies they continue to master at ever-higher levels of proficiency. In the wars we are waging, and will wage, these troops will become one of the final arbiters of success.⁸

The technologies that our air-intelligence specialists leverage in these new kinds of wars are also vital to our successes because of the enemy we fight. Consequently, ISR assets (including Army, Navy, and Marine platforms) are the foundation of virtually every military success. The key role of air intelligence is highlighted by efforts to locate, observe, characterize, track, and engage extremist high-value individuals. In several cases, the full range of assets, from human intelligence to airborne ISR platforms and Distributed Common Ground/Surface Systems as well as national technical means, has come together to provide unprecedented situational awareness, detailed characterization of targets and their support networks, and the terminal tracking and engagement data required to kill our adversaries. Yet, air-intelligence assets are transforming how we fight in other, less obvious ways—for example, miniaturized and full-sized UASes that safeguard ground forces from ambush. Time-sensitive targeting offers yet another example. Increasingly sophisticated technologies and capabilities now allow intelligence personnel to direct pilots, ground forces, and other combatants to targets in minutes instead of hours or days. Young Airmen are developing these new skills at the Goodfellow AFB schoolhouse—the Air Force center for intelligence training and a key producer of intelligence specialists for all the services.

The Training Revolution:
Troops, Technologies, and Methodologies

The ongoing intelligence-training revolution is the product of three components: personnel, state-of-the-art technologies, and creative teaching methodologies. Our airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines form the center of the training effort—they will carry the fight to our adversaries. The chief emphasized this when he noted that “our Intel Way Ahead also addresses end-to-end Intelligence Airmen career force management, from the focus of our initial technical training to how we develop our intel professionals into leaders.”⁹

Although the troops currently in training are among the best ever to pass through the schoolhouse portals, the real force-multipliers in their training regimen are new training technologies that introduce high degrees of realism, dynamism, and unpredictability into exercise play, and vastly improved teaching methodologies that emphasize analytical skills. Put simply, training technologies give exercises the look and feel of the war we are currently fighting.

One new modeling and simulation technology, for instance, allows for dynamic exercise play by processing students’ inputs in sophisticated ways to produce outcomes designed to reward sound analysis and careful employment of ISR assets while penalizing poor analysis and employment. If players send a high-value ISR asset into harm’s way without checking the enemy order of battle or requesting escort by friendly fighters, they often lose the asset and must prosecute the rest of the fight—including intelligence-collection management and targeting—without it. Similarly, making poor choices when building their “collection deck” (the assignment of ISR assets to collect against various targets) will considerably reduce the effectiveness of air strikes and other attacks.¹⁰

The current suite of training technologies enables students to practice intelligence functions at all levels of war, from unconventional, low-intensity, tactical engagements to conventional, high-intensity, force-on-force conflicts. Advanced modeling and simulation technologies that use UAS feeds, satellite-orbit displays, moving-target-indicator software, and sophisticated message-delivery capabilities arrayed in a realistic environment much like an air and space operations center have changed the face of intelligence training in new and dramatic ways.¹¹

For instance, signals intelligence (SIGINT) analysts are employing a new generation of classroom tools that allow them to listen to and see military activities in their target language, carried out in real-world situations by our current and potential adversaries, thus giving them a real-world flavor we could barely have imagined even two years ago. These training modules come complete with static, background noise, different dialects, and a host of other challenges designed to push young “SIGINTers” to the limits of their capabilities.¹² In coordination with national agencies, the schoolhouse is leveraging technologies never before offered to the Department of Defense, all of which will soon enable young apprentices to practice even more extensively on real-world mission data collected by a variety of ISR assets. Just as impressive, these kinds of technologies enable students to map not only communications networks but also human networks, zeroing in on high-value individuals, infiltrators, and rogue elements.¹³

The same advantages accrue to students in the analytical-intelligence tracks. Both SIGINTers and traditional all-source analysts benefit from advanced technologies that allow them to work together in a capstone exercise that pushes their learning curve to the limit while giving them an opportunity to see what expertise, intuition, and analytical insights their counterparts bring to the table in the ISR division of an air and space operations center. These Air Force analysts are now working with Army SIGINT mission managers who use advanced training technologies to help student “targeteers” pick high-value, high-threat, and time-sensitive ground targets. Similarly, new technologies will enable communications and electronic-intelligence specialists (the two SIGINT subspecialties) to bring near-real-time intelligence to the table, further enhancing realism. This effort to bring all varieties of intelligence specialists together for intensive training creates crucial synergy for the fight.¹⁴

