Released: Jan 12, 1998
The 1,500-square-foot facility, co-located with the Information Directorate's Information and Intelligence Exploitation Division, houses servers and workstations linking it to intelligence production centers worldwide. It will allow Air Force, Army and Navy Reservists in upstate New York the opportunity to work alongside their active duty counterparts as an integral part of the intelligence community and the national defense team.
Rear Adm. Larry Poe, commander of the Naval Reserve Intelligence Command, and Brig. Gen. John Wilkinson, deputy director of Air Force Reserve Intelligence, opened the JRIF in ceremonies earlier this month. Representatives of all three services and local government officials attended the opening.
The JRIF is currently the home to two Naval Reserve Intelligence Area Seventeen Units, DIA Headquarters Unit 0705 and ONI 1805, both of which conducted drills in Buffalo until August. Preparations are underway to co-locate the Army Reserve's 3424th Military Intelligence Detachment, elements of the New York National Guard's 642nd Military Intelligence Battalion, and a detachment of the Air Force Reserve intelligence analysts in the JRIF.
The state-of-the-art workstations and servers in the JRIF provide the robust connectivity and the opportunity for seamless integration between Reserve analysts and their gaining command production centers -- a relationship demanded by the increasingly critical role of Reservists in the armed forces.
Both Wilkinson and Poe noted that, in the present era of budget constraints, active duty forces must increasingly rely on Reservists, not only for wartime augmentation but also for regular peacetime support to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities.
In addition to providing Reservists a joint, high-technology facility, the JRIF will also allow AFRL engineers to obtain timely feedback and input from experienced intelligence operators and analysts in the performance of new software packages developed for the intelligence mission. This arrangement should significantly shorten the time required to field high-quality system packages to active duty forces.