March 25, 1999
 

"IO Commanders Brief"
 

I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk. General Shaud, thanks for the invitation, and thanks for sponsoring a symposium on Information Operations -- definitely an area of growing interest. I’d also like to thank General Jumper for giving half my speech. It will shorten some of my comments, because he certainly is extremely accurate in his comments about where we are headed with Information Operations.

I have had a combined marketing and education campaign for the last six months as I’ve tried to go around the community and talk about Information Operations and what it is we mean by that. What I’d like to do this morning is talk about two pieces of it in my joint hat and my Air Force hat and then get into some specific details about some of my concerns.

For those of you who may not know, I do wear several hats. I will talk briefly about my joint command and control warfare hat and my Air Intelligence Agency hat.

On the joint side, I have moved from under the J-3 on the joint side to work for the U.S. Atlantic Command. That has been an interesting transition and one that has worked well so far. On the Air Force side, I currently work under the XO on the Air Staff. I also have several other hats because of the funding strains, and for those of you who don’t know, the Air Force is the executive agent for the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, so I have a budget there that we have to POM for every year. Then within the Air Intelligence Agency, I have three POMs there - an Air Force POM, a DIA POM and an NSA POM. I keep fairly busy, and my staff is always on the run doing something with budgeting.

A little history is important to talk about. Those of you who have been around awhile understand that coming out of World War II we were interested very much in our experiences with code breakers and marking communications. It was very interesting to know what the Japanese and Germans were going to do before they did it. We created an organization that can continue that kind of expertise and, over time, we’ve added things to it. Coming out of Vietnam, we learned some tough lessons about electronic warfare. So we decided we needed to add that capability. Coming out of the desert, [after Desert Shield/Storm] we understood that we needed to break down some barriers and make some mergers among some intelligence organizations in order to turn around information quicker and get it to the operator faster. In the process, the organization became a major command for awhile, and when we downsized in the 90s, it reverted to an agency. But it is still the same size, and the Air Intelligence Agency today is a little over 15,000 folks.

On the joint side, coming out Vietnam, the same kind of experiences and interest in electronic warfare existed, so they decided to put the center for excellence for EW on the joint side, and it is in the same building where AIA is headquartered. We had command and control warfare coming out of Desert Storm for much the same reason as we worked a lot of the intelligence functions together.

Today, both organizations are looking at Information Operations in a large way. What is driving all this is technology? As we go forward, it is racing faster than we are. If you listened to General Minihan’s comments yesterday, you gained a better appreciation for one of the problems we have - the commercial organizations out there are moving much faster than we are. They are a lot quicker on their feet than we are. We need to stay up with them if at all possible.

Let’s talk about doctrine a little bit. There have been some discussions on the periphery of it. The current Joint 3-13 and an extract from the joint doctrine talk about attacking and defending systems.

It’s nice, short and to the point. But it leaves you lacking a little bit. To translate this into what we’ve done and where we are headed, you take traditional command and control warfare, which is what the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center has been all about, and you add to it other kinds of things - classified programs that we can’t get into here today. These would include the traditional kinds of things you think of - destruction, deception, psychological operations, electronic warfare and so forth, and we’ve added to that now, protecting our networks and potentially attacking other’s networks.

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General Jumper mentioned having the effect you want. Effects-based targeting is something we spend a lot of time talking about today. Effects-based targeting applies not only to visually pleasing destruction from an armed bomb, but also the effect we may have [GAP in tape].

Ten or 12 people are dedicated to USAFE or EUCOM. Another 10 to 12 persons are dedicated to PACOM. Another 10 to 12 are dedicated to CENTCOM and so forth, and they stay busy all the time. They are engaged not only in exercise planning and bringing IW to the fight, but the also are out there in the real world working real-world problems.

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The interesting thing about the joint side is that in the joint definition and in joint doctrine, they don’t talk about Information Operations in the same way the Air Force does. That does create some problems - problems we can overcome -- and I am convinced that we will. Obviously I like the Air Force doctrine better.

Our definition is a little more wide-ranging and a lot more specific than the current joint definition is. For the first time in any of the doctrine that talks about Information Operations, the Air Force uses the words gain, exploit, attack and defend. The Air Force has gone to this because I think you cannot do attack and defend without gain and exploit. Anybody who has been in the intelligence business or has used intelligence a lot in any conflict knows that you have to know where you want to go before you go there.

