I last visited the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center in Fallon, Nevada during the pandemic in 2020 during the Rear Admiral Brophy’s time in command of NAWDC. During that visit I became familiar with an important new pilot program in NAWDC which was quite different from the rest of the command.

This program was called MISR or Maritime ISR for short. NAWDC is best known as “Top Gun” and the image one has of platforms coming off the carrier deck. MISR is. Platform agonistic and is focused on the shift in warfighting associated with the digital domain.

Coming back four years later, I was able to get a chance to talk with MISR officers about how MISR has progressed as the Navy has increasingly focused on force distribution and one embedded in the digital transformation processes of the fleet.

The core exercise hosted by NAWDC and run by the MISR team is called Resolute Hunter. The Fall iteration of this exercise was starting during the week I was at NAWDC.

This is what I learned during my visit in the Fall of 2020 from the head of MISR, CDR Pete “Two Times” Salvaggio.

MISR prides itself in being both platform and sensor agnostic, along with employing an effects-based tasking and tactics approach that allows for shaping the ISR domain knowledge which a task force or fleet needs to be fully combat effective. What is most impressive is that CDR Salvaggio has been present at the creation and is a key part of shaping the way ahead in a time of significant change in what the fleet is being asked to do in both a joint and coalition operational environment.

What is entailed in “Two Times” perspective is a cultural shift. “We need a paradigm shift: The Navy needs to focus on the left side of the kill chain.”

The kill chain is described as find, fix, track, target, engage and assess (F2T2EA). For the U.S. Navy, the weight of effort has been upon target and engage. As “Two Times” puts it “But if you cannot find, fix or track something, you never get to target.”

There is another challenge as well: in a crisis, knowing what to hit and what to avoid is crucial to crisis management. This clearly requires the kind of ISR management skills to inform the appropriate decision makers as well.

The ISR piece is particularly challenging as one operates across a multi-domain battlespace to be able to identify the best ISR information, even if it is not contained within the ISR assets and sensors within your organic task force.

And the training side of this is very challenging. That challenge might be put this way: How does one build the skills in the Navy to do what you want to do with regard to managed ISR data and deliver it in the correct but timely manner and how to get the command level to understand the absolute centrality of having such skill sets?

“Two Times” identified a number of key parameters of change with the coming of MISR.

“We are finally breaking the old mindset; it is only now that the department heads at NAWDC are embracing the new role for ISR in the fight.”

“We are a unique weapons school organization at NAWDC for we are not attached to a particular platform like Top Gun with the F-18 and F-35. The MISR school has both officers and enlisted WTIs in the team. We are not all aviators; we have intel specialists, we have cryptologists, pilots, aircrew-men etc.”

“Aviators follow a more rapid pace of actions by the mere nature of how fast the aircraft we are in physically move; non-aviators do not necessarily have the same pace of working rapidly within chaos. Our goal at MISR is to be comfortable to work in chaos.”

In my discussion with “Two Times” in his office during my November 2020 visit as he sat down during various swirls of activity underway in the exercise, “This is the only place within the Navy where we are able to pull all of these ISR assets together to work the collaborative assessment and determination space.”

I would add that this about the whole question of ISR-led and enabled, which is focused on how to leverage sensor networks to accelerate the decision cycle.

New ISR/C2 capabilities are clearly coming to the force, but as he put it: “We need to take what we have today and make it work more effectively in a collaborative ISR effort.”

But to underscore the shift from being the collectors and delivering data to the decision makers, he referred to the goal of the training embodied in the exercise as making the operators in airborne ISR, “puzzle solvers.” Rather than looking at these airborne teams as the human managers of airborne sensors, “we are training future Jedi Knights.”

And to be clear, all of the assets used in the exercise are not normally thought of as ISR platforms but are platforms that have significant sensor capabilities.

It really was about focusing on sensor networks and sorting through how these platform/networks could best shape an understanding of the evolving mission and paths to mission effectiveness.

So what has happened since then?

To get an update, I talked with LCDR Jason “Cuddles” Falk, who is the assistant commander of the program, and a former MH-60R Weapons and Tactics instructor, about the evolution since 2020. There have been significant changes in the Navy moving forward with Distributed Maritime Operations in the context of the changing nature of warfare in which the digital dimension has become increasingly significant.

It became clear in talking with him that MISR had become involved with the entire kill chain, not just the left side. For targeting in a fluid distributed environment is closely linked with surveillance and reconnaissance informing decision making rapidly enough to determine where the target is located and how best to degrade or kill that target.

In fact, MISR is de facto highlighting the importance of a kill web rather than a kill chain. A distributed force works with Local Area Networks, which means that the force can operate with combat clusters leveraging LANs rather than having to rely on centrally delivered ISR content. And this allows, the MISR thinking process to encompass autonomous and remotely piloted systems as key decision-making aides for combat cluster LANs or as adds to higher echelon decision making.

Since I have been to Resolute Hunter in 2020, the exercise has encompassed five eyes partners and joint participants, notably the USMC as they work Naval integration. And indeed if one wishes to find a key epicenter of Navy and USMC integration, MISR and NAWDC are key places to go to see how they are working the kind of S and R D being worked or surveillance, reconnaissance and decision-making. And the folding in of autonomous systems will certainly be a key part of this.

But Resolute Hunter has changed in another way. The ready force needs more rapid transformation, and this is being driven by payloads coming to the fleet, rather than new platforms. The kill web is empowered and anchored by the payloads available at the point of operations delivering the kinds of effects which the task or combat cluster needs to have available.

Resolute Hunter has evolved to the point whereby warfighters participating in the exercise are given access to new payloads to explore their potential benefit to a warfighting outcome. In other words, Resolute Hunter can become a place to help the Navy and the joint and allied forces to discover ways to close gaps in warfighting with new payloads on platforms or delivered by autonomous systems.

This is how Cuddles put the focus of the effort:

“We’re producing warrior solution architects. If you tell us the capabilities and the effects of the payload, we can connect them with other payloads to create the constellation that can deliver the desired effect. In other words: kill web design, execution, and management. The enemy gets a vote too. Given the complex nature of the next fight, the speed, scale, and precision required to achieve the desired effects need to be aligned at the right opportunity in time and space and also need to be dynamically managed as the battlespace and enemy actions change.

“We are focused on producing the human element that can manage those sensing, shooting, and C2 constellations and exploit those opportunities.

“The platform, payload agnostic approach enhances the ability to look for contingencies and allows you to build in the redundancy needed to execute kill webs at speed.”

Industrial partners are now bringing their experimental payloads, either roll on roll off payloads, or autonomous system delivered payloads, to Resolute Hunter to get into the hands of warfighters.

This platform-payload mix in the hands of warfighters is the key to driving the kind of rapid change the ready force needs in order to be able to compete in today’s strategic context.

Featured photo: U.S. Marines assigned to the operations control element with 1st Radio Battalion, I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, assemble an inflatable satellite antenna at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, during Exercise Resolute Hunter 25-1, Oct. 31, 2024. Resolute Hunter, the Department of Defense’s only dedicated battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance exercise, has served as a proving ground for 1st RadBn as it employs a new command structure consisting of three elements – small teams of SIEW Marines, the OCE and an operations control and analysis center – all geographically distributed as they would be in a real-world operation. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Nate Carberry)

For example, see the following:

Leveraging Training to Shape Payload Innovations