Air Force releases flight plan for next generation ISR dominance

The U.S. Air Force recently released its Next Generation Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Dominance Flight Plan, which is a strategy for maintaining and enhancing competitive advantage in the rapidly changing digital era through 2028.

“We need to balance our ISR portfolio to meet the challenges of a highly contested environment,” Lt. Gen. Dash Jamieson, deputy chief of staff for ISR, said. “The future will consist of a multidomain, multi-intelligence, government/commercial-partnered collaborative sensing grid. It will be resilient, persistent, and penetrating to support a range of options across the spectrum of conflict.”

The plan has three facets supported by 10 lines of effort – investing in the foundational capabilities of people and partnerships to drive culture change; pursuing disruptive technologies and opportunities; and using multirole, cross-domain ISR collection capabilities to bolster readiness and lethality.

Each line of effort has its own plan with goals and benchmarks. Goals include transitioning industrial-age constructs into digital-age approaches, fielding new technology development from idea to execution via DevOps, and operating a data-centric enterprise.

It will be a collaborative culture, the Air Force said, and will require strengthening partnerships with academia, allies, industry and the other military services.

The plan is aligned with the National Defense Strategy.