Watchdog Says Shape Up ISR Systems

Congress’ watch­dog agency, the Government Accountability Office, is warn­ing that the Pentagon needs to improve how it plans for and man­ages devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal intel­li­gence and sur­veil­lance systems.

In a report released April 23, the GAO said the mil­i­tary has strug­gled “to improve inte­gra­tion across DOD and national intel­li­gence agen­cies” ham­pered by the widely dif­fer­ing mis­sions and bureau­cratic cul­tures of the intel­li­gence agencies.

This is not an aca­d­e­mic exer­cise. The report notes that the mil­i­tary plans to spend $28 bil­lion over the next seven years to field a wide array of intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance sys­tems. That’s just air­borne sys­tems and does not include spy satel­lites, with their tra­di­tion­ally hefty price tags.

The GAO report cites one exam­ple where the Pentagon “had dif­fi­culty obtain­ing com­plete infor­ma­tion” on top secret “national” assets — usu­ally a veiled ref­er­ence to highly clas­si­fied radar and electro-​​optical satel­lites — “because of secu­rity clas­si­fi­ca­tions of other agency doc­u­ments.” Also, bud­get wars have ham­pered the effort to improve coor­di­na­tion across the intel­li­gence enter­prise, the GAO report says. In clas­sic under­stated fash­ion, the report says that “dis­agree­ments about equi­table fund­ing from each bud­get have led to pro­gram delays.”

The Pentagon has drawn up an “ISR Integration Roadmap” but it does not appear to help much, if the report’s lan­guage is parsed care­fully. The roadmap does not “pro­vide a long-​​term view of what capa­bil­i­ties are required to achieve strate­gic goals or pro­vide detailed infor­ma­tion that would make it use­ful as a basis for decid­ing among alter­na­tive investments.”

The GAO reviewed 19 intel­li­gence and recon­nais­sance sys­tems pro­pos­als and found that 12 “spon­sors” — this could be a com­bat­ant com­mand, an intel­li­gence agency or a ser­vice — “did not com­plete assess­ments, and the com­plete­ness of the remain­ing seven spon­sors’ assess­ments var­ied.” Perhaps most wor­ry­ing, was the office’s find­ing that the entity charged with over­see­ing these cru­cial deci­sions — the Battlespace Awareness Functional Capabilities Board — “lacks ade­quate num­bers of ded­i­cated, skilled per­son­nel to engage in early coor­di­na­tion with spon­sors and to review spon­sors’ assessments.”

The report’s authors rec­om­mend that Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells Adm. Mike Mullen, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James Clapper, under­sec­re­tary of Defense for intel­li­gence, to work together and develop “a com­pre­hen­sive source of infor­ma­tion on all ISR capa­bil­i­ties.” Also, Gates should also put in place a mon­i­tor­ing process to make sure the capa­bil­i­ties board and those it works with do a bet­ter job. Finally, the report’s authors say the capa­bil­i­ties board’s staffing lev­els and their exper­tise should be reviewed.

– Colin Clark

April 24th, 2008 | Info War | 28068 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/04/24/watchdog-says-shape-up-isr-systems/Watchdog+Says+Shape+Up+ISR+Systems2008-04-24+14%3A19%3A36Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.