Orlando, February 18, 2010—NORAD/US Northern Command boss, Gen. Gene Renuart, says a lot of hours and effort are going into expansion of US airspace situational awareness. Command officials recently met with Homeland Security to work on a concept called the “air domain intelligence integration cell”—a concept similar to an Air Force air operations center, but it would fuse data from civilian and law enforcement agencies together with military air operations to form a more coherent picture of air activity for the continental US. He said this data would show the diversity of daily US air traffic and help tie it to intelligence streams that are used to find “tracks of interest” that might pose a threat. The Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies are developing the initiative and will house the cell at NORTHCOM headquarters to get “better vision” into threats from the air domain.
A three-month continuing resolution that ended in December inflicted less pain on the Department of the Air Force than it had expected, as procurement and construction continue in the new year. The federal government operated under a stopgap spending measure that stretched from the beginning of the fiscal year on…