Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance

In its macroscopic sense, ISTAR is a practice that links several battlefield functions together to assist a combat force in employing its sensors and managing the information they gather.

ISR is the coordinated and integrated acquisition, processing and provision of timely, accurate, relevant, coherent and assured information and intelligence to support commander's conduct of activities.

[15][16][17][18] In July 2021 the NDAA budget markup by the House Armed Services Committee sought to retain ISR resources such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, the E-8 Joint Surveillance Radar and Attack System (JSTARS) which the Air Force is seeking to divest.

[28] The intelligence data provided by these ISR systems can take many forms, including optical, radar, or infrared images or electronic signals.

[29] For space-based targeting sensors, in a 2019 Broad Agency Announcement, the US government defined ISR in this case as "a capability for gathering data and information on an object or in an area of interest (AOI) on a persistent, event-driven, or scheduled basis using imagery, signals, and other collection methods.

Most space-based intelligence collection capabilities consist of multiple satellites operating in concert, or supplemented by other sensors, when continuous surveillance of an area is desired.

The Joint Regional Edge Node (JREN) is on-deck for distributing nearly a petabyte to the Combatant Commands in the next year, for 2023, an increase by a factor of 10.

[58] In light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, commercial satellite imagery is being used to track troop movements, broadcast world events in real time, and conduct war.—NHK World-Japan[59][60] ISTAR is the process of integrating the intelligence process with surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance tasks in order to improve a commander's situational awareness and consequently their decision making.