After years of training, a recon commando marches into the briefing room and declares, “I’ve got little flying drones, cyber forensic tools, and a long-range rifle. I want a target.” The boss looks at the commando and replies, “Look, scout, you don’t have the authorities to use any of those fancy tools, take a seat in the back.” The commando nods and sits. Then an intelligence collector speaks to the boss: “I have a target, I just need a way to access it from the ground.” The boss considers the collector and says, “Listen, your job is to focus on the air. Come sit with the crew up front.” The collector and commando shrug, the briefing continues and the target window closes. We were the commando, collector, and boss in this fable too many times. The U.S. Air Force isn’t sure how to organize or train for special reconnaissance, and the current model keeps repeating like a bad joke. We think the time is right for the Air Force to deliver a harder-hitting punch line.
Integrating special warfare airmen, information warfare capabilities, and other technical elements conducting special reconnaissance missions can help. The status quo separates these communities between Air Combat Command and Air Force Special Operations Command largely based on funding, training, and mission from the last war. However, the Air Force’s re-optimization ambition may reshape many of those major commands, stand up new ones, and shuffle the subordinate units of action. The appetite for change should include a new model to merge capabilities within a dedicated special reconnaissance squadron.
Mission, Airmen, and Meaning
Joint doctrine defines “special reconnaissance” as actions conducted in sensitive environments to collect information of strategic importance, usually without capabilities found in the conventional force. Historically, special reconnaissance includes peculiar capabilities employing clandestine and covert mechanisms. The Air Force removed the term “special reconnaissance” from service doctrine in 2024, but invests heavily in conventional reconnaissance capability like the U-2 “Dragon Lady” aircraft and the distributed intelligence processing stations. Reconnaissance and intelligence squadrons collect sensitive information, but the assets themselves are overt. America acknowledges the reconnaissance aircraft for what they are, and the adversary treats these missions like spy planes. For example, a Dragon Lady flying over South Korea would be sensitive but not special, and everyone can figure out the intended target for collection.
The Air Force holds special reconnaissance in contradiction, re-labeling legacy weather technicians as special reconnaissance airmen for the core activity but isolating them from the information warfare enterprise. This prevents seamless integration with the authorities, priorities, and reporting mechanisms in the information warfare chain of command. The service re-optimization for great-power competition opens the aperture to re-examine this exclusionary relationship. Air Force special operations units learned many re-optimization lessons over the last few years, and the ideas have powerful advocates in Air Force leadership. This organizational change could harness the cultural advantages of special warfare commandos with the technological infrastructure and integration of the information warfare enterprise.
We recommend defining Air Force special reconnaissance as the technical service capabilities, including discreet and non-standard platforms. This approach to special reconnaissance under information warfare should include small drones, close access cyber operations, and the fine lines between signals intelligence and electronic warfare. This could be hardware designed for an aircraft and adapted to approach a target by land or sea. It could also include the radio shack solution of commercially acquired drones modified to collect signals of interest and feed into the joint force’s target acquisition networks. Many of these entrepreneurial efforts occur today, but across different units in separate major commands without the integration required to complete a targeting cycle. To improve, special reconnaissance units of action should be built against precise targets with the authorities to perform the mission. Forming a squadron in the Air Force’s information warfare enterprise could put the experts in the same room with the required infrastructure to achieve this goal.
Airman’s Guide to Information and Special Warfare
Unfortunately, the Air Force isolates special reconnaissance expertise in separate command structures based on conventions from the last war. The capabilities to collect intelligence, target enemy weak points, and exploit them with cyber effects all fall under information warfare elements in Air Combat Command’s 16th Air Force. This includes the authorities for the service cryptologic component over signals intelligence and cyber security. Like the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, the 16th Air Force Commander is also dual-hatted as the Air Force Cyber Component Commander. Frankly, this is a good thing: Establishing secure networks, building common intelligence pictures, and targeting for cyber effects all benefit from an integrated command hierarchy, stealing adversary secrets and protecting America’s.
Air Force Special Warfare includes tactical air controllers for munitions employment, pararescue experts to bring people home, and special tactics units to open austere airfields. Special reconnaissance airmen fall under the special tactics umbrella and exclusively exist in special operations formations. This enlisted career field recruits, assesses, selects, and trains commandos to collect and exploit key information, conduct electronic warfare, integrate small drones, and perform tactical cyber actions. Their training includes a variety of infiltration techniques including military free fall, maritime skills, ghillie suits, and sniper rifles. The job description excludes the word “intelligence” and holds the information warfare chain of command at arm’s length. As such, these commandos lack the authority to perform their advertised function. Merging these special reconnaissance experts with information warfare units at multiple career milestones increases the Air Force’s special reconnaissance potential, while ensuring data integration into existing systems for total force benefit.
