For decades, imagery has been the dominant method GEOINT analysts have used to evaluate the world. Unfortunately, our adversaries know it. They have learned to evade imagery surveillance - but they didn’t stop there. Adversaries have also gotten better at managing their digital signatures and concealing movement by exploiting the gaps in our known collection patterns and revisit windows. They have deliberately adapted across multiple observable signatures to avoid detection – for instance, maritime vessels go dark and assets move under cover of darkness and spoof their location to hide where they are and what they’re doing there.

The intelligence community already fuses multi-source intelligence to address this. But if we shift radio frequency (RF) collection further upstream in the data collection and workflow process, it can tip and identify activity worth investigating and enable cueing other collection against it. The intelligence community can better leverage an underutilized data layer in their analysis. 

Artificial intelligence exposes a structural flaw in how the United States turns technological innovation into national capability.

America’s private sector builds the technology; government typically enters later as a buyer, attempting to append national security requirements to commercial systems that have already matured. That sequence fails for dual-use technologies that can shift rapidly from commercial software into cyber capabilities, intelligence platforms, autonomous systems, and critical military infrastructure.

From the comfort of an office, a drone operator executed a lethal standoff strike in Yemen on Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior al-Qaeda operative and U.S. citizen, from the other side of the planet in real-time. He was killed in a non-battlefield environment using Hellfire missiles fired from a remotely operated MQ-9 Reaper drone under secret executive authority. The mission was a collaboration between the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command.

Conducted under Title 50 covert action authority, the operation circumvented the requirement for public Congressional debate and authorization. Therein lies the issue where current laws are ill-equipped to govern the proliferation of unmanned systems. Title 50 authority governs intelligence community operations that can be authorized by the President without Congressional approval. Conversely, the 1973 War Powers Resolution represents a failure of legal limits on Executive conflict-related powers. Together, they create a ‘grey zone’ that is easily exploitable by unmanned systems.