Troops and technologies represent a vital duo, but new teaching methodologies are equally important. These rely not only on instructor preparation but also on a steady influx of combat-tested instructors to the schoolhouse. They involve leading-edge teaching techniques that combine intensive instruction, frequent practical exercises, and maximum leveraging of new and emerging technologies. In the officers’ course, for instance, students now focus on analytical skills from the second week of a nearly seven-month-long course, and they employ these deepening skills during every exercise. All students must deliver an ISR employment briefing in which they analyze a real-world scenario from previous operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, determine optimum employment of scarce ISR assets, and present their plan to instructors. The debriefings that come afterwards are often delivered by combat-experienced instructors who know where students went wrong—or right—and drive this home with personal experiences. Yet, instructors also ensure that students recognize they will operate in a complex, real-world environment in which inspired analysis is difficult and perfect analysis impossible. In this, they take their lead from General Deptula, the USAF/A2, who notes that “you can’t expect predictions with 100 percent success in intel work, and you shouldn’t, because then we drive motivations to tell the leadership what they want to hear.”¹⁵

The employment of combat veterans as instructors is a key linchpin in the current training renaissance. A significant issue, therefore, and one the intelligence community is working hard to address, is the necessity of making the schoolhouse an attractive assignment for Airmen. Fortunately, senior leaders recognize the importance of realistic joint training to the success of the intelligence enterprise. Consequently, they reward personnel who perform well at the schoolhouse with excellent assignments upon completion of their teaching tours. During the selection board conducted by the intelligence leadership board in 2007, all five of the officers considered from Goodfellow received competitive director-of-operations or wing director-of-intelligence assignments.¹⁶ The promotion picture is also improving dramatically. And so it must if we are to meet General Moseley’s and General Deptula’s vision of Air Force intelligence as “the preeminent intel organization in the U.S. military, with the most respected intel personnel and the most valuable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance . . . capabilities.”¹⁷ Put simply, this all begins with leading-edge training. If we cannot attract and reward the best people to teach at the schoolhouse, then we will graduate mediocre students.

In line with this emphasis on operational currency, training squadrons hone their instructors’ skills and teaching currency by deploying them to field sites for short or extended periods. Conversely, the schoolhouse hosts a huge array of subject-matter experts, active duty and retired senior intelligence officers, and leaders from national intelligence agencies, all of whom bring vital perspectives to both students and their instructors while simultaneously building ties between intelligence organizations.¹⁸

New Directions:
Total Force, Joint Force,
and National Agencies

One of the often-overlooked truths of intelligence training is that it would come to a screeching halt without a Total Force effort. Civilians, both civil service and contractors, play a vital role at the schoolhouse as instructors, network engineers, technologists, resources experts, manpower experts, registrars, and training managers. We cannot complete the mission without them. The same is true of our Guard and Reserve personnel, who play similarly key roles. This is truly a Total Force effort. Even more fundamentally, it is also a joint effort.¹⁹

Approximately 25 percent of the instructors at Goodfellow are from our sister services. This presence is as crucial as the joint student presence. Indeed, for the first time, intelligence students from all services are training together—a huge force multiplier since it provides insight into the kinds of intelligence work each service does best and, more importantly, brings those discrete areas of expertise together to provide a synergy that would otherwise be absent. In a telling statistic, nearly 80 percent of intelligence specialists from our sister services come through the schoolhouse for initial or advanced training—or both.²⁰

Jointness is vital, but interaction with national agencies is also crucial—and we are building relationships with these key players as well as leveraging their training assets. Efforts with the National Security Agency in particular are paying handsome dividends as the schoolhouse receives increased funding and leading-edge training systems that allow us to bring together national and military intelligence personnel and products in new, essential ways.²¹

Air-Intelligence Training
and the Air-Intelligence Revolution

The air-intelligence revolution currently under way is itself part of a larger phenomenon driven by rapid changes in warfare and concomitant intelligence requirements since 9/11. To an unprecedented degree, the tactics, techniques, and procedures for employing ISR assets rely on close cooperation between military and national intelligence organizations and agencies, all of whom bring unique attributes and capabilities that facilitate time-sensitive targeting, long-term surveillance and target characterization, nodal analysis of human and nonhuman target systems, vectoring of combat aircraft and ground troops to the proper targets, and myriad other tasks. Yet, training lies at the heart of all of these successes. According to an old proverb, “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.” This is particularly true of intelligence training because it gives us the tools to safeguard American and allied lives while maximizing the effects we achieve against our enemies. Nonetheless, we still have much to do.

Tasks: Bringing the
Air-Intelligence Revolution to Maturity

We need to complete several operational and training actions in order to maximize our intelligence capabilities. The first involves deepening our joint and national focus and interactions in terms of both training and operations. Closer interaction at the schoolhouse can address the former, but only the development of a new intellectual infrastructure, in which military and civilian intelligence organizations and agencies come together in more intense and orderly interactions, can take us the rest of the way.

