Tracking the MISR Effort: From Pilot Program to Kill Web Enabler

The coverage of Maritime ISR (MISR) Weapons and Tactics Instructors across Second Line of Defense and Defense.info spans five years and represents one of the most sustained independent analytical efforts to track a genuinely new warfighting capability as it evolved from a modest pilot program into a foundational element of the U.S. Navy’s kill web architecture. The story begins with a candid admission: until a visit to San Diego in early 2020, I had never heard of MISR officers. Neither, it appeared, had most people. That obscurity was itself diagnostic, a sign that something important was being built outside the usual spotlights of platform procurement and budget battles.

What followed over the next five years was a methodical effort to document, analyze, and advance understanding of a program that was, in the words of Vice Admiral Miller, the Navy’s Air Boss, absolutely central to future warfighting: “The next war will be won or lost by the purple shirts. You need to take MISR seriously, because the next fight is an ISR fight.”

The bibliography assembled for this project, spanning fourteen original articles, one USNI Proceedings piece, and a Navy press release on the Resolute Hunter exercise, traces the MISR program through three distinct phases: founding and cultural struggle (2020–2021), validation and expanding scope (2023), and maturation into a force-design principle (2024–2025).

Phase One (2020–2021): Standing Up the Left Side of the Kill Chain

The first cluster of articles, published through summer and fall 2020, captures the MISR program at its most embryonic and most culturally contested. CDR Pete “Two Times” Salvaggio, the MISR Weapons School Department Head and the program’s founding intellectual architect, served as the primary interlocutor across multiple interviews. His framing was consistent and pointed: the Navy needed a paradigm shift focused on the “left side of the kill chain”—the find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess sequence, rather than centering everything on the terminal engager.

The cultural dimension was as important as the technical one. MISR was deliberately platform-agnostic, the only weapons school at NAWDC not attached to a specific aircraft. Its student body was equally unusual, mixing naval aviators with intelligence specialists, cryptologists, and surface warfare officers. This heterodox composition was not accidental. It reflected the core insight that the ISR-C2 integration challenge crossed community lines in ways that a single-platform school could never address. Salvaggio’s phrase captured the aspiration: “Our goal at MISR is to be comfortable to work in chaos.”

The reporting on LCDR Maddox, the first MISR officer deployed to a carrier strike group, USS George H.W. Bush, CSG-2, under Rear Admiral Whitesell—added critical ground truth. Her deployment demonstrated both what was possible and what was still resisted. With different assets using different operating pictures, the full value of ISR streams was going unrealized. The Minotaur system, which gave all participants a common operational picture regardless of whether they were airborne or afloat, was the technical linchpin.

But the deeper point was cultural: admirals who had come through the fast jet community faced a genuine intellectual challenge in incorporating MISR and dynamic targeting into their operational thinking. The deployment nonetheless generated demand, Vice Admiral Miller subsequently expressed his desire to have MISR officers in every carrier strike group and at the fleet level.

The January 2021 article on Resolute Hunter marked a conceptual step forward. The exercise, jointly sponsored by NAWDC and the USAF’s Air Combat Command, with Australian and British partners as well as Marines, was described not merely as a training event but as a “new paradigm.” ISR forces were no longer simply collectors feeding data to decision-makers; they were becoming “fusers of information” providing for distributed decisions at the tactical edge. Rear Admiral Brophy’s framing — “What exactly do 21st century fires look like from a Maritime perspective?”— signaled that NAWDC leadership understood MISR as a conceptual probe into the nature of modern combat, not merely a new training course.

Phase Two (2023): Validation, the USNI Argument, and the Coalition Dimension

The October 2023 article “ISR, Counter-ISR, C2 and Multi-Domain Strike” represented the program’s first appearance in a wider analytical context, appearing alongside perspectives from Australian Wing Commander Marija Jovanovich at a Williams Foundation seminar. Her testimony was significant: she singled out the Resolute Hunter exercise and Salvaggio’s MISR work as a concrete expression of the expanded ISR role she had been advocating in her own air force. The reach of the MISR framework into coalition thinking was no longer theoretical.