Information superiority is something we know we need to have. We want to dominate that environment. Under that we have information in warfare, which is a gain and exploit piece, and there are a lot of other things under that I could list on the information warfare side.

There are still people like General Jumper mentioned who think Information Operations is all about computers. Our doctrinal definition of IO says nothing about computer network attack or computer defense. We prefer to talk about offensive counter information and defensive counter information, and we like to think about it the same way you think about offensive counter and defensive counter air. You can’t think of them as separate entities, they have to work together.

On the offensive side, you find computer network attack, which is a joint use, under information attack. Computer network defense is there, and it is called information assurance. There are still raging debates in some circles, both within the Air Force and among the Services, about the way the Air Force describes IO. I like this construct. I can understand it. You can connect the dots between gain, exploit, attack and defend. That is an important part of what we are trying to do.

We have put the various intelligence organizations together at AIA. They all have to work in conjunction with one another -- and very effectively -- if we are going to produce the torque that the commander needs in the field in trying to have the effect desired.

If I showed you a chart that included all the AIA organizations, you wouldn’t be able to read it because the font would be too small. We have many civilians in the organization. The vast majority of those civilians are in the science and technical field. I have several thousand in various locations doing extremely important work. I think as an organization, I probably have more scientists and engineers in my civilian community than any other in the Air Force today.

Information Operations is not new. I try to make this point because we need to understand what we are talking about if we are going to appreciate the way the doctrine was written. I’d like to talk about IO in the age of the Roman Empire to make my point.

Gaining information is something we have always wanted to do. The Romans wanted to know what the Hittites and the Huns were up to. They wanted to know, whomever the enemy was, what it was doing. They would send somebody up to hide behind a rock or a tree and observe what the enemy was going to do. They were gaining information on the enemy. Guess what? We want to gain information on the enemy.

We just have different tools, but the goal is gaining information. We have a variety of means to do it: ground, airborne and overhead, and we need to understand how to use them effectively and get the answers that we glean from those assets to the person who can make a decision about the effect he or she wants to have on the battlefield.

How about the exploit part? In the age of the Roman Empire, the only way you could get information back was to write it on a piece of parchment, give the parchment to someone who could run real fast on one of those fine Roman roads and hopefully get it back to the commander in time for him to do something about it. We don’t do anything differently - we just do it faster.

We have a lot of ways to do it. We have airborne assets, overhead assets and people on the ground exploiting information from all kinds of systems out there. The key is getting that information to the right person in time to have the effect desired.

How about the attack part. The Huns weren’t complete idiots. They saw the guy up on the hill spying on them so they would send somebody up there to whack the guy over the side of the head - that terminates the gain and exploit part. Are we worried about that today? Sure we are.

There are all kinds of people out there who would like to do bad things to our gain and exploit assets and to everything else for that matter. Don’t you think that Saddam would like to shoot down a Rivet Joint? Absolutely. Would we like to take care of his ability to gain and exploit? Absolutely. It is a two-way street. The Romans were worried about it. We are worried about it. We want to be able to do it. We also want to be able to prevent it.

How about the defend part? In the days of the Roman Empire, the only way to protect that guy trying to do the gain and exploit part was to send out a platoon of soldiers to surround him, protect him, have multiple runners, lots of parchment and run down multiple routes to get back to the commander.

We are interested in the same things today. I guarantee you anytime there is a high-value asset airborne anywhere in the world where it is threatened, we will have airplanes airborne to defend it. When I was in Okinawa, we would send our routine amount of forces to Southern Watch, and most of the guys who were over there were flying to defend either AWACS or Rivet Joint. We are very interested in this. And the computer network part of it is very important. We are only now beginning to fully understand how to take care of our networks. General Minihan made a comment yesterday. It is the content that we care about. We need to avoid talking about defending against a network attack by shutting it off. Because guess what? If I shut it off, I can’t use it either. There is a lot to be learned about computers and defending and attacking the networks. We are pushing very hard in some areas to not only understand the attack and defend part, but also the exploitation element, because remember, this is just signals we are talking about, zeroes and ones.

My point is, in the age of the Roman Empire, they had lots of methods. They were very interested. But they had to use people and they had to use parchment.

We have multiple means, multiple ways of doing things. There is a long list, but we understand the concepts of gain, exploit, attack and defend in our Air Force. We need to continue to educate people on the importance of it so we can fully exploit the capabilities that are out there and integrate them in ways that are understandable and usable by commanders in the field.

AIA has people engaged in intelligence somewhere around the world all the time. Here are some examples.

