When asked why the U.S. Air Force needs to more than double the number of uniformed intelligence analysts over the next three years, Col. Dan Johnson tells the story of an airman who was told to provide the Army with intelligence about three targets.

The airman, working at a classified location, entered a computer chat room with his Army counterparts in Iraq. He provided information about the targets using intelligence from U-2 and Predator aircraft, and when he was done, he asked the soldiers if they needed anything else. They said they could use help assessing the safety of a proposed convoy route.

The airman found “eight places of interest, one of which was an [improvised explosive device] that was exploded in place, and three weapons caches along the route,” said Johnson, commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing, headquartered at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Johnson’s wing is in charge of the five sites where analysts receive intelligence collected by Air Force planes and other sources, analyze it and advise forces in the field.

Johnson uses the example to focus attention on the impact one analyst can have. It is his way to make the case for adding 2,500 intelligence analyst positions to the existing 1,900 analysts over the next three years. The task will be challenging, experts said, because those analysts will need to be identified and trained to interpret videos, signals intelligence and human intelligence, and to fuse all three. They must know how to use sophisticated software tools, and they must understand the cultural details in which U.S. forces are operating. They need to know how the Army, Marines and Navy operate under the U.S. push to share information seamlessly among the services and intelligence agencies.

Adding so many analysts so quickly won’t be easy, but in the view of Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the service’s intelligence chief, the analysts are part of the solution to an even bigger problem.“In the not-too-distance future, we’ll be swimming in sensors and drowning in data,” Deptula said at the C4ISR Journal conference in October.

Deptula was referring to the flood of additional intelligence, especially video and the slower “motion imagery” the Air Force plans to gather over wide areas of Afghanistan. The service is pushing to achieve 50 nonstop Predator and Reaper patrols by late 2011. On top of that, a new fleet of turboprop-based Liberty planes is being deployed, and the Air Force plans to start flying Reaper unmanned planes equipped with the new Gorgon Stare camera pods. Today’s Predators beam “soda straw” views of the ground just meters across. Gorgon Stare’s multiple cameras mounted in wing pods will view an area 8 kilometers across and send pieces of this motion imagery to multiple users.

Deptula has been pushing the Pentagon to focus on deploying more camera systems like Gorgon Stare rather than fixating on the number of Reapers — the larger version of the Predators the U.S. plans to switch to completely by 2016. With Gorgon Stare, a single plane could serve more troops and analysts. If Deptula wins that bureaucratic battle, the Air Force must be ready with the analysts to make sense of the imagery. He wants to expand the number of imagery feeds from 50 today to as many as 3,000.

“Swimming” and “drowning” have become buzzwords since Deptula uttered them in October.

THE ‘HARD STARE’

Deptula’s speech followed his service’s first intelligence process assessment in August called Sentinel Focus 09 — Sentinel being the official name of the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground System, its part of the multiagency intelligence network the U.S. accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Air Force calls its five intelligence sites Distributed Ground Systems. Inside, analysts pore over collections from U-2s, Global Hawks, Predators and Reapers.

Experts from the 480th wing and intelligence agencies, including the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, were asked to observe those analysts in action and assess operations “as honestly and critically as possible,” said intelligence expert Robert Hamel, an adviser to Johnson. Officials called it a “hard stare.”

How did it go? “We learned that we need a mechanism that enables continuous improvement across our enterprise. The pace and demands continuously shift, especially in the [counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and irregular warfare] fights,” said Johnson by e-mail.

“We are drowning, but we have a get-well plan. But it’s going to take a while,” he said.

The wing plans to conduct Sentinel Focus assessments every six months. The next is scheduled for February.

The intelligence sites handle more than 700 gigabytes of information a day, the equivalent of more than 700 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Deptula’s forecast would turn those encyclopedias into a daily library, one reason that Johnson will get 2,138 of the new analysts to spread from Langley to Beale Air Force Base in California, Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii, Osan Air Base in Japan and Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Langley’s 30th Intelligence Squadron, known as Distributed Ground System-1, will almost double its billets to 650 by 2011. It is moving into a new building in February with a room as big as a football field and a sea of computers. Many of the new staff will be airmen straight out of tech school.

In the past two years, the Air Force launched two programs — the Top-Off Course and ISR Liaisons — to improve intelligence operations in the field.

