The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s strategy to tap the imaging and analytics capabilities of private industry is making steady progress, according to agency officials.
The plan, launched in October, calls for NGA to broaden its intelligence arsenal, speed the delivery of product and streamline acquisitions through closer cooperation with the commercial sector.
One of the strategy’s first goals is the exploration and evaluation of commercial geoint data and products, a process that planners say is solidly under way.
“We have been doing a number of assessments among the satellite builders, asking how accurate the satellites are, and how these providers and capabilities can satisfy our mission sets,” said John Goolgasian, NGA’s Director, Source/Content Portfolio Manager.
In addition to these evaluations, NGA has stepped up its efforts to leverage its buying power. At the instigation of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NGA started working more closely with the National Reconnaissance Office on strategic purchasing, a key goal within the new strategy.
“We want to really align the activities of the entire enterprise — from space to ground — to make sure we all are working together to see where is the dollar best spent,” Goolgasian said. “We want to look at this jointly to understand how we can best leverage this growth in the space industry.”
Analysts say such steps are sorely needed at a time when the commercial sector has been rapidly growing its geoint capabilities — capabilities that can be crucial determinants for those seeking a strategic edge. In a battlefield scenario, “they need to see what changes are going on, to analyze what is changing, and for that you need a large number of satellites. That is one big driver and that is where these commercial capabilities become very useful,” said Claude Rousseau, research director and satellite consulting firm Northern Sky Research.
NGA leadership likewise describes the evolving approach to industry as a strategic imperative.
“These systems are critical to meeting many of our national security requirements, and the importance of their unique and extraordinary capabilities cannot be overstated,” NGA Director Robert Cardillo told the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in a March hearing. Broader access to commercial assets is needed to help meet “critical intelligence and military requirements in the most effective and efficient manner.”
While NGA has been leveraging unclassified data for over a decade, planners have stepped up efforts to understand and take advantage of these tools since the release of the new commercial strategy, Goolgasian said.
In addition to its broad, ongoing examination of commercial offerings, he said, the agency is looking specifically at how that data could be used to enhance its own classified information. “We want to see what kind of data we can leverage to add another layer that could be compared against our own assessments,” he said. “We want to see what is out there that could help us to identify additional vectors of threat.”
Comparisons between classified and unclassified information could also help NGA to assess the validity of its own data.
When NGA has pursued this course in the past, it has generally followed an as-needed approach, with a focus on immediate operational-intelligence needs. Since the launch of the strategy in October, planners have been shifting that emphasis. “We are driving into more of a long-term approach now,” Goolgasian said.
In pursuing that long-term view, NGA has begun to more specifically articulate its expectations of the interplay between the agency and its industry partners. In particular, NGA says it is not looking to drive industry efforts, but rather to see what new approaches commercial companies can bring to the table.
“We will tell them what our needs are, what kinds of things we are looking for, what problems we have — but we are not looking to tell them build this or that kind of satellite,” Goolgasian said. “We have already seen things that we would not have requested but that we look at and say: Yes, that is probably something we can use.”
