The role of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in disaster and public health emergency.

Correspondence: Unal Demirtas, MD Gulhane Military Medical Academy Military Health Services General Doktor Tevfik Sağlam Cad. Ankara Keçiören 06010, Turkey In the last few years, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities have played an important role in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. ISR assets help identify for first responders, federal civil agencies, and government and private aid organizations, the areas where relief efforts should be focused and what kind of supplies and aid victims need. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is a rubric used by the joint forces to describe all activities associated with collecting, integrating, analyzing, disseminating and exploiting militarily relevant information about other nations and non-state actors. It includes not only the secret information collected by technical means and human agents, but also open-source intelligence gleaned from places like the Internet. Practitioners often distinguish between strategic ISR that is of interest to national agencies or multiple military services, and more perishable tactical intelligence that is only of use to particular fighting units in specific circumstances, but there is no clear dividing line between the two areas. Whatever the nature of the information, a complete ISR system necessarily includes collection systems for acquiring raw data, hardware and software for fusing the data into a meaningful picture, analytic tools for interpreting that picture, and networks for moving the processed information to potential users in a timely fashion. In this context, NATO defined the terms involved in ISR: