Q&A: Major General Blair E. Hansen
Written by Harrison Donnelly
Major General Blair E. Hansen
Director of ISR Capabilities
Air Force
Hansen’s commands have included a fighter squadron, operations group and fighter wing in several locations in the United States and abroad, as well as the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Balad Air Base, Iraq. He has held staff assignments at the Combined Forces Command in Seoul, South Korea, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Headquarters U.S. Air Force. Prior to assuming his current position, he was the vice commander, 9th Air Force, Shaw AFB, S.C.
Hansen is a command pilot with more than 3,500 hours in fighter aircraft, including 110 combat missions. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and a master’s degree in management from Troy State University. Hansen was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: How is the Air Force responding to the need for enhanced ISR to support stepped-up U.S. operations in Afghanistan?
A: The Air Force is heavily committed, as are the other services, to the fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan. With the shift that’s going on now, we’re working very closely with our partners in the other services, as well as the secretary of defense’s staff, to ensure that we’re not only pushing the right amount of ISR to Afghanistan, but also that everything is integrated and working together. What we are doing specifically gets to a number of things. This goes somewhat to the ISR Task Force started by the secretary a little more than a year ago, and especially the efforts we had focused then in Iraq, and slightly less so in Afghanistan, although now the weight has clearly shifted. The major tenets of that still continue to be front and center in terms of our responsibilities. That includes the ability to focus precisely.
The task force looked at three options. The first was to shift assets from other places. But we quickly decided that there was no more “juice in that orange,” and to do so would create unacceptable risks elsewhere. The second was to become more efficient, and the third was to buy commercial technology off the shelf. That’s how we came up with Project Liberty, which I’ll discuss.
That gets to how you turn data into real value. Some of it is useable coming right off the air asset. For example, full-motion video streamed from a Predator may have high utility to someone looking at it real-time, via what we call a ROVER capability—remote operated video enhanced receiver. That provides the visibility directly to a person on the ground—a joint terminal air controller [JTAC] or ground commander—to really see over that next hill or provide instant situational awareness. But it’s bigger than that, and we can do many different things analytically in processing, exploitation and dissemination to not just integrate other types of intelligence with that, but also to actually pull data from the full-motion video.
It’s really important to know where our friends are, and not just those in uniform. The most important ingredient of counterinsurgency doctrine and warfare is that we understand fundamentally that we win not by killing the enemy, although that’s a part of it, but by bringing the people with us, so that they see us as key to their success. The potential for an unintended consequence, whether it is an errant bomb or an unfortunate accident, would have major consequences. For example, if we drop a bomb on a house where we know a high value target is, and inadvertently take out the leader of a town, or a family next door that we didn’t know about, we may have had a tactical success, but a strategic failure. The consequences of not knowing enough are off the charts.
Q: How would you define surgical ISR? How will it help, to mention just one example, to reduce or eliminate the number of Afghan civilians killed in consequence of U.S./coalition operations, which has been cited as an important objective by U.S. officials?
A: The first thing is knowing where everyone is. That sounds trivial, but it isn’t. We, as the joint team, need to thoroughly understand the environment. Ultimately, in many of the engagements, it’s the ground commander who has the urgent need for information, and from a variety of sources, one of which is the Air Force. The environment that he or she is in, given the nature of counterinsurgency, is amorphous. The enemy doesn’t wear uniforms, and the potential is high for the enemy to be using citizens as shields for their operations. We need to understand when that’s occurring. The “find and fix” piece will drive the “finish” piece. It’s not so simple as to say, that’s the target—they, he or it is in a certain facility or house—we’ve also got to understand everything around it. In fact, it may be that getting to the finish piece, the elimination of that target as a threat, is better done through a capture. We may want some value that that person may have; we may want to talk to that person. The real challenge becomes the find-fix, rather than the finish. In some cases, it makes sense that there’s a kinetic end once we’ve located and ascertained the environment, and cleared it in an intelligent way, so that we know who’s there and who’s not there. Then it makes sense to drop a bomb, shoot a rocket or have some other kinetic finish. But sometimes it doesn’t, and a key function of ISR is to ensure that we really understand what the effects are going to be—what’s the risk, who could get hurt—and evaluate that on its own. That’s really important.
Another aspect is irregular warfare, and the tenet of irregular warfare drives us to a notion that I’ve coined “surgical ISR,” which is very localized. If you think about it that way, there are myriad locations with surgical ISR going on today in those microscopic ways, with units all over the combat areas of responsibility. As you think about that, and how important it is for the commander to really understand that, it’s easy to see how it’s a component of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare.
But there’s another factor that plays into this as well—the information age. That means a number of things that relate to what we’re doing now, and the way we will conduct any operations in the future. We’re not going to unplug ourselves. There are some who suggest that enemy is going to completely unplug us. I don’t subscribe to that. We’re going to be redundant in our systems, we’re going to protect them, and as you consider the impact of technology, it’s a red thing and a blue thing. Our adversaries will be leveraging information technologies as important assets. These folks are aware of the capabilities in many ways that we have to affect them, not just in the current fight, but as we look to the future. So our threat array is apt to be much more mobile, concealed and difficult to get at. The imperative of information warfare, which we are in whether we like it or not, is that find and fix is always going to be our challenge.
As airmen, for 100 years we focused on attaining precision—the ability to hold at risk any target anywhere on the globe, at any time. We’ve basically achieved that. In the Cold War and pre-Cold War era, we had a largely static array of threat and target presentations. It was basically fixed, and not so difficult to locate. That’s all changed, for many reasons. Our adversaries and potential adversaries have gone to school on us; they’re creating mobile employment concepts, hiding their capabilities as best they can, and becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their command and control. Information technology and the “flatness” of the world, to use author Thomas Friedman’s phrase, when applied to military matters, have shortened our decision times and made the challenge of finding and fixing in warfare much more difficult. By extension, we then realized that in much of today’s operations, the imperative of information warfare is ISR operations, rather than ISR as a support function to operations.
In many ways today, the finish piece is an incidental. Once we ascertain the environment and know where the target is, we’ve got a menu of ways to finish, depending on the joint commander’s intent. It may be a takedown, a bomb or other methods. The takedown of terrorist leader Zarqawi in Iraq a couple of years ago was a classic example. There were 700 hours of ISR operation, with a finish that occurred with on-call assets. The pilot who killed Zarqawi did not know he was taking off to do that. We’ve got this unique environment, in which the thing that’s going to consume more and more of our efforts is the finding, sensing and precise geo-locating of targets and other things we want to know about, which in counterinsurgency includes where civilians and allies are.
Q: What is the MC-12/Project Liberty, why was it launched, and where does it stand today?
A: The genesis of the MC-12 came from some brainstorming that several of us on the secretary’s ISR Task Force were doing a little over a year ago. This was a way to get added capability, because nobody could see the potential to get even close to demand. So we knew all the things we were doing with Predator and Reaper to get more, sooner, but we we’re tapped out on those. What could we do off the shelf? The Liberty Ship concept from World War II was kicked around. The question was whether there was something readily available that we could adapt via modern sensors and communications to this fight and get it in quickly in an additive way. Our remote-split operations in UAS are paying great dividends, but how could we add to that? As you know, the Liberty ship operations in World War II were commercial logistics shipping. The idea was to buy and use these off-the-shelf ships to resupply European combat operations. This was the basic idea behind the MC-12, Project Liberty.
What capabilities did we need? The highest priority requirement continues to be high-quality full-motion video and signals intelligence. Project Liberty came into form as a concept about a year ago, and the funding became available in early August. This was divided into two categories—one that could be fielded as soon as possible with aircraft that were immediately available. These were used, low-time King Air aircraft on the civilian market. At the same time, we went to industry to buy new aircraft, which took longer lead times. Funding and our ability to produce trained crews brought us to 37 airplanes. As we look at this, we’ll see a fleet, which now is beginning to field numbers one through seven, which were originally used but fairly low-time airplanes. Numbers eight and above will be new airplanes with slightly better capabilities. To me, it’s relatively miraculous that people have taken a good idea, based on something from World War II, and applied modern sensors, such as full-motion video and other intelligence capabilities, along with communications suites that move data, onto these airplanes, and they’re now in the fight in less than a year.
