Seeking Combat Support Marines for Special Ops

SOCOM is seeking better ISR options for units in the field. (U.S. Marine/Steven Fox, released)

SOFIC 2022: US Special Operations Command is looking to beef up its airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities as it moves away from counterterrorism operations and towards potential conflicts against a near-peer adversary.

At the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference today, several SOCOM leaders called out the need for sustained investment in new overhead ISR capabilities that will give special operators better situational awareness in the future.

“As I look at next generation ISR, I think that’s something that still needs further development,” said OCOM commander Gen. Richard Clarke. “Just buying overhead UAVs — that is not going to be the solution in the long run. There are so many capabilities that have to come together that I think can allow our
people — that are in those different, 80 plus different countries — to even get a better feel than just having something above their head.”

Clarke said that the counterterrorism focus of the last 20 years of war didn’t require SOCOM to develop overhead ISR capabilities that integrated with sensors in other domains. With the emergence of space and commercially available data, the command now needs to advance its ISR capabilities.

“We got to layer space capabilities with that. We have to layer open source data with that. We have to be able to pull that all together. And those things that are flying above, we need to make sure we have the best capabilities on top of them,” Clarke said.

To do so, SOCOM acquisition executive James Smith said that the command is investing in three specific areas: space-based payloads; cyber-based targeting; and collaborative, autonomous unmanned and unattended sensors for its next-generation ISR needs.

“It’s the idea of taking the data from these space-based payloads from what we can find on the cyber internet and what we can garner from our own small organic sensors, working in support of the team, fusing that information together and providing a far greater probability of confidence for our operators about what they’re looking at in their environment,” Smith said.

Smith said the Program Executive Office for Special Reconnaissance at SOCOM will be responsible for both the unmanned sensors and the space-based capabilities. PEO Special Operations Forces Digital Applications will be tasked with the cyber responsibilities.

Lisa Sanders, director of science and technology at SOCOM, said her office is spending its time further defining what investments the special operations community needs to make in next generation ISR. Within that realm, she said SOCOM’s S&T community is most heavily focused on space-base payloads and is working with other Defense Department agencies, such as the Space Development Agency, on those efforts.

According to Sanders’ presentation, SOCOM has about $22 million in S&T funding for next-generation ISR in fiscal 2022.

“The biggest thing that we’re doing in 2023 in this domain is defining what should we be investing in,” Sanders said. “I’ll tell you just off the top of my head, I think a lot of it is open source information, publicly available information and how do you effectively avoid cognitive overload in that space.”