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’s nascent KC-Z program, aimed at developing a next-generation family of systems for aerial refueling, will look to launch its analysis-of-alternatives study in 2024, years earlier than originally planned. Originally, the analysis of alternatives for KC-Z was set for “maybe in the 2030s,” Paul Waugh, program executive officer…