Interception: if you look at the various ways that we gain and exploit information, you have to go through several common steps. You have to collect it. You have to analyze it. You have to get it to somebody who can do something about it, analyze it in a way that makes the information usable for a decision maker, decide what you are going to do, do it, then go back and revisit it and see if what you did worked or not.

Computer network operations: much of the computer network defense business is classified, but when an attack comes, I might want to divert that attack and feed false data back. There are all kinds of ways to exploit this kind of capability. General Jumper talked about how offense and defense have to be connected. This is part of what we are trying to figure out. It is a busy business. We are engaged all the time, and in some places it is growing. In my NSA hat, as you can imagine, we are deeply involved in national infrastructure protection as we try to fully understand all the technical challenges we face in this area.

General Jumper alluded to the fact that the 609^th Squadron at Shaw, which was originally to be an IO squadron, is going away this summer. At Corona last June, the decision was made to embed IO capability in several locations using AIA personnel. Actually, it is a pretty smart decision when you think about it. If you use the 609^th Squadron at Shaw as a template for all the other places that want to have a light squadron, you are talking 120 to 140 people at each location, and that is an expensive bill to pay. In the embedding process that AIA is doing for all the warfighting NAFs and the major commands you will see a lot smaller numbers, which would be augmented for deployments.

We are going to embed people in the flights that have both offensive and defensive training so they understand both sides of the equation. We will have gain and exploit and attack and defend expertise in there. They will live in the AOC, and they are going to be divided into two sections, an information in warfare/gain and exploit section and an information warfare section. We have a training school that we are setting up right now. They have gone through with some preliminary short courses right now. They are building a much longer course, probably three and one-half months, and the first class is starting in October. They are moving into their new facilities this month.

On the information warfare side of the house, the targeting process is going to be very important. General Jumper mentioned the fact that we need to be able to understand all the tools that are out there. We need to be able to get those tools engaged in time to be able to use them effectively to have the effects we want to have. Some of these tools take a long time to be ready to implement. We need to figure out how to get around some of the policy limitations we are currently having to live with if we are going to be effective in using some of those tools.

We depend a lot on communications today. Understanding how to control band width usage is becoming something that is in our lexicon nowadays. The demand for information is increasing. There will not be less demand for imagery. The ability to move that information around the world is going to be a big challenge for us as more and more organizations compete for band width. When I was in Okinawa, I was given a briefing by a commercial telephone company. They were laying a 1.4 terrabyte fiber optic cable across the Pacific. They were a year and a half from having that cable up and operating and they already had 75 percent of it leased. They expected to have 100 percent of it leased before it was finally constructed. The demand for information is skyrocketing.

People are always asking me, “where do you think you are heading, and why are you going there?” We need to look at some of our platforms out there and do a better job of consolidating. The technology is out there to be able to put more things on platforms so we can fuse information and provide a better picture to the commander on the ground. That is something that is important. We talk about information overload. If we can take various intelligence pieces of information, put them together, make some sense out of them so we can give them a more complete picture, we will be a lot more effective as we go along.

I can talk long and hard about SIGINT support to electronic warfare in a different forum. There are several imagery production support efforts out there. The number of commercial imagery satellites that are going up on orbit is increasing rapidly. We need to be able to take advantage of that. We are not talking about commercial imagery for targeting necessarily; we are talking about commercial imagery just to get some scene visualization capability out there. That is going to be a big boost to us and will save us a lot of money in the long run.

HUMINT is getting back into the business. This is another area where we are asking the Guard and Reserve to help us out. Obviously, you don’t need interrogators all the time. You only need them when you need them. I think the Guard and Reserve will be very useful for us in that role.

I’d like to talk about some specific things that we are trying to do within each of the “INTs.” We need to continually exploit our relationship with the National Security Agency. In my hat as the Air Force component commander for NSA, I spend a lot of time working with them on how to exploit what is going on out there in computer networks. We understand the traditional SIGINT part of it; with the compute part of it we have a ways to go. But we are making rapid progress. There are three regional SIGINT operation centers. They have only been stood up about five or six years. We are still understanding how to use them and fully exploit them. The CINCs that they support enjoy them very much. All we get are good comments on how they are working.

The unified cryptologic architecture is an NSA proposal to try to get configuration control. It is a very aggressive effort over a number of years. I hope it is successful because, as any commander out there knows, configuration control is a real problem. Commanders have to get control of computers and software, otherwise they are going to be in real trouble when they try to integrate and merge data from various functions within their organization.

