Addressing Problems of Uncertainty with Broad-Area Monitoring and Analytics

From IC Insider Planet

The nature of hazards and threats is evolving rapidly, as is technology, and governments are struggling to keep pace. For the national security enterprise, this equates to not only addressing higher volume and frequency of threats, but also answering more diverse and complex questions, such as monitoring vast areas and having the coverage to characterize behaviors and enable retrospective analyses. Nations also need data and intelligence that can be disseminated widely at pace to build shared awareness and collaboration across governments, allies, and partners, and compete in the information domain.

Defense and intelligence organizations have been relatively slow to adapt to these evolving challenges, in part because focus has been on developing evermore exquisite imagery to identify objects with greater precision and reliability. This better answers the what and where, but is less able to answer the why and what next. Alternatively, these are further unanswered questions – why and what next? What happened and how?

These questions require additional collection and exploitation methods to complement existing approaches – enabling the move from sensor-centric to problem-centric intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), where analysts can combine sources to provide effective solutions to more complex intelligence problems. The defense sector is combining traditional tasking with different forms of sensing such as SAR, RF, and hyperspectral, but has overlooked a complementary optical capability: continual global medium-resolution imaging.

This white paper explores how organizations – from governments and enterprises to think tanks and the OSINT community – are layering high-cadence medium-resolution global imaging and analytics with established tasking practices to address systemic gaps in visibility and responsiveness over broad areas and timeframes.

Read the full white paper here.

Image credit: ©Planet Labs PBC • SkySat • Earthquake aftermath in Kahramanmaras, Turkey • February 9, 2023

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