The July 2023 USNI Proceedings article by Bigay and Herdt, “Make More Maritime ISR Weapons and Tactics Instructors,” provided independent institutional validation from inside the Navy. Its core argument was both a status report and an advocacy document: the 18-week course graduating approximately 18 students annually was producing professionals who connected sensors, weapons, and decision-makers across all domains—but the throughput was insufficient for the demand the program was generating. The article pointed to structural gaps: career-path options for MISR WTIs had not been adequately developed, and the absence of a dedicated detailing pathway meant that officers with rare and hard-won skills were returning to their parent communities rather than compounding institutional expertise. The Proceedings imprimatur signaled that MISR had crossed from experimental to mainstream within Naval aviation discourse.

The coalition dimension, already visible in the 2021 Resolute Hunter reporting, was reinforced in the 2023 Navy press release documenting the exercise’s bi-annual format. UK and Australian participation was now institutionalized, directly supporting the National Security Strategy’s emphasis on coalition building and the CNO’s Navigation Plan. The exercise was no longer a pilot; it was a recurring allied intelligence integration event.

Phase Three (2024–2025): From Left Side to Full Kill Chain, from Training to Force Design

The return visit to NAWDC in October 2024 produced the most analytically significant set of observations in the entire coverage arc. LCDR Jason “Cuddles” Falk, the program’s assistant commander, described a transformation that went well beyond the original 2020 mandate. MISR had evolved from a left-side-of-the-kill-chain specialist program into a capability engaged across the entire kill chain. The shift reflected the Navy’s deepening investment in Distributed Maritime Operations and the growing centrality of the digital domain. The Resolute Hunter exercise had evolved with it: where the 2020 iteration focused on how ISR collectors could support tactical decision-makers more effectively, the 2024 version focused on how the full range of platforms and payloads available to the Navy and its joint partners could provide surveillance and reconnaissance “eyes” to “decision-maker brains” at the tactical edge.

The November 2024 article on payload innovation — “Leveraging Training to Shape Payload Innovations” — captured a further evolution that was conceptually important: MISR had become a driver of innovation, not merely a trainer for existing capabilities. The program was inviting external participants to introduce new payloads into the Resolute Hunter training environment, creating a feedback loop between tactical users and developers. The Lockheed Martin partnership involving rapid concept prototype installation on MH-60S airframes was cited as an exemplar: by getting flight suit input early in the systems engineering cycle, the program was accelerating capability transition and reducing the most expensive element of R&D, flight time. MISR was no longer just building “6th generation officers” focused on C2/ISR integration; it was institutionalizing iterative development through collaborative experimentation.

The 2025 articles, covering the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, the “Fight Tonight” force concept, non-kinetic capabilities, and the shift from crisis management to chaos management, show a program that has moved from naval aviation training into broader force design discourse. The 22nd MEU’s integration of the JUMP 20 Group 3 uncrewed aircraft system during ARGMEUEX was treated not as a platform procurement story but as a case study in organizational learning: the system’s first flight aboard a San Antonio-class amphibious warship became an immediate operational capability enhancement rather than an entry point for years of doctrine development. Marines discovered the system’s value through practical application, and the discovery fed back into the training and development cycle.

The November 2025 article “MISR and the Shift from Crisis Management to Chaos Management” represented the fullest theoretical elaboration yet of what the MISR program means for military organization. Drawing on Admiral Paparo’s call for “new mental furniture” in 21st-century warfare, the article framed MISR as a real-world instantiation of chaos management, the replacement of scenario prediction, linear cause-and-effect reasoning, and efficiency-optimized structures with adaptive, persistent, distributed operations. MISR-enabled forces, the argument ran, could continuously adapt to changing strategic conditions rather than waiting for adversary actions to cross clear thresholds. The distributed operations concepts enabled by MISR, small, mobile capabilities presenting difficult targeting challenges, were positioned as a direct answer to peer adversary anti-access/area denial strategies.

Thematic Threads Across the Coverage Arc

Several analytical threads run consistently across the entire body of MISR coverage and are worth making explicit.

The Kill Chain vs. Kill Web Distinction. The earliest articles established and the later ones confirmed that MISR’s purpose was not to improve existing kill chain processes but to enable kill web operations: the disconnection of specific sensors from specific weapons, replaced by sensor network management delivering outcomes across a distributed force. The 2024 update that MISR had expanded from the left side of the kill chain to the entire chain does not contradict this—it reflects the program’s maturation into the connective tissue of the full-spectrum kill web.

