Advanced tech needed for 'inevitable' high-end conflict: However, a fight in a highly contested environment, which differs from the permissive counterinsurgency environments in which U.S. forces have fought for 15 years, is inevitable. “This future fight — and this is where I’ll say this is my opinion — a future fight that is inevitable, non-permissive operations in high-end contested and degraded operational environment — to me this is not a matter of if but when and we’re not as well prepared for it as we would like to be, which is why the [future] budget does put a lot of emphasis on those high-end technologies,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director for defense intelligence (warfighter support) at the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said Thursday at a breakfast hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.
Shanahan provided a short list of priorities being pursued to get after this issue. The first is greater airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability, both manned and unmanned. This unmanned component, he said, is across all the services, “it’s no longer just an Air Force [thing], the Army and the Navy are getting big into the unmanned ISR."
Shanahan also noted unmanned undersea capabilities for the Navy, which he described as a big growth area.
