The company, which builds and manages synthetic aperture radar satellites, or SAR, this week rolled out its Vessel Classification tool, promising streamlined analysis and an automated ability to track ships across its historical archives.

Governments, outside experts and observers are increasingly tapping overhead imagery to monitor faraway fighting or materiel buildup. Its applications were exemplified in the lead up to Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and, more recently, to assess damage stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.

Unlike traditional electro-optical satellite imagery, which can be hampered by poor weather and lighting, SAR generates images with radar that can penetrate cloud cover and other adverse conditions.

David Hemphill, a senior product manager at Capella, told C4ISRNET the classification capability takes data and turns it into actionable information.

“There might be a lot of different locations you’d be monitoring that you’re not really interested in — until a warship shows up,” he said in a May 7 interview at the GEOINT conference in Florida. “It gets you that much closer to the type of answers that an analyst is looking for, without necessarily having to do as much manual labor.”

The Department of Defense and intelligence community officials have stressed the importance of maritime domain awareness, or a deep understanding of what is happening on, below or near the water’s surface. Such awareness will be critical in the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. is preparing for potential clashes with China.

Hemphill said ordering Vessel Classification is as easy as checking an additional box on the California-based company’s platform. The tool was made possible by EMSI, a company with years of geospatial intelligence experience.

“We can get more diverse looks at maritime, and it’s consistent,” he said. “We can now tell you if it’s a warship, a submarine, a tanker, those sorts of things. And then if you’re monitoring a certain location, you can start to get trends and graphs.”

The NATO ISR Force, comprising more than 400 people working from Europe, logged 30% more flight hours in 2023 than the year prior, according to Scott Bray, the assistant secretary general for intelligence and security.

The force’s flights covered the alliance’s eastern flank, notable for its proximity to the Russia-Ukraine war; the Baltic and Black seas; and the High North following Finland’s membership, he told GEOINT conference attendees in Florida on May 7.

“The North Atlantic security environment is under threat,” said Bray, who visited Kyiv two weeks ago. “Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine has created the biggest conflict on the European continent since the Second World War, and the Euro-Atlantic is not at peace.”

The ISR Force has five of its own unmanned RQ-4D Phoenixes. The remotely piloted aircraft are based on designs by Northrop Grumman, the third-largest contractor in the world when ranked by defense-related revenue. The company earned $32.5 billion in 2022, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis.

The drones are modified to meet NATO information-sharing and communication requirements and are outfitted with surveillance sensors. Together, the force can cover more than 62,000 square-miles a day.

Bray said “the appetite, the expectations and the centrality of intelligence to NATO is only growing.” Militaries around the world are increasingly turning to unmanned technologies to monitor faraway forces and augment targeting on the front lines.

The NATO ISR Force was previously known as the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance Force. The name change was motivated by a growing set of missions.

The force recently participated in the Nordic Response exercise, concentrated on northern Norway, Sweden and Finland. It featured more than 20,000 troops from more than a dozen countries.

“In today’s complex environment, decision-ready, actionable intelligence provided at the speed of need is one of our greatest weapons,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew Clark, the ISR Force commander, said in a statement at the time. “As the alliance’s premier ISR unit, NISRF provides the foundation for informed decisions, allowing NATO to anticipate threats and react quickly.”

The Department of Defense and the intelligence community increasingly view a successful fight with Russia and China as requiring teammates: France in a battle for Europe, for example, or Australia in the Indo-Pacific. Hesitancy to share data between countries could translate to disjointed operations and confusion on the front lines.

Space Force Lt. Gen. David Miller on May 6 told attendees at the GEOINT conference in Florida that legacy processes that “stamp NOFORN on everything” are a “recipe for losing.”

The NOFORN designation indicates that information may not be released to foreign governments, organizations and non-U.S. citizens. It is one of many factors that controls who can see what and when.

“The United States does not go into conflict alone. Check your history. It does not happen,” said Miller, who took the helm at Space Operations Command in January.

His comments come as the Defense Department pursues what’s known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

In the CJADC2 vision, forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber are seamlessly connected and firepower can be coordinated over vast distances. That includes international troops, with whom the U.S. military has a history fighting alongside.

“It must be interoperable,” Miller said. “We need to have our coalition partners a part of the formation and their shooters ready to receive this information, and it goes directly to them at the same time it goes to the United States Air Force or whoever the shooter is on our side.”

Secrecy in the space domain has long posed a challenge to the Defense Department and the public looking to know more.

Congress has in the past instructed the department to review its classified space portfolio. A rewrite of space classification policy was announced earlier this year.

“Inside the Beltway, people always ask me, ‘How can I make things unclassified?’ That is not actually a thing I’m all that concerned about,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters at the Pentagon earlier this year. “I’m concerned about reducing the classification of things where they are overclassified to the point that it hampers our ability to get work done or hampers the ability of the warfighter to do their mission.”

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said May 6 the Joint Mission Management Center will integrate data collected from the Defense Department, various intelligence agencies and international partners. While the center, dubbed JMMC, is still in the concept phase, he said the agency is working quickly to get it up and running.

“Integration is the right thing to do,” he said in a speech at the GEOINT Conference in Orlando. “The JMMC is going to be the way of the future for us in this regard. It will be critical to unifying DOD, IC and allied GEOINT collection operations that deliver decision advantage at speed and scale during competition, crisis and combat.”

