National Reconnaissance Office director Bruce Carlson said most consumers of intel today want one thing: “a map or a picture with a dot” indicating where someone is to be killed or rescued, or where cargo is to be dropped. He’s orienting his vast processing resources to provide that and to seek other ways of doing it as well. Very soon, he said, signals intelligence will be good enough to support precision targeting. Users today want actionable intel faster and more accurately, and “we can do that,” Carlson asserted.
The Air Force wants to pump more than $12 billion over the next five years into its new affordable long-range missiles program and recently asked industry to push the flights of some of those munitions beyond 1,200 miles.