Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, former director of the National Security Agency, once wrote, “Important as it is in peacetime, communications security becomes even more important in wartime. For a few decades, nations have been relying on encryption systems to protect a wide variety of computerized transmissions ranging from commerce to government to military communications. While today’s encryption systems are considered reasonably secure, the possibilities of quantum cryptography and quantum computing offer a whole new dimension and threat to computerized secrecy.

The recently unveiled Defense Innovation Initiative aims to “pursue innovative ways to sustain and advance our military superiority for the 21^st Century” by finding “new and creative ways to sustain, and in some areas expand, our advantages even as we deal with more limited resources

When we talk about U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in 2023, we often depict it graphically as beginning with a global array of sensors that produces a variety of data absorbed in a cloud, from which multisource and all-source analysts produce decision advantage for both national and combatant decisionmakers. Big data analytics is at the core of this vision, and its impacts to intelligence analysts and the way they execute their mission will be multifaceted.