Promise of Persistent Surveillance

The defense and intelligence community initiatives to create persistent surveillance capabilities and enable access to the resultant continuous data streams will create significant change in the joint force and partners operating across the domains of war and the levels of war. The joint force must act in qualitatively different ways in order to deal with current and future full spectrum threats, to include the transnational extremist threat we will face for the coming decades. New operational concepts as envisioned by the United States Joint Forces Command guide service transformations, redefine linkages with other elements of national power, and seek full integration of the joint force with all partners- DoD, non-DoD, and multinational. Intelligence transformation from the Cold War Reconnaissance Paradigm to the Persistence Paradigm creates a qualitatively different type of intelligence support and moves actionable intelligence to the lowest levels of our formations in this new operating construct. This new paradigm will enable U.S. DoD, non-DoD, and coalition forces to act coherently through shared understanding and engage in adaptive planning and dynamic execution, overmatching global adversaries in agility and decision speed. The integrating mechanism for delivering persistent surveillance across all domains and levels of war will be the 21st century Common Operating Picture. Enterprise data, collaborative planning, and networked actions will change the command methods and control structures as we conduct the global war against the dispersed and distributed threat. Embedded decision aids, modeling, and an advanced neural network act as a synthetic brain to empower the lowest levels of our formations and mission partners. The granularization of warfare, enabled by persistent surveillance feeds into the Common Operating Picture, will enable U.S. forces and security system partners to win the decision cycle battle in the 21st Century. These changes will also requ