NGA is the intelligence community’s lead organization for analyzing satellite imagery and turning it into usable data. Whitworth said the need for a collaborative center is being driven in part by an increasingly dynamic threat environment that requires better data from multiple intelligence sources.

Government agencies have a tendency to manage data in stovepipes, he noted. NGA wants JMMC to provide a place for distinct space organizations to stitch together a more complete picture from the intelligence they gather – one that relies less on assumptions and more on trusted information.

“Space is a vast domain where many organizations operate, but it’s no place for a stovepipe – or multiple stovepipes,” Whitworth said. “It requires a joint or integrated approach, were we all work together.”

JMMC will not only provide a venue for collaboration, it will also take advantage of advanced intelligence collection capabilities, he told reporters in a briefing after his speech.

“It’s going to rely on better and better speed based on better and better code,” Whitworth said.

The agency, tasked with analyzing overhead imagery, monitoring buildup of foreign materiel and mapping the Earth for military purposes, on May 6 published a commercial solutions opening asking companies to pitch their products for Project Aegir, meant to deepen U.S. understanding of what’s happening around the world.

Ballooning demand for commercial analytics and unclassified intelligence tied to the Indo-Pacific is motivating the move, according to NGA leadership. The region is home to some of the world’s largest militaries, ports and economies, with China increasingly making its presence known. Washington considers Beijing its top threat and has warned of consequences should its global ambitions go uncontested.

Improved maritime domain awareness — a deep understanding of what’s happening on, below, or near the water — is needed, and the private sector holds answers, according to NGA boss Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth. The appetite for imagery and analysis is growing, as showcased by the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.

The Project Aegir solicitation “underscores our commitment to staying ahead of evolving threats and supporting frontline efforts against [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing, illicit trafficking, and other activities that pose threats to global security,” Whitworth said in a May 6 speech at the GEOINT conference in Florida.

He later told reporters much of the push came from Adm. John Aquilino, the former head of INDOPACOM. Adm. Samuel Paparo now holds the job.

Outcomes of the project, he added, could prove useful in hot spots such as the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Houthi rebels based in Yemen have for months targeted commercial and military vessels with drone and missile attacks. U.S warships Carney, Gravely, Laboon, Mason and Thomas Hudner have destroyed dozens of overhead threats since October.

Companies interested in the opening have until May 24 to submit responses, after which some will be selected for review by the Defense Innovation Unit. A $1.5 million pilot program could then follow, documents show.

Washington and other governments have committed billions of dollars of security aid to Ukraine, including long-range missiles, armored vehicles and secure communication devices. The jamming and spoofing that blankets fighting in Eastern Europe offers a trial against Russian tools rarely seen in action.

Michael Monteleone, the director of the Army’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space Cross-Functional Team, on May 5 told reporters the conflict is a “huge learning experience for us.”

“The global community has shared a lot of our technology, our weapons systems, our command-and-control systems and others, with the Ukrainians,” he said on the sidelines of the GEOINT conference in Florida. “You’re seeing that being used in real time, and it is a source of feedback.”

Monteleone’s cross-functional team, expected to shift its focus to so-called all-domain sensing in the coming months, is tasked with improving soldier access to critical sources of situational awareness, including where they are, where they are headed and when they will arrive.

Digital harassment can render such information useless.

“Even early in the war, we learned what happened when GPS just didn’t exist, and how the Ukrainian soldiers dealt with that, and how the Russian soldiers dealt with that,” Monteleone said.

The Defense Department’s spending is increasingly motivated by potential battles with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific. Russian electronic warfare has hamstrung Excalibur precision artillery as well as an undisclosed ground-launched version of an air-to-ground armament, according to experts.

The lessons gleaned from Ukraine’s fight are making “everybody think about the problem space,” Monteleone said, “including where our investments truly need to be.”

The Army in recent years earmarked millions of dollars for sophisticated electronic warfare equipment as well as jam-resistant navigation gear.

The service inked a $318 million deal with BAE Systems for M-code GPS cards and tapped TRX Systems to produce second-generation Dismounted Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems, which soldiers can carry in the field. That deal was worth $402 million.

Maxar Intelligence and Lockheed Martin announced their growing partnership May 6, saying it will improve the F-35 Full Mission Simulator. The FMS, as it’s known, puts people inside a copycat cockpit with displays and other devices that replicate software, sensors and weapons used on the actual aircraft.

The simulator is a major step in training and is useful for mission rehearsal. More than 2,400 people have been schooled using the FMS, according to Lockheed.

At its core are lifelike visuals and environments that Maxar makes possible. The new agreement standardizes pricing, licensing and other requirements for its products, including Dynamic and Precision3D, which generate high-resolution images and three-dimensional models of the Earth. The joint announcement did not mention a dollar figure.

“Maxar’s geospatial products, particularly Precision3D, are critical to the success of this system,” Susanne Hake, general manager for U.S. government at Maxar, said in a statement. “They enable the highly accurate, precise simulated real-world environments that are brought to life in the FMS, creating an immersive experience that helps improve pilot safety and enhance mission success.”

The Department of Defense is increasingly interested in computerized worlds: The Army has mulled the metaverse as a recruiting tool, thinking it may appeal to younger generations, and Navy leaders have advocated for improved virtual testing techniques for information warfare and other sensitive disciplines.

Doