Gen. James Cartwright, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said Thursday at AFA’s Symposium in Orlando, Fla. that accessing data, discovering it, getting it to those who need it and ridding ourselves of the “ownership idea” is crucial. He went on: “The reality here is whether you’re on the ground or in the air, you step across the line of departure where you light the burners—shit happens. You’ve got to be able to respond. Waiting for five to 10 years is unacceptable in the world we live in.” He spoke of the need to figure out how to move data around and to build and integrate organizations without losing the service’s ethos. “We as Strategic Command have built a distributed organization along functional lines,” he said. “What is absolutely essential to me is to marry up the United States Air Force as they network to gather their air operations centers because without those air operations centers our functionally distributed nodes have no way to connect to the fight.”
The U.S. military struck key Iranian nuclear sites June 21 in an operation that was intended to shut down Iran’s nuclear program but which was not aimed at the country’s leadership. U.S. Air Force bombers and submarine-launched cruise missiles struck three sites in the early hours of June 22: Fordow, Natanaz,…