Please be advised: This event will premiere on this page at 10:00 a.m. EDT, Friday, October 29. Register for the event here
ISR—a bureaucratic abbreviation for “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance”— is the eyes and ears of informed policymaking in peacetime and of effective leadership on the battlefield in time of war. The systems that acquire timely information about foreign threats, process that information and then present it in a form that is useful to national leaders and military commanders are increasingly large in number and diverse in size, ranging from small personal devices to complex satellite systems.
For the last 30 years, the United States has benefitted from ISR dominance. As a result, an expectation has developed among America’s leaders that they will always benefit from visibility into the thinking and actions of their adversaries, who, for their part, will never see as clearly inside the decision making of the United States. Yet this expectation is increasingly disconnected from reality: The advent of highly capable and reasonably- priced commercial systems is levelling the playing field, while demand in the United States government for ISR systems is placing limited resources under increasing strain.
The national security community must begin making hard choices about how to allocate its finite assets. As leaders determine which threats to prioritize, they will also look toward nontraditional systems like commercial data to fill gaps in collection. This development will pose challenges for policymakers regarding privacy, but it will also open up opportunities for dissuading adversaries from pursuing aggression. Please join Hudson’s Michael Doran, Ezra Cohen and Bryan Clark to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the U.S. government in this new era in ISR.
Join Hudson Institute Senior Fellows Michael Doran and Ludovic Hood, Research Fellow Zineb Riboua, and Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for a timely discussion about the conflicts in the region and America’s strategic and diplomatic paths forward.
Join Senior Fellow Dr. Rebeccah Heinrichs and Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) for a fireside discussion on how Congress can guide American strategy, the need to modernize the defense industrial base, and the vital role of allies and partners in an unstable international environment.
Join Senior Fellow Michael Doran for a candid conversation with H.E. Narek Mkrtchyan, ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the United States of America, as they discuss the developments, challenges, and opportunities defining the US-Armenia relationship.
Please join Hudson Institute’s China Center as Miles Yu hosts a panel with key members of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan and the Democratic Progressive Party to examine Taiwan’s mobilization efforts against the CCP’s increasing threats.