The other piece that I think will realize some value in terms of capability is having the two pilots of the aircraft looking out the window, in addition to the sensors, in a way that’s plugged directly into their partners on the ground. That will be helpful. The ultimate wide area airborne surveillance sensor is the human eye. That’s a good way to consider that, because there will be many different applications when you have the big picture of looking out and being plugged in, hearing what’s going on with the intelligence operators in the back, and having a connection with the ground. That’s the aircraft system, but there’s more to Liberty than that; there’s also an analytical enterprise.
By that, I mean what we refer to in intelligence terms as processing, exploitation and dissemination. Knowing that the nature of this fight is hugely decentralized, we realize that we need folks on the ground who understand the intelligence needs and requirements to be with their ground counterparts in planning as well as analyzing the data coming off. So before and after a mission, we have to make sure that we’re looking in the right places, are focused in the right way and have connected the right people, both in the airplane and the ground unit. We have cells to do that in theater, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, we have the ability to leverage our global Distributed Common Ground System capability, which is our analytic enterprise. All the intelligence analysis capability is leveraged through the kinds of systems we have to turn data into much more potent value for the joint fight.
By the end of next year, we should have all 37 MC-12s fielded. We’ll hold back seven aircraft to use for ongoing training requirements. This is not something, like the Liberty ships, that we’re going to get rid of, because we’re going to be doing irregular warfare for a long time. But what we’re not going to do is build the basing structure yet in the States and permanently base people who would require training to stay up to speed. That would require us to pull some airplanes out of the fight. What we’re doing is pushing people directly into the fight. As their tours end, they will go back to the systems they came from, and we will feed more people into the pipeline. This allows us to keep 85 percent of the MC-12s in the fight all the time. Otherwise, more than half of it would have to come home. When we have this fully built out, we will have 30 airplanes in the fight for the foreseeable future, as they are needed. It’s not just “all in,” but beyond “all in” in the case of Liberty, because we have the capacity to put more than we should, frankly, into the fight. If this system was based permanently as all the other systems in DoD are, you pay the home-basing and training bill. We’re deferring that bill—not in terms of money, but of people and aircraft.
Q: In what other ways is the Air Force using geospatial intelligence to meet ISR needs worldwide?
A: GEOINT is crucial to the Air Force mission. When I say the Air Force mission, I’m not talking about the Air Force as the ultimate recipient of the value, but as part of our mission in the joint fight. The context of GEOINT is incredible as you begin to see the technologies that are emerging now. They range from the quality of the full-motion video capabilities to the ability to connect data in a way similar to what we see in the civilian environment. It’s the whole wireless business and the ability to move data—the notion of being able to relate disparate data in meaningful ways. This is allowing huge leaps in GEOINT. The ability to have a geographically oriented picture that fuses other types of data is critically important to us.
Mapping the Earth three-dimensionally is difficult, but very important to us, especially in those areas that we’re operating in today. But the ability to add more value in GEOINT through hyperspectral technologies, to integrate electro-optics, infrared and radar, and combine those technologies enables us to pick up incredible things that we would not have thought possible. The things that we use to highlight movement and traffic areas, and ground moving target indicators, are in high demand as well. We’re seeing great things technically, and it’s huge that we continue with our focus on rooting our intelligence in time and space. That’s the core of GEOINT, which anchors our whole common operating picture. We anchor our picture in geospatial intelligence, and we build that picture and enrich the knowledge piece of that by integrating other aspects of intelligence and anchoring them in a geographic way. The value of that is through the roof, as we see amounts of data that a few years ago would have been a pipe dream.
