NATO ISR

The United States and France are jointly sponsoring an initiative to fix intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sharing within NATO, said Alexander Vershbow, the alliance’s deputy secretary general. This initiative aims to build up “both the network infrastructure to integrate national ISR capabilities, plus NATO-owned capabilities like AWACS” and the new Global Hawk-based Alliance Ground Surveillance system, he told defense reporters in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 29. The idea is to “enable all the data from these different sources to be integrated and then pooled” to make it available for use across the alliance, he said. Many bugs need to be worked out, especially regarding who will release what data and who will have access, he said. France and Britain may make “a so-called contribution in kind” to the ISR enterprise in the form of their own national ISR assets, while other allies will likely contribute cash, said Vershbow. This would be an “absolutely new example of NATO common funding,” but “this is a case where the allies recognize a need to pool their resources to build the hardware and the software” necessary to truly integrate as an alliance, he said. (See also Why Not Syria, Libya Lessons Learned, and European Tanker Teaming.)