Second, we must continue to leverage leading-edge technologies. Closely tied to this is the key requirement that we employ this equipment to train like we fight. The capstone exercise at the schoolhouse is moving rapidly in this direction. It enables instructors to deliver realistic, dynamic, and unpredictable training that maximizes learning and allows students to profit from both good decisions and bad ones at no cost to our troops in the field.

Third, we must push hard to make our “Focus on Goodfellow” efforts a success. These include attracting the most qualified, combat-tested instructors to teach the next generation of intelligence specialists and bringing in the leadership cadre necessary to tie the larger effort together. Needless to say, this effort will fail if we do not reward these troops for their willingness to come to the schoolhouse. Without this human talent, we will not succeed. We must remember the World War II experience: our best Airmen went from the fighting front to the schoolhouse in order to train the next cadre of troops. On the other side of the coin, the schoolhouse is working to fend off an ever-growing list of deployment taskers, which, taken collectively, threaten to slow or even halt several vital courses. A deployment load that takes instructor numbers below the minimum needed to teach the full range of intelligence courses would have major second- and third-order effects in the field, where fewer intelligence specialists—and less-well-trained ones—wage a losing battle to keep up with the enemy’s ever-changing tactics, techniques, and procedures and threat-system employment. We cannot afford to undercut instructor numbers and quality at the schoolhouse.

Fourth, and on a related note, we must continue to leverage the huge pool of human talent available to train our students and, in the case of senior officers, assist the leadership at Goodfellow with its efforts to make continuous improvements at the schoolhouse. This is precisely why we must broaden and deepen the pool of subject-matter experts, senior intelligence officers, and senior operational leaders who come to share their expertise and life experiences with the students.

Fifth, we must bend all our efforts to creating a proper balance between preparing to fight current adversaries and preparing students to fight future ones. This process is under way, with the capstone intelligence exercise now featuring a high-intensity conflict and a simultaneous lower-intensity effort. This kind of play will force students to employ scarce ISR assets with maximum effectiveness and efficiency while exposing them to the full range of real and potential adversaries. Our list of those adversaries changes quickly; we must be sufficiently flexible and well trained to wage future wars with appropriate intelligence capabilities.

The central importance of intelligence to military operations is clear. By combining a visionary and highly effective program for intelligence training with operational fixes such as a renewed intellectual infrastructure, including close cooperation between military and civilian intelligence organizations, we will be better prepared than ever for the full spectrum of armed conflict. When merged seamlessly with operations, intelligence will enable us to provide for our nation’s security by delivering the decisive edge in current and future wars.

1. This includes intelligence and operations personnel at Multi-National Corps-Iraq/J2, the combined air operations center, Air Combat Command/A2, and other locations.

2. The Gulf War Air Power Survey was the first publication to look in detail at the difficulties inherent in striking time-sensitive targets. Since then, scores of books and articles have explored this problem, and intelligence personnel are leveraging these insights along with new technologies to engage such targets in record time. See Eliot A. Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, 1993).

3. There are dozens of good sources on the project to decipher German messages, known as Ultra. One of the best is F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, 5 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979–1990). For the successes in the Pacific, see Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s Ultra: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).

4. For a detailed look at this key intelligence success, see Robert S. Ehlers Jr., “BDA: Anglo-American Air Intelligence, Bomb Damage Assessment, and the Bombing Campaigns against Germany, 1914–1945” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2005).

7. Gen T. Michael Moseley, “CSAF’s Vector: Transforming Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance,” 29 January 2007, http://www.af.mil/library/viewpoints/csaf.asp?id=299.

10. 17th Training Group / Training Squadron, Modeling and Simulation Initial Operational Capability and Full Operational Capability, August 2006; and idem, Modeling and Simulation Strategic Plan, September 2006.

12. The term SIGINTer is slang for a SIGINT specialist. These intelligence personnel are charged with monitoring both communications and noncommunications electronic emissions and bringing intelligence gleaned from these intercepts to bear during combat operations.

14. Commander, 17th Training Group, memorandum of agreement among the 17th Training Support Squadron, 315th Training Squadron, and 316th Training Squadron, subject: Operation Lone Star,December 2006.

15. Quoted in “Air Force Launches Intelligence Overhaul, Aiming to Lead Field,” InsideDefense.com, 31 January 2007, 4.

16. Message, Air Force Personnel Center, to Air Force senior intelligence officers, subject: Results of Summer 2007 Intelligence Director of Operations Board, February 2007.

18. The 315th Training Squadron hosted over 50 senior visitors in 2007, including 10 general officers or civilian equivalents and over 30 colonels and civilian equivalents.

19. Every training squadron includes at least 10 percent civilians—in several cases, closer to 30 percent—as well as three to 15 Guard and Reserve personnel. Finally, nearly 25 percent of the instructors in the 17th Training Group’s squadrons come from our sister services.

21. Five recent visits by National Security Agency personnel have had a huge impact on its growing relationship with the schoolhouse.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University

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