Taking the Search Out of Search and Rescue

Colorado Springs, Colo. The space enterprise has taken the search out of search and rescue to allow pararescuemen to focus on rescue, Air Force Space Command boss Gen. John Hyten said Tuesday at the Space Symposium here. The PJs make sure airmen are never alone, and “we have done some amazing things in our community to make sure that they’re never alone either,” Hyten said. But while they have a threat focus in everything they do, the space enterprise must start preparing for “the same kind of threat,” he said. “Not the same physical threat … but the same kind of attitude that they bring to their challenges every day.” Hyten also talked about multi-domain operations, saying the US military must integrate humans and machines more effectively and pass data from machine to machine and from machine to human in the right way, at the right time. Right now, he said, all the operational command and control centers do a specific thing very well—the air operations center does air, the space operations center does space, etc.—but orders, coordinates, and other data is still passed by voice, Hyten said. “When we can share data back and forth with ops centers, that’s when we’ll achieve multi-domain operations,” he said.