Concerning modernizing the airborne SIGINT systems, we have some real challenges with Rivet Joint today. There is some good news and bad news there. Honestly, there is a tremendous demand for Rivet Joint right now. Talk about a high-demand, low-density platform. Rivet Joint and U-2 and eventually UAVs are going to continue to be requested by every commander whenever there is a contingency or real world operation going on. I know these are areas that General Jumper is concerned about.

I’ve talked about trying to get more imagery from commercial systems. The information production support for PGMs is a growing issue out there. We are doing a good job currently, and we are working very hard to continue to do that for new systems as they come on board.

We really need to flesh out HUMINT. The Department of Defense has done a good job in my opinion of standing up to this requirement. I am comfortable with where we are headed. We just need to look seriously at getting the Guard and Reserve on board for our specific requirement and the embedding process out to support the NAF commanders.

There are some other issues that have come up in other forums. Networks are a center of gravity. We need to understand how to protect them, and we need to understand how to engage the adversaries. We need to understand how to attack them in a coherent way to have the desired effect.

You are going to get tired of hearing me talking about effects-based targeting. The 2, 3 and the 6 interface is extremely important to this. General Minihan asked yesterday why we don’t just fuse those three organizations into one. That is not a bad idea in one way of looking at it because the speed with which information flows these days is going to require very close cooperation. That’s one of the reasons we are putting the AIA personnel in the NAF AOCs in the fashion that we are. Some are working with the A-2 and some with the A-3 so that cross level will be there all the time. We need to be realistic. We need to have the opportunity to test some of the capabilities that we believe we have. This is a big challenge, and we need to really look at improving our situational awareness at the same time. We have some challenges out there between the 2, 3 and the 6 that can be worked out. We need to understand each other’s roles in the Information Operations domain. If we can, then I think we can solve the next problem, which is situational awareness for that commander out there in the AOC.

Concerning situational awareness, would you not, as a commander of an air operation, like to know which sensors are available to you at a given time? Would you not also like be able to see where those assets are planned to be the next day or the day after that? You’d want to look at a live feed with all the various information so you would know what was terrain was masked from a Joint Stars or an AWACS or a UAV or a U-2. If there were a change from the pop up target that you gained from your intelligence community from some source, would you not like to know where you had coverage and protection from some asset out there so you could divert a force of F-15Es, for example, to go against a different target that may or may not be covered by one of these assets? That would be interesting kinds of information to know. There is a lot more that we would be able to put up there that you could selectively put on a screen or delete based upon the circumstances at the time. The software, the technology is out there. We just haven’t broken the code yet on how to do that and who is responsible for it. We need to get over it.

You want to have a realistic understanding of where the gaps are in coverage so you can fill the gaps with those kinds of things that you do have control over and can change easily. Some things can’t be changed easily; some can. So, why not have a complete picture so you can fill in those gaps with the assets that are the most flexible to use.

There are some other issues. There’s been a lot of discussion, General Jumper and others alluded to it, about whether we should try to merge the Air Intelligence Agency with Air Force Space Command. As you probably also heard, there is a look at moving the computer network at the JTF Defense to U.S. Space Command on the joint side. Since I wear the JCTWE hat and the AIA hat, I am very interested in this topic. What I try to tell people is the logic behind this makes sense. The devil is always in the details. If you are trying to figure out a better way to manage limited assets, why not use the AMC or TRANSCOM model? We put all those kinds of limited mobility assets together in one organization so we can manage them better, hopefully more efficiently, and provide a capability to the commander in the field who needs it. Why not put all of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets in one organization to do the same kind of thing because we are always going to be challenged with a high-demand, low-density problem when it comes to our ISR assets such as Rivet Joint and U-2.

Control tasking the role of sensors is always going to be a big challenge. The key is giving the commander full insight into what is available and having some control over it in a central location so you don’t have sensors running over each other in duplication. That is one of the reasons I am interested in commercial imagery and a few other things. If we have the capability to get the kind of imagery we want so I can use my national assets better and more effectively and refine the work that I need to do, then why not?

Concerning joint forces and Air Force doctrine, I would like to think the joint doctrine would eventually come towards Air Force doctrine, but I am not sure that is necessary.

Core competency of targeting: We have lost the picture in some people’s minds on targeting. I would disagree with that in this sense. We understand the targeting process. What we need to better appreciate is the effects of the targeting that we are talking about and how to incorporate the zeroes and ones into that. If all I want to do is shut down a particular corridor for 24 hours so I can send in assets to take out a particular target, then maybe all I need to do is send a string of zeroes and ones to shut that down or confuse it for 24 hours or two hours or 30 minutes. I may not need to send somebody in there to blow it up.

