Time Critical Targeting

Experiences in Operations Desert Storm and Allied Force highlighted a significant weakness in the USAF's ability to engage time-critical targets. The weakness stems from airpower's inability to employ force quickly and kill an emerging target before it disappears back into hiding. USAF's engagement sequence, called the kill chain, is not fast enough to detect, locate, identify, and engage the target. Experience shows that the enemy has used this method of emerging, engaging, and dispersing since the beginning of time, and because it is still effective, the enemy has little reason to change. To help solve this difficulty, this study introduces and investigates two methods--reactive and preemptive--and determines how they might solve the problem in 2010. Evidence suggests that the USAF is attempting to solve the problem by using the reactive approach, which first detects a target with an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform and tasks a loitering-strike platform to kill it.