(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, is part of a bipartisan effort to get information about military intelligence technology.
In a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Kelly and other senators ask for details regarding the retirement of airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance capabilities.
“We are writing to you today to reiterate a concern we raised with Secretary of Defense Austin last year,” wrote the senators. “Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) is being scaled back at a rate that leaves the Combatant Commanders accepting greater risk and civilian policy makers with less input to inform their decisions.”
Proposals and efforts to cut ISR operations began during the Biden administration. The purpose was to move around money and invest those resources in future capabilities.
“We have to invest in those things that are going to allow us to have resilient forces, to operate in a distributed manner, and to be absolutely lethal in a future fight,” then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told a 2021 Senate hearing covered by Air & Space Forces Magazine.
In their letter to Hegseth, Kelly et al wrote that “in the pursuit of other modernization efforts beyond ISR, and possibly an overly optimistic prediction of what space can quickly execute,” the Air Force is quickly drawing down its current inventory of airborne ISR platforms without making investments in what the senators consider replacement capabilities.
“At the current rate of investment and divestment, the Air Force will eventually have more lethal tools, but they leave the military with fewer tools to know what they are striking and fewer tools for policy makers to know if they should be striking something at all,” the senators wrote.
They then provided examples of how important ISR has been in terms of providing information and security, even going back as far as the Cuban missile crisis during the Kennedy administration and the Camp David Accords of the Carter years.
“ISR provides the information necessary for the decision makers at every level,” the senators wrote. “It is no accident ISR is listed as one of the Air Force’s Core Functions.”
Kelly’s office said in a press release that the Air Force has retired aerial vehicles such as the MC-12 Liberty, E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System and the MQ-9 Block 1. Meanwhile, Kelly’s office said the Air Force has stopped procuring the MQ-9As and begun the shut-down of the U-2 training pipeline, while not procuring or announcing the development of new or modernized capabilities to fill the gaps caused by not having these aerial vehicles.
U.S. Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-North Dakota; Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire; Deb Fischer, R-Nebraska; and Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, joined Kelly in writing and signing the letter.