Cultural Resistance as a Persistent Theme. From the 2020 articles through the 2025 chaos management piece, the obstacle to MISR’s impact has never been primarily technical. The challenge has consistently been breaking “habitual operational patterns of senior commanders” who came of age in a platform-centric, kinetic-first Navy. The Proceedings article’s identification of “deeply rooted warfare doctrine” as the “biggest barrier to innovation” echoed what “Two Times” had said five years earlier. Progress has been real—the selection rates of aviator MISR WTIs for operational command were cited as evidence of community acceptance—but the cultural dimension remains the long pole in the tent.

Coalition Integration as Force Multiplier. From the first Resolute Hunter reporting through the 2025 articles, the coalition dimension has been both present and growing. Australian and British participation in Resolute Hunter, the Williams Foundation seminar context for the 2023 ISR article, and the 22nd MEU’s distributed operations work all point to MISR as a mechanism for allied interoperability, not just a U.S. Navy training program. The “fight tonight” framing prominent in the 2025 Australian-connected coverage suggests that the MISR concept is finding resonance in allied force design discussions.

The Sixth Generation Officer Concept. The phrase “6th generation officers” appeared early in the 2020 coverage and has persisted. It describes professionals defined not by the platform they fly or the weapons they employ but by their mastery of C2/ISR integration, their ability to work sensor networks across domains, connect distributed force elements, and deliver targeting effects that no single platform could achieve alone. MISR WTIs are the institutional embodiment of this concept, and the program’s expansion beyond naval aviation into Marine and joint force contexts suggests the concept is broadening beyond its origins.

Training as Innovation Driver. The 2024–2025 reporting marked a qualitative shift in how MISR’s role in innovation was understood. Earlier articles described training as preparation for capabilities developed elsewhere; the later articles showed training itself becoming a site of capability development. The Resolute Hunter integration of new payloads, the Lockheed Martin partnership, and the 22nd MEU’s experimental integration of unmanned systems all reflect a model in which the training environment is used to accelerate fielding rather than simply prepare operators for systems already fielded.

Overall Assessment and Open Questions

The MISR coverage across Second Line of Defense and Defense.info represents a coherent five-year analytical project that has tracked a genuine military innovation from obscurity to institutional establishment. The program’s trajectory from a novel pilot at NAWDC to a recognized component of distributed maritime operations, 22nd MEU integration, and coalition ISR exercises confirms the analytical judgment made in 2020 that MISR was not merely a new course but “a new foundational element, and a plank holder in the strategic shift for force structure integratability.”

Several open questions emerge from the arc of coverage and deserve continued attention. The throughput problem identified in the 2023 Proceedings article, approximately 18 graduates annually, has not been publicly resolved. If MISR WTIs are now sought for every carrier strike group, at fleet level, and in the Marine Corps, the gap between supply and demand is substantial. The career-path question is equally unresolved: whether the Navy has created the institutional structures to retain and develop MISR WTIs as a career specialty, rather than treating the qualification as a professional development tour, will determine whether the program compounds its expertise or perpetually re-trains.

The extension of MISR concepts into the Marine Corps and the 22nd MEU context raises a further question: is MISR becoming a joint warfighting concept or remaining a naval aviation program with joint participation? The distinction matters for resourcing, doctrine development, and the pace at which the cultural change MISR embodies can propagate through the broader joint force. The chaos management framing of the November 2025 article suggests an aspiration to joint relevance; the institutional structures to realize that aspiration are less clearly documented.

Finally, the payload revolution thread that emerged in late 2024 points toward a potentially decisive evolution: if MISR training environments become recognized sites of rapid capability development, shortcutting the traditional acquisition timeline by integrating operators into the front end of systems engineering, the program’s value extends well beyond the 18 officers it graduates each cycle. Tracking whether the Lockheed Martin prototype model and the JUMP 20 experimental integration become templates for a broader innovation approach within naval and Marine aviation will be a key analytical task in the years ahead.

What began as a discovery of an obscure new program in the corridors of NAWDC has become a sustained analytical engagement with one of the more consequential innovations in U.S. naval warfighting in the past decade.

The MISR story is, at its core, a story about the primacy of the cognitive and organizational over the purely technological, about building the human connective tissue without which the most advanced sensors, platforms, and networks cannot deliver their potential combat effect.

