Joint Warfighting: Attacking Time-Critical Targets

摘要

This letter responds to your request that we review the Department of Defense's (DOD) efforts to enhance its ability to attack time-critical targets. While DOD has developed and fielded considerable capability to detect, assess, and attack most fixed enemy targets, experiences in the Persian Gulf and more recently in Kosovo revealed that DOD has limited ability to rapidly identity and strike time-critical targets, such as mobile Scud and surface-to-air missile sites. Such targets proved to be elusive when our adversaries were able to move critical assets to safety in a shorter time frame than it takes us to implement the sensor-to-shooter process. In fact, the time needed to effectively attack mobile targets is much shorter than DOD's established 30 to 72 hour targeting cycle for attacking most fixed targets. DOD studies have pointed to a variety of reasons for why it takes too long to be in a position to strike time-critical targets. Chiefly, the systems involved in the sensor-to- shooter process do not operate effectively together. There are over 100 command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems that are needed to identity and strike targets. But these are separately owned and operated by each of the military services as well as other DOD and intelligence agencies. These separate systems have limited ability to interoperate, both technically (such as incompatible data formats) and operationally. As a result, they cannot easily and quickly exchange data; communication systems must be patched together to make this happen. Compounding this problem is the fact that each service has its own command, control, and communications structure that may present barriers to interoperability. In fact, in a battle situation, the Joint Forces Commander is faced with integrating, in an ad hoc manner, more than 400 different mission and software applications.