Another integration obstacle focuses on the Air Force’s small drone procurement and integration. Under the current system, security forces own the small drone program. This makes sense for the Air Force’s key fight to get airborne, but gets complicated when bases move into other countries. The priority for any small drones around the active airfield should be to defend the base, and security forces own the mission when American sovereignty is clear. However, if the small drone targets adversary military elements outside the base, and implement special payloads to facilitate collection, the requisite authorities look more like the U-2s based out of South Korea than a drone flying over a base in Texas. This is something special reconnaissance commandos can and should train for, but employing novel technology with signals intelligence payloads requires prioritization, deconfliction, integration, and oversight. If the intent extends to a Frankenstein drone with collection and cyber effects on a single platform, then the authorities and targeting exist entirely in information warfare channels.
Forming a special reconnaissance squadron in the information warfare enterprise would utilize the authorities and cyber capabilities to allocate the best sensing assets against prioritized targets. The Air Force can fix a lot of these issues by assigning special warfare commandos, defender drone operators, and others conducting intelligence functions with the information warfare enterprise under the same unit commander. It would provide an opportunity for the proposed Air Force Cyber and Intelligence Command to task sensors and cyber effects capability to special reconnaissance commandos according to the ambitions of their career field.
Humans Over Hardware
Blending intelligence professionals, special warfare commandos, and cyber capability would build on current models in the Air Force and joint special operations community. Air Force Special Operations Command started on the right path with mixed expertise and blended leadership teams as they designed and activated several new theater air operations squadrons within power projection wings. These new units each maintain a regional focus built off legacy aspects of the combat aviation advisors’ foreign internal defense mission. However, they are not purpose-built around a technical special reconnaissance mission, and the information warfare enterprise should fill this niche.
Leaders and veterans in special reconnaissance squadrons would need cultural buy-in from special warfare and the intelligence community, and the blended leadership team should be a requirement from the start. Sharing key developmental opportunities like squadron commander, operations officer, and senior enlisted leadership, would upend traditional talent management systems, but it is worth it. Merging information and special warfare experts into a consolidated special reconnaissance squadron could help balance a commando’s “get after it” mentality with the patient attention to detail required in intelligence collection, network targeting, and cyber security. The Air Force regularly practices this at the general officer and colonel command assignment processes. Special reconnaissance formations in Naval Special Warfare and Marine Reconnaissance Battalions provide examples where intelligence officers occasionally lead information warfare and special reconnaissance professionals in consolidated units of action.
The Fast Eat the Slow
Establishing dedicated squadrons is hardly quixotic. The first years should form an initial cadre with strong skills in expeditionary cyber access, small drones, signals intelligence expertise, foreign language skills and the drive to target adversary systems and networks. Prospective candidates would need to show mental and physical capability, but Ukraine demonstrates small-drone lethality without the need for the physical baseline of an inter-collegiate athlete. Central assignment team processes can help, but digital boards, service fitness tests, electronic interviews, and peer recommendations should be enough for commanders to select the right initial cadre. If the squadron stands up in an area rich with possible hires, the ability to find members and build the unity of effort amplifies. Texas hosts the information warfare enterprise and Special Warfare Training Wing in San Antonio with the 17th Training Wing only a few hours away. Hurlburt and Arizona could be longer-term options as well based on developments in Air Force Special Warfare. This could potentially be manpower neutral as the Air Force re-allocates personnel and capability from legacy missions, potentially allowing a stand-up before 2027.
Without a dedicated squadron, special reconnaissance successes are single-serving and fail to build long-term improvement and integration. People work together on big projects and solve impossible problems because they trust partners, and the bureaucratic separation of the current model holds the Air Force special reconnaissance elements back. A squadron can bring them together and iterate success over the long term at the warfighter’s unit of action.
Great-power competition isn’t about the big eating the small: The winner will be determined by the fast eating the slow. For special reconnaissance capability, the airmen involved can be faster than the competition as soon as we stop running in circles. The Air Force should take advantage of the current re-organization to address a critical blind spot in special reconnaissance integration. Bringing the collectors and commandos together in a squadron ensures the right airmen hunt the best targets with the best capability.
John Long is an Air Force officer currently participating in the Director’s Fellowship at the National Security Agency. His leadership experience includes squadron, troop, and flight command in a Special Tactics Squadron, the Joint Special Operations Command, Tactical Air Control Party units, and remotely piloted aircraft elements.
Leandros Fugate is an Air Force officer currently serving at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He commanded a special operations airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance unit in the Indo-Pacific, executing air and maritime special reconnaissance missions, special operations liaison to India, and prior service at Air Force and joint special operations units.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent those of the U.S. Air Force, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.
Image: Master Sgt. Matt Hecht via Spangdahlem Air Base.
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