The ISR Top-Off Course is given to soldiers and Marines in the days before they deploy to war zones.

“We teach them ‘Here is the DCGS, here’s how you get in touch with us, here’s what we can provide you,’ “ said Capt. Mike Hollingsworth, who commands the squadron’s DCGS Analytical Report Team called the DART.

ISR liaisons are officers who help troops link into the Air Force intelligence/network. “We hand out business cards, and the handoff is ‘You’re going to have somebody in your [area of operations] called the ISR liaison. Touch base with that guy. He’ll give you the information I’ve given you, and he’ll come out to your [forward operating base], travel around your AO, talking, helping you out,’” Hollingsworth said.

The Top-Off Course and liaison programs are expanding the demand, but those customers won’t be satisfied if the processing-exploitation-dissemination chain — the military term for the sensors, computers, and human analysts — isn’t big enough. Shortages are not uncommon, Johnson said, though the situation is improving as more analysts come on station.

INSIDE AN INTELLIGENCE STATION

Walk through a Distributed Ground System operation and three things become immediately apparent. One is the activity. Another is the lack of senior NCOs. The third is civilian contractors in front of some of the computer screens.

Some of the airmen are imagery analysts. Others deal with their signals intelligence counterparts at Fort Gordon, Ga. Some translate intercepted correspondence or news stories. All work a 12-hour schedule that adds up to nonstop operations.

Any time an analyst concludes that intelligence is sufficiently developed for a unit’s needs, it is passed along.

Activity also can include a link with troops in combat, which calls for immediate, undivided attention. An analyst in Virginia can route raw images from an unmanned aircraft to a unit in Afghanistan so it can see the opposition.

Increasingly, the Army is beaming video directly from aircraft to troops, in some cases bypassing the Air Force’s intelligence chain. Despite the trend, the Air Force intelligence teams say they bring an expertise that troops in the field don’t have. “There’s a common misconception by people who don’t do this for a living that they could do this for a living,” said Hollingsworth. “I saw it when I was in Afghanistan. Soldiers could pull unexploited imagery off the Internet and look and say, ‘Hey, that’s the IED you’re looking for.’ And I’d say, ‘No, that’s not an IED. That’s a house from high up.’”

The DGS has noncommissioned officers, but not as many as one might expect, in large part because the growth of leaders hasn’t caught up with that of analysts. Many of those NCOs have been retrained from other jobs to salvage Air Force careers that otherwise might have been curtailed by a reduction in force of 30,000 people five years ago.

Many working in the Distributed Ground System have moved from other Air Force career fields. Sheldon spent his first 15 years with C-5 cargo planes before being given other options, including intelligence training. But building up an experienced staff has required innovation.

Through private contractors, the Air Force has hired soldiers and Marines who recently left the service after deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They speak Army or Marine. They speak ground forces rather than Air Force,” said Lt. Col. Brendan Harris, commander of the 30th Intelligence Squadron.

“We’re growing people, but it takes five years to get someone with five years of experience. So for now, I’ve been able to buy some of that experience,” he added.

Those contractors do analytical jobs, in addition to offering advice, but when the job involves a bomb or a missile, called “the kill chain,” an airman does the analysis. “I have to have somebody who is subject to the [Uniform Code of Military Justice] if they mess up,” Harris said. The analysts can choose from an ever-growing inventory of computer tools to do their jobs, but those tools can’t replace the bodies.

“We’re not trying to replace them,” said Tod Hagan, director of ISR Software Solutions at Modus Operandi Inc. “We’re trying to help them do their jobs better.”

His company has a tool that uses key words to analyze print matter. Experts at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., are testing it.

More common tools are being used now.

“We have Google Earth,” said Airman 1st Class Mark Kruse, a 21-year-old imagery analyst who also speaks Urdu, the primary language of Pakistan. “We use it to reference other imagery. We can use electronic light tables to enhance the imagery or to overlap historical imagery to see if something was recently built. That might be a level of interest.”

Changes from more people to better computer tools are in store for the Air Force’s intelligence stations, but officials do not expect one critical aspect of the culture to change. Airmen will still reach out to troops and say, “What do you need?’” Johnson said.

When they go home each day, added Hollingsworth, ”They can say ‘Something I have done has kept somebody alive, or killed a terrorist, or actually impacted wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.’”