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70th ISRW hosts WEPTAC

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Kevin Iinuma
  • 70 ISR Wing Public Affairs
The 70th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Wing gathered approximately 47 participants from the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force for this year’s Weapons and Tactics Conference (WEPTAC) at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, Sept. 12-16, 2022.
 
Assembling members from the Air Combat Command, Air Force Special Operations Command, Air Force Global Strike Command, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and Delta 7, to discuss and document tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to enhance the lethality and survivability of our Joint Forces.
 
“I’m excited to bring together a diverse motivated group of tactical and technical experts from across the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force to solve challenging problems for Agile Combat Employment, Information Warfare, and cyber operations,” said U.S. Air Force Capt. Julian Freeman, 70th ISRW weapons officer. “I believe WEPTAC participants will identify unique tradecraft, partnerships, and innovative solutions to accelerate our processes against the hardest targets.”
 
WEPTAC teams were not responsible for just building a process, but ensuring that it was easily understood, comprehensive, and universally applicable to all Air Force core missions. The Air Force has many intelligence needs, so failure to provide an output meeting this standard would lead to a continued poor utilization and ill-defined exploitation of these information-based target signatures.
 
“It is essential for our wing to integrate with our unit-level intelligence, ISRWs, and operators to ensure we provide the best tactical solutions across the spectrums of conflict and competition,” said Freeman.

As many challenges that occur during every conference, one challenge the WEPTAC groups encountered was ensuring the teams had clear guidance and the necessary expertise to generate solutions. The teams overcame these challenges by seeking a wide variety of feedback from senior leaders within the 70th ISRW and from subject-matter experts across multiple units to ensure their goals were clear, measurable, and feasible. These discussions led to quality guidance and ensured leaders with diverse experience were able to yield innovative results.
 
“Our group’s ability to learn how to use and incorporate new data with such efficiency led directly into complete processes for operationalizing and even training future analysts in the processes,” said U.S. Air Force Capt. Colin Bryant, 7th Bomb Wing intelligence weapons officer, Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. “Micro experiments put the process to the test and allowed us to codify a clear path to successful fusion of this information into current analysis workflows. Next steps now lead us to greater intelligence community (IC) inclusion instead of the original goal of simply putting our fixings into writing.”
 
These working group directly from U.S. Air Force Warfare Center priorities and U.S. Air Force Weapons School academic achievements focused on leveraging previously ill-defined exploration of emerging technology information signatures to hold our adversaries’ most valuable systems at risk at any time of our choosing. The 70th ISRW is uniquely positioned to lead the charge in developing, testing, training, and fielding standards for exploiting these enemy vulnerabilities within the Air Force and to support similar efforts IC-wide.
 
“The 70th ISRW has motivated and innovative Airmen that not only learned how to deal with traditionally difficult intricacies of emerging technologies, but that they collectively developed the tradecraft standards and future training requirements to disseminate Air Force-wide,” said Bryant. “The accomplishments of this week for our Mission Focus Working Group were truly impressive.”