A lot of what we talk about in the IO business is sending strings of zeroes and ones. I tell people to be careful when they are talking about targeting. I use the same analogy that we use when we are talking about bridge campaigns. Before you go bomb every bridge across every river you probably want to go talk to the Army.

We need to talk about integrating an IO mindset fully, and General Jumper kind of approved of that. The approval and planning cycle for some of the IO tools that are out there is way too cumbersome now. We know it is cumbersome. We are trying to get people working for us to understand that. We have a way to go.

If I had tools at my fingertips such as responsive and timely battle management, along with situational awareness, the people in the AOC could do their jobs much better.

We are getting better at measuring effectiveness and BDA all the time. Believe me, that is one of the toughest challenges. Again, what we are asking now is not, “did we blow the building up?” The question is, “did we have the desired effect?” That is a difficult question to answer sometimes because the picture doesn’t necessarily show you that.

The points I tried to make: IO is not new. It has been around a long time. We just have new tools. We do it faster, hopefully better. Information technology applications are going faster in the commercial world than they are in the way we do business. We need to understand it and appreciate it and not be bashful about getting into new technology that is out there. The Air Force does talk about IO differently - there is a gain and exploit and an attack and defend piece. Remember, it is difficult to attack and defend if you haven’t gained and exploited. AIA is organizing to provide expertise at all levels. That is true. That is what the embedding is all about. By putting AIA expertise out there in the field, they will have reached back to my organization and all the various INTs within AIA down at the other end of the keyboard. That gives a lot of advantages to people out there in those AOCs.

What are your questions?

General Shaud: General Jumper and Ken Minihan and others have implied we needed to somehow coordinate offensive and defensive information warfare. We have been convinced. Why is this a challenge? What is the problem here?

General Baker: Part of the problem is within the joint community, which has a lot of influence on how the various CINCs out there look at the problem. They on the joint side are only focused on the information warfare, the attack and defend piece. Within the attack and defend piece, they are focused almost totally on the traditional kinds of command and control warfare, electronic warfare, psychological operations and so forth. They really haven’t gotten into the network business, and they haven’t gotten into what I call effects-based targeting.

In my joint hat, when my joint teams go out to support the CINCs, the first thing we have to do is get there in time to be able to understand what the commander’s intent is going to be and then, secondly, be there in time to explain how desired effects can be achieved and achieved so that the IO planning can get into the cycle soon enough to have the effect that you want in a lot less violent way. All too often we have found, even with our people embedded in CINC planning cells, the planners come to the IO or IW cell after they’re finished and say, “OK, now what can you guys do?” That is part of the problem. We’ve been too late in the game. I will admit fully that within EUCOM and with CENTCOM, because we have spent so much time there over the last year or so, they are coming around, and they understand it much more, and that is good news and bad news. The good news is they are learning how to integrate it fully from both the offensive and defensive side. The bad news is my people are TDY a lot more.

General Shaud: Once you envision something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to happen. Joint Vision 2010, which was very much into networking and effects-based targeting, is something we talked about a long time. Now we are trying to make it happen. That will combine those two influences. As DoD migrates some communication capability to commercial systems, how does this affect vulnerabilities to information warfare?

General Baker: There are two issues here. One is we, for reasons I don’t fully understand, have been selling off a lot of band width. That will drive us to buy more and more commercial imagery. The challenge is, we are competing against people out there like CNN who also are demanding that band width. We have to be imaginative in the way we contract for imagery for a crisis so we have it there. You have to almost look at it like we’ve done CRAF for years with civilian airlines. We have to have some way to pull that band width in when we need it on a moment’s notice. That is a difficult thing to do.

Protecting networks in terms of encryption or building firewalls is a bigger challenge because in many commercial applications they are not interested in putting a lot of encryption on the networks. Now we have to take a different look at it, and the encryption almost has to be embedded in your system so that as it goes across the line and gets to the other end, it is decrypted in the system. We’ve been doing that for years. We know how to do it. We just have to be better at it, faster at it and understand and be comfortable with putting it over those commercial networks.

General Shaud: Next question on policy limitations. If you could change one or two policies in your area, what would you change first?

