Here's an off-topic riff on high level ideas for how the USAF might remake itself:
A company called SenseNetworks has an interesting new product called Citysense (via). It aggregates location/movement data on cabs in major cities, models the data to tease out insight, and then makes it available via their platform. Users access output through a variety of applications (i.e. a dashboard). Here's the output:
The most interesting aspect of this system is that it provides a visual clue as to what Cloud Power (a blanket of microsensors and machines that can dominate a target zone) is going to look like:
- Granular real-time data acquisition (permissive or non-permissive tagging) on every object of interest in an urban zone,
- modeling of that data for insight, trending, historical patterns and
- actions that take advantage of that data (micro-UAVs).
NOTE: even if the AF doesn't embrace "cloud power" -- sclerortic decision making, misdirection, etc. -- the strength of the trend line (riding Moore's law down) indicates that we will definitely see some variant of this in the DIY weapons space over the long term.