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7 October 2021

Commercial GEOINT Raises Questions About NGA, IC Roles, Says Gordon

HERESA HITCHENS

WASHINGTON: As the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) expands its efforts to tap into, integrate and disseminate imagery and analysis from commercial providers, it also increasingly is running into an existential question: With so much data widely available, where does the government’s go-to GEOINT provider go from here?

Intelligence Community representatives are gathering for the annual GEOINT Symposium this year in St. Louis, Mo., where the issue of how to handle the explosion of available commercial imagery, 3D maps, visualization tools and analytics will be on the agenda, especially as some of the NGA’s customers — particularly within the military — have shown they’re eager to simply buy commercial services directly.

Over the past several years, it has become apparent that what the Aerospace Corporation has dubbed the “GEOINT Singularity” — when there is so much real-time Earth observation and analysis is widely available that military forces have nowhere to hide — is roiling the IC. So much so that key IC players have created a new(ish) Commercial Space Council to figure out how to best incorporate commercial unclassified information and speed its delivery to users.

“In a world that now has access to all the same data … what’s your role going to be? If your role is only to withhold your expertise, the world’s gonna move on because speed is so important,” Sue Gordon, former deputy of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said recently. “But if the world moves on without you, it’s not moving on as well as it could,” she added, because users are missing the “craft” element of deep understanding IC analysis brings.

“So, I think it’s a really interesting moment for intelligence to try and sort out,” she said. “Are they about secrets or about national security? Is the coin of the realm the 70 years of craft that they have, or is it about what they uniquely hold?”

Gordon called NGA a particularly “interesting” case because of their strong turn to the commercial industry.

“But you have to decide how far you’re going to go, because you have combatant commanders who now can go directly to commercial,” she said.

Special Operations Command (SOCOM), for example, in May issued a contract worth up to $373 million to CACI International to provide geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis. Under the contract, company experts “will provide mission expertise, including full-lifecycle geospatial intelligence analytic support. Additionally, CACI system engineers will help maintain and evolve SOCOM’s intelligence information technology infrastructure,” CACI said in a May 24 press release.

The raises the question of whether direct buying of commercial is “the best way for the nation to acquire geospatial intelligence,” Gordon told a small group of reporters on Sept. 25 in the margins of the annual Intelligence & National Security Alliance’s Baker Award Dinner, at which she was being feted. Or can NGA continue to “play an interlocutor, without adding overhead?”

That overhead is not just in cost to the taxpayer, but also in the time lag that comes with NGA’s processes, including those related to security for classified information — a fact that the agency itself is clearly aware of and is seeking to redress.

That time lag is what is of greatest concern to military commanders, who are seeking near real-time battlefield information to manage machine-speed, All Domain Operations in future conflicts with peer competitors Russia and China. Foundational to this new way of war is DoD’s plan for Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which is aimed at linking all sensors to all operators and weapons platforms near instantaneously.

The Army in particular is looking to ensure that it has direct access to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) from satellites for targeting its increasingly long-range arsenal, including new hypersonic weapons, that leaders see as critical to its role in the Pentagon’s new Joint Warfighting Concept for all-domain operations.

Meanwhile, the Space Force is also looking to gear up imagery collection from commercial satellites and set itself up as the one-stop shop for dissemination of space-derived ISR, as part of its role in support of JADC2.

NGA, for its part, has doubled down on its push to expand and improve upon every aspect of how it leverages commercial capabilities. Late last year, it moved to expand its pool of commercial satellite firms providing access to their data libraries for the agency’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (G-EGD) system. G-EGD “provides access to map-ready, unclassified imagery to support a wide range of efforts for the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, federal civilian agencies and over 55 foreign partners,” according to NGA’s website.

Most recently, on Sept. 27, NGA signed a formal contract with Hawkeye 360, a startup based in Herndon, Va., which provides radio frequency (RF) data and analytics from space. The company in June launched a third set of three satellites that pinpoint the location of RF emitters, bringing its total constellation to nine.

Hawkeye had been working under a NGA pilot program since last September; the new contract, for up to $10 million over four years, moves the effort into an operational phase.

“HawkEye 360 will provide NGA the means to develop global datasets, enabling users to discover and monitor a broad range of RF activity across large geographic areas,” the company said in a Sept. 27 press release.

In June, NGA sought out industry views for upgrading its own software for processing imagery provided to it by NRO, in order to speed its own internal analysis. (In 2017, authority to procure commercial satellite imagery for military and intelligence purposes shifted from NGA to NRO; NGA retains the responsibility for acquiring commercial GEOINT analyses and related software capabilities.)

On Sept. 30, NGA has sent out a call for industry help to put together a new web-based portal to ease, and speed, dissemination of imagery, maps and other intel products gathered from commercial providers. The new portal program, called Commercial GEOINT Access Portal (CGAP), is focused on rapidly providing the Intelligence Community, military operators, US government agencies, state and local authorities and international partners around the world with commercial imagery products — primarily in unclassified but also in classified form.

“CGAP enables users to discover, visualize, exploit, and receive medium/high resolution CI and products on multiple networks to support various government missions,” explains the request for information (RFI). “The capability will be accessible to authorized and registered users as a browser-based web application and from third party portals, desktop applications, and mobile/handheld devices though the use of web services.”

Industry has until Nov. 1 to respond with ideas, the RFI said, ranging from views about the concept of operations for the portal to technical parameters.

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