General Baker: That is a tough question. Part of the problem is that the computer network attack and defend part of Information Operations is still of a concern to the policy makers in Washington because of traceability. The lawyers are very heavily engaged in that. General Cunningham would love to help me answer that question. Beyond that, I can’t get into it.

General Shaud: Given the ops tempo today, can you give us an idea of what needs to be done to program and upgrade your high-demand, low-density Rivet Joint crews?

General Baker: I alluded to it earlier. The Rivet Joint situation is a tough one. We have underfunded it for years. People in the audience know that. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that corporately we’ve decided to put new engines on the airplane, which is a good thing. In my experience on Okinawa, watching my KC-135Rs take off was really interesting. When the Rivet Joint took off behind them, it took twice as much runway. So, we are putting the new engines on the airplane. That is going to be a wonderful thing because the plane will be more efficient and have more range and more time airborne.

The second part of that is, we are buying two more airplanes. When 15 and 16 roll out, they will give us the kind of capability to support those demands out there that we currently have. The bad news is that when we bought 15 and 16, we programmed for more pilots and navigators but we did not program for more linguists. So we are in the process right now of trying to get that fixed. The problem is, for those of you who are familiar with the linguist training process, it takes me two years plus to get an airborne linguist qualified to fly on a Rivet Joint because it takes a year just to get through the school. If you look at 15 and 16 being delivered in the 2000/2001 timeframe, if I started today, I might get some there and ready to go. We are behind the power curve right now in getting the crew in the airplane.

The last piece is the technology that is out there right now in the commercial world is being used in a lot of places around the world. It is moving ahead faster than we are in modifying the back of the airplane. We have several proposals out there. I don’t want to get into the specifics, but we know what we need to do to the back end of the airplane, and we need to do it quickly.

General Shaud: Many of us participate in exercises - global engagement, JCS exercises. To better refine info ops during exercises, what types of scenario would you like to see?

General Baker: Part of the problem is due to the fact that it is a relatively new area and not fully understood. That is the reason I give briefings like this to anyone I can get to sit still long enough. Because it’s a new area, we don’t have available data bases to simulate the effects that sending a string of zeroes and ones is going to have. Doing all your IO inputs and effects on 3 by 5 cards is not very effective. We are looking very hard at trying to come up with Information Operations planning tools to put into exercises and sending more of our people out to participate in exercises who actually understand the techniques and the impacts that some of these things can have. I think if we do that more effectively, we will have the desired effect. The difficulty we also face is in some areas of IO -- how do you simulate or determine the effect of psyop or deception? That is a very difficult thing to do.

General Shaud: In terms of info ops, how do you view the role of the media, and how are your public affairs personnel working with you and the traditional operators to influence Information Operations?

General Baker: One of the things we do, particularly on the joint side within our IO cells when we go out, is to try to gain an appreciation of public affairs and civil affairs so we can understand how to influence what it is we are doing or not doing. We have been fairly effective in the joint world in doing some of that in educating some of the various CINCs out there. As part of their campaign planning, they need to have civil affairs in there as an up front part of what they are doing.

I agree we need to be able to use our public affairs, civil affairs and psychological operations people from the very beginning as we being to try to craft the environment that we are going to go into. The challenge is to do that before any campaign actually begins to shape the battle space. One of the challenges we have is getting those people engaged soon enough so they can gain the commander’s trust to appreciate the fact that shaping the battle space begins well before the bombs start dropping.

General Shaud: In your joint hat, how would you recommend that a theater commander organize IO? With components? With components as lead of other components? Or as a theater IO entity?

General Baker: One of the reasons that we are looking at a merger between the Air Intelligence Agency and Space Command is to try to figure out a way to help solve that problem. When we try to build an Information Operations planning cell for the joint side, I have in my joint hat the JC2WC that eventually will migrate, I think, to U.S. Space Command. That is essentially what we do now, but it is not as well orchestrated as it might be. If we move JC2WC to U.S. Space Command and Air Intelligence Agency merges with Air Force Space Command. I can take those two hats on and off and, we can do a much better job of manning an IO cell at the joint level.

I think each service brings some unique capabilities to it. Obviously, I think the Air Force is way out in front in IO, particularly on the computer side. But the other services do bring some unique capabilities. EUCOM and CENTCOM are generally ahead of everybody else right now. When our IO experts or IW experts walk in the door, they already have a chair. They already have a terminal, and they are considered part of the team. That is a very effective way of doing it because they need to be considered part of the planning team. If they are not and they are not there soon enough, then we won’t have the desired effect. 

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