We have an ability to share common pictures that we wouldn’t have thought possible. Today, for example, we’re fielding ROVER 5, which is high resolution, with what we call the “John Madden” effect. Just as when you watch football on television on Sunday afternoon, and see the commentator draw a circle around a player, ROVER 5 will be in the hands of a soldier, Marine or Air Force JTAC on the ground, who will draw a circle around the window on a building that they want the Predator to be focused on, or to guide a bomb on. I alluded to the demand as we spoke about full-motion video in particular. A year or more ago, we never thought that we would be able to get close to the demand curve with the supply curve for this kind of capability—for the ability to see in real-time the moving scene over the hill. We thought that would be unattainable, and it may be, but this is helping us get close.
Q: What about wide area airborne surveillance?
A: One technical breakthrough in GEOINT is our wide area airborne surveillance [WAAS] pod. WAAS is a pod that will be fielded next year that will have the capability of near-full-motion video. This will have two frames per second. Full-motion video is 30 frames per second, like a movie. So it’s not full-motion video, but in most cases it would be a very suitable substitute. Picture one aerial vehicle, say an MQ-9 Reaper, with a wide area airborne surveillance pod—dubbed “Gorgon Stare” by the Air Force. Imagine having 12 individual sub-views, each individually steerable through a ROVER device by a person on the ground.
That’s the initial capability, and we’ll be moving within a year or so after initial fielding to a capability with 30 of those individual moveable spots on one vehicle—each one of them steerable, and still have the ability to use the full-motion video ball on the airplane independently. For the first time, that’s going to allow us to close the requirement capability gap.
Q: You are a command pilot with more than 110 combat missions. How has your experience in that role shaped how you develop and implement ISR capabilities?
A: It’s made me impatient. There’s a tension between someone with a background like me and those who have classically been in the intelligence business. It’s partly wrong, but there’s some substance to the notion that we just don’t get enough about our environment quickly enough, or we don’t see the right pictures or the right charts soon enough. There’s a natural tension there. In the big picture, in today’s fight, there’s an insatiable appetite to make things happen faster—to ask the question of why we can’t pull this closer. That has been something I’ve been able to ask in some cases. What’s been really an absolute joy to me is watching what’s happening, in terms of technological development and the focus of industry, on our deep problems of getting to knowledge about the environments I’ve mentioned, as well as our people, and especially those who are innovating and making fabulous things happen.
It’s the people working together who are bringing real value. Just the other day, I heard a mission report that spoke to the integration, determination and dedication of the people to really get after what was necessary at that moment in the way of intelligence and knowledge. It’s absolutely seamless. It was a group of people around the world, all of whom are on a first-name basis—the ability to be focused on that individual, the tactical intelligence requirement, multiplied over many different situations—that’s a joy to see working. The people we have today across the joint force are phenomenal.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: Within the intelligence community, I’ve seen a major shift in policy in the past few years, which is an embrace of the notion that we have to pull our information together. It doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of information that comes from the RF spectrum, from off a map or that a human finds out about another person, they all form an integrated picture, especially as we’re able to relate the information via the information technology revolution. What it’s pushed us to is an environment that says we have to share. The policy has changed from the need to know, which was pretty restrictive, to the responsibility to share—within appropriate security caveats. It’s breaking down the stovepipes and letting us get to the value of relating the types of intelligence instead of requiring Airman Jones or Specialist Smith have to have a password for a Website; it’s Jones or Smith having access to a common picture as a menu.
One thing that’s impressed me in the years I’ve been in the ISR business is the changed nature of the world in the IT revolution. The connectedness of the world and the technologies that are available to friend and foe alike are going to have a staggering effect. It will continue to be one of those environments that we’ve got to put our best and brightest on in order to truly understand what we need to know, and then go after it. In today’s environment, there are issues going on this week in places like Iran or North Korea, but next week it may somewhere else. We’ll have to deal with pop-ups like these, and have the agility to do many things at the same time. ♦