For my discussion of the MISRs as an example of how transformation really happens, see my new book:

Bibliography: Maritime ISR (MISR) Weapons and Tactics Instructors

Second Line of Defense (sldinfo.com)

Laird, Robbin. “Working the Left Side of the Kill Chain: MISR Comes to the Navy.” Second Line of Defense, October 2020. https://sldinfo.com/2020/10/working-the-left-side-of-the-kill-chain-misr-comes-to-the-navy/

Laird, Robbin. “MISR, MINOTAUR and Training for the Maritime Kill Web.” Second Line of Defense, July 2020. https://sldinfo.com/2020/07/misr-minotaur-and-training-for-the-maritime-kill-web/

Laird, Robbin. “The Coming of MISR to the Fleet: The Perspective of the First Deployed MISR Officer.” Second Line of Defense, August 2020. https://sldinfo.com/2020/08/the-coming-of-misr-to-the-fleet-the-perspective-of-the-first-deployed-misr-officer/

Laird, Robbin. “Resolute Hunter: Shaping a New Paradigm.” Second Line of Defense, January 2021. https://sldinfo.com/2021/01/resolute-hunter-shaping-a-new-paradigm/

Laird, Robbin. “ISR, Counter-ISR, C2 and Multi-Domain Strike.” Second Line of Defense, October 2023. https://sldinfo.com/2023/10/isr-counter-isr-c2-and-multi-domain-strike/

Laird, Robbin. “Leveraging Training to Shape Payload Innovations.” Second Line of Defense, November 2024. https://sldinfo.com/2024/11/leveraging-training-to-shape-payload-innovations/

Laird, Robbin. “Return to NAWDC: An Update on the MISR Pilot Program.” Second Line of Defense, December 2024. https://sldinfo.com/2024/12/return-to-nawdc-an-update-on-the-misr-pilot-program/

Laird, Robbin. “The Payload Revolution: Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Decision-Making.” Second Line of Defense, February 2025. https://sldinfo.com/2025/02/the-payload-revolution-surveillance-reconnaissance-and-decision-making/

Laird, Robbin. “Rethinking Military Training for the High-End Fight: From Kill Chains to Kill Webs.” Second Line of Defense, August 2025. https://sldinfo.com/2025/08/rethinking-military-training-for-the-high-end-fight-from-kill-chains-to-kill-webs/

Defense.info

Laird, Robbin. “The Changing Role of ISR in the Pacific.” Defense.info, August 2020. https://defense.info/re-shaping-defense-security/2020/08/the-changing-role-of-isr-in-the-pacific/

Laird, Robbin. “LCDR Maddox: The First Deployed MISR Officer.” Defense.info, September 2020. https://defense.info/interview-of-the-week/lcdr-maddox-the-first-deployed-misr-officer/

Laird, Robbin. “Enhancing Non-Kinetic Capabilities in the Ready Force.” Defense.info, May 2025. https://defense.info/williams-foundation/2025/05/enhancing-non-kinetic-capabilities-in-the-ready-force/

Laird, Robbin. “The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Works the MISR Mission.” Defense.info, July 2025. https://defense.info/re-shaping-defense-security/2025/07/the-22nd-marine-expeditionary-unit-meu-works-the-misr-mission/

Laird, Robbin. “The MISR Approach to Enhancing the ‘Fight Tonight’ Force.” Defense.info, August 2025. https://defense.info/multi-domain-dynamics/2025/08/the-misr-approach-to-enhancing-the-fight-tonight-force/

Laird, Robbin. “Redefining Military Readiness in an Age of Perpetual Competition.” Defense.info, August 2025. https://defense.info/re-thinking-strategy/2025/08/redefining-military-readiness-in-an-age-of-perpetual-competition/

Laird, Robbin. “MISR and the Shift from Crisis Management to Chaos Management.” Defense.info, November 2025. https://defense.info/re-shaping-defense-security/2025/11/misr-and-the-shift-from-crisis-management-to-chaos-management/

Other Sources

Bigay, Dave, and Courtney Herdt. “Make More Maritime ISR Weapons and Tactics Instructors.” Proceedings 149, no. 7 (July 2023). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/july/make-more-maritime-isr-weapons-and-tactics-instructors

U.S. Navy. “Bi-Annual Exercise Resolute Hunter Provides Real-World Partner-Nation and U.S. Joint Force Interoperability.” Navy.mil, March 2023. https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=523&Article=3338627