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Dramatic changes in the security environment in the past two decades have led to a greatly increased demand for U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. Today, the Air Force must provide ISR to a growing set of missions, from the global fight against terrorist organizations to humanitarian relief efforts around the globe, while remaining postured to support major combat operations should the need arise. To meet these requirements, the Air Force is currently undertaking unprecedented measures to expand and enhance its ISR capabilities. Particular urgency has been attached to cultivating its fleet of sophisticated remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) to support current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Equally critical to these efforts, however, is the Air Force s extensive processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) force, which is essential to convert the raw data collected into usable intelligence and deliver it to the warfighter. It is therefore imperative to assess the size and mix of the Air Force s PED force to ensure that the ability to conduct all necessary PED within required timelines keeps pace with the increases in the amount and type of information collected. In this report, part of a fiscal year 2009 2010 study Sizing the U.S. Air Force ISR Force to Meet Future Challenges, we addressed the particular challenges associated with the exploitation of motion imagery within the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS). Motion imagery collections from full-motion video sensors on RPAs have risen rapidly to the point at which they now consume the largest share of Air Force DCGS resources, and new wide-area motion imagery sensors now being deployed have the potential to increase the amount of raw data collected by an order of magnitude. The information explosion resulting from these vast amounts of motion imagery threatens to overwhelm Air Force intelligence analysts.

The Army believes that it needs the new joint cargo aircraft, the C-27J Spartan, to transport mission critical, time sensitive (MCTS) cargo and passengers to the brigade combat teams and supporting forces conducting full-spectrum operations. This issue is relevant in today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in future counterinsurgencies where ground forces are widely dispersed across long resupply distances, as well as in stability operations overseas and support to civil authorities at home. Two related questions arise: (1) Is the C-27J Spartan a reasonable replacement for the C-23 Sherpa that is being used today in Iraq to deliver MCTS cargo and passengers?, and (2) Are there ways to improve the resupply routes and the air tasking procedures that are currently being used by the Army to provide direct support to the field commanders? In April 2009, after the research phase of our study was completed, the Secretary of Defense decided to place the Air Force in charge of the C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA) program and reduce the number of aircraft procured from 78 to 38. In speaking to reporters, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale explained that "what we're looking for in transferring to the Air Force is to exploit some synergy between the C-130s, particularly the C-130s the Air Force has, and the JCA." This programmatic change does not alter the findings of our study. Irrespective of whether the Air Force or the Army owns and operates the C-27J aircraft, the Army needs to have access to a responsive airlift system that can deliver MCTS cargo to the forward operating forces. This requires an air scheduling system that incorporates rapid approval procedures and does not lead to excessive aircraft holds and procedural delays. This paper should interest those involved with 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review and with Army rotary-wing and fixed-wing airlift.

This report is an introduction to the Collection Operations Model (COM), a stochastic, agent-based analysis tool for C3ISR written for the System Effectiveness Analysis Simulation (SEAS) modeling environment. SEAS is a multi-agent, theater-operations simulation environment sponsored by the Air Force Space Command, Space and Missile Systems Center, Directorate of Developmental Planning. The COM is designed to be a universal model that can be adapted to support almost any scenario. It can represent thousands of autonomous, interacting platforms on all sides of a conflict that employ a wide variety of sensor packages and communications devices and execute individual behaviors of arbitrary complexity. The COM can explore the capabilities of a wide range of ISR assets, including manned platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles, unattended ground sensors, special operations forces, and virtually any air, land, or sea system. The model accepts as input a wide array of sensor capabilities, target properties, terrain analysis, weather effects, resource limitations, communications delays, and command and control delays. Its final output is a minute-by-minute account of each agent's changing operational picture. The COM's sensor models are its most detailed components. The signals intelligence (SIGINT) model is the COM's most sophisticated individual model. Many aspects of emitters and receivers are represented: field of regard (FOR), including main and side lobes where appropriate; scan cycle, emission interval, or emission probability; frequency bands; relative angular size of main and side lobes; and the effective radiated power of each radiative lobe. The imagery intelligence model estimates the quality of electro-optical, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar images. For fiscal year 2008, RAND has invested in the addition of space-based assets to the COM, including relevant space weather and atmospheric effects., RAND Project Air Force. ISBN 978-0-8330-4494-5.

The military is heavily reliant on the transfer of information among various networks in its day-to-day operations. With fewer defense dollars available for the development of new systems, the use of commercial- off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to build military information networks is becoming commonplace. The critical nature of much of this information requires that knowledge of the performance characteristics of the networks through which this information travels be known. These characteristics allow network managers and designers to plan for future growth of the network, analyze network reliability, and plan for the construction of new networks. One method to determine the performance characteristics of a network is through the use of modeling and simulation. COMNET III release 1., 1n is a COTS network simulation application which may be used to model and simulate both local and wide area networks. This thesis provides a tutorial to explain the theory used in the application for the modeling and simulation of networks. Each chapter presents the theory of several objects which may be used in the application, states a network problem which is to be analyzed, provides step- by-step instructions to build a model to analyze the network problem, and presents the results of the network simulation.

The military is heavily reliant on the transfer of information among various networks in its day-to-day operations. With fewer defense dollars available for the development of new systems, the use of commercial- off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to build military information networks is becoming commonplace. The critical nature of much of this information requires that knowledge of the performance characteristics of the networks through which this information travels be known. These characteristics allow network managers and designers to plan for future growth of the network, analyze network reliability, and plan for the construction of new networks. One method to determine the performance characteristics of a network is through the use of modeling and simulation. COMNET III release 1., 1n is a COTS network simulation application which may be used to model and simulate both local and wide area networks. This thesis provides a tutorial to explain the theory used in the application for the modeling and simulation of networks. Each chapter presents the theory of several objects which may be used in the application, states a network problem which is to be analyzed, provides step- by-step instructions to build a model to analyze the network problem, and presents the results of the network simulation.