General offers warfighter perspective on C4ISR value

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66 ABW Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --  Addressing the Hanscom Representatives Association at the Minuteman Club Jan. 14, Brig. Gen. Lawrence Wells suggested government and industry members ask themselves a question: 'What have I done today to help the warfighter?' 

"The way to answer that is to say, 'how have I shortened the kill chain?'" the general said. In Air Force parlance, the kill chain refers to a multi-step process comprised of finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, engaging and assessing the damage done to enemy forces or assets. 

General Wells, who serves as the director of Warfighter Systems Integration and Deployment within the Air Force's Office of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer, offered several examples to show just how important that question - and the answer - can be. 

In one case, he spoke of an eight-person special operations team that had been airlifted into a compound thought to be abandoned. 

"They were just going in to search for what we call pocket litter, which are things left around that you can gather intelligence from," the general said. "A couple of minutes before the team went in, we took a picture from the Global Hawk and we sent it back; so within a few minutes, that team leader is looking at it on a laptop, and what he sees is about 10 Taliban inside the building who have set up an ambush to take them out." 

Armed with this information, the team was able to quickly switch tactics and "decimate" those ambushing forces. 

"I can tell you that those eight members would have been dead had they gone in without the information provided by the Global Hawk and the entire C4ISR infrastructure," said General Wells. "We need this every single day, multiple times a day, and at night." 

The general talked about numerous individual systems and initiatives that continue to improve Warfighting effectiveness - including chat capability on aircraft, radio over Internet Protocol and an airborne gateway that allows multiple systems to talk with one another. 

He also spoke about the value of reach-back. He discussed the important role of unmanned aerial systems operating in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan but being controlled out of Beale AFB, Calif., and Nellis AFB, Nev. 

"It gives us more safety and allows us to keep more of our people out of harm's way," he said. 

Machine-to-machine interfaces that take "humans out of the loop," increase speed and reduce the possibility for error are also critical developments, he said. 

Finally, the general cautioned that, as the war shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan, many things must be considered. Not the least of those is the need to build a more robust C4ISR network. 

"The C4ISR network that you've built in Iraq over the last five or six years is not in place in Afghanistan, and we're going to have to work those issues," General Wells said.