By Robbin Laird
When I visited VADM Miller, then the Navy’s Air Boss, in 2020, I learned of something called MISR. No not a cheap person, but the Navy’s rethink of how to work the left side of the kill chain or to expand its capability to provide the data necessary for more accurate and rapid decision making.
As Vice Admiral Miller, the Navy’s Air Boss said to me: “The next war will be won or lost by the purple shirts. You need to take MISR seriously, because the next fight is an ISR fight.”
I went to the Naval Aviation Warfighting Center or NAWDC to follow up and to learn more about MISR. I talked with NAWDC officers three times that year and visited twice. The last visit was to observe the exercise which was led by MISR officers, namely Resolute Hunter. At that exercise when I visited, the main focus was upon how to leverage ISR platforms which the Navy could work with which were non-Navy platforms.
This past Fall, I visited NAWDC again and spoke with MISR officers again and learned about the development of the Resolute Hunter exercise. What I learned is that the payload revolution had come to the ISR challenge. Rather than ISR platforms, the focus is upon sensor awareness delivered to the distributed decision maker. It is about enabling a variety of platforms with payloads which can deliver the surveillance and reconnaissance data to the distributed decision maker to be able to act rapidly and accurately in a fluid battlespace.
This means that MISR and its Resolute Hunter exercises has evolved to be able to encompass payloads on various platforms, and payloads on autonomous systems as pipelines providing the data needed for accurate and rapid decision making.
Recently, I talked with the MISR Department Head at NAWDC, CDR Timothy “HaveQuick” Bierbach about the evolution. He provided me with his perspective on the evolution which I had observed.
He noted: “What you saw in 2020 was the utilization of manned ISR dedicated platforms in the battlespace. How can we better utilize and optimize the functionality of the reconnaissance strike complex that we built out during the 1980s? We now are focused on how we can leverage new payloads and a wider variety of platforms to deliver the decisive information which the commanders need, known as the layered reconnaissance strike network. The focus is not on a narrow number of assets to provide ISR data; rather it is upon enabling the decision-maker with the most relevant data to make a more rapid decision.
“The combination of all of these systems, sensors, platforms and weapons makes the current battle space characterized by more rapid decision making and also changes how legacy industrial military technology can operate more effectively.”
The focus is upon training MISR officers to learn how to leverage new technologies, new payloads and combine them with the evolution of the legacy force to deliver capability to the force to fight more effectively, rapidly and decisively.
Secretary Wynne, who brought me in to the world of fifth generation aircraft, always argued that the warrior shaping the con-ops guided how technology would be used.
He argued the following: “A new CONOPs leveraging the new aircraft and able to incorporate legacy platforms and to shape new investments enhancing the joint effect is crucial to success. Declining numbers, coupled with a refusal to recognize the “re-norming challenge,” will lead to a needless loss of capability.
“But we need as well to invest in the future, not just modernize the past, and step back and consider which tactics techniques and procedures have current technology trends been guiding the future fight.
“We need to also consider the training needed to perfect our capabilities. We need to retool and to rethink, and it must start in our imagination and not assume that historical success will be replicated in the future without serious effort.”
This is clearly what MISR is doing, not just building muscle memory for the past fight using legacy systems but building forward to shape ways to deliver the effects needed for the future fight. This means as well that MISR and NAWDC are working ways for training to drive development of new payloads for the operational force. By bringing in developmental payloads to Resolute Hunter exercise, the MISR team can test out what helps, what works, what does not and what can fill gaps and drive greater mission success.
This effort reflects another Wynne insight as well.
“Look to the future technology base, and consider how it will affect the conduct of warfare. Now, bring to bear the military operational brilliance so necessary to converting any technology into a weapon of warfare.”
MISR and NAWDC are focused on shaping the military art by embracing relevant new technologies and in the ISR world, a major change is that the sensors available to a distributed force using a version of a local area network is becoming a reality. The Navy leadership has been focusing on the need to fight from the Maritime Operations Center (MOC) which clearly can be distributed. Now the payload revolution is enabling distributed combat clusters to have the ISR data they need or the S and R data they need to make their decisions they are authorized to do.
The MISR approach is tailored to such a dynamic approach moving naval warfare forward beyond the information age to the age where the warrior in the high end fight needs to fight at the speed of light.
CDR Bierbach noted that “a local reconnaissance strike network now can operate much more rapidly in terms of decision cycle than a single national reconnaissance strike complex”
And frankly, in my view, the payload revolution is providing to a very wide range of platforms including maritime autonomous system mesh fleets the kind of ISR and C2 nodes enabling distributed forces and strike complexes.
Bierbach then posed the key challenge: “How do we utilize to a maximum capacity and the maximum functionality of the local area reconnaissance strike networks and combine it with the national reconnaissance strike network to create the maximum desired effects?”
The Wynne quotes are taken from our forthcoming book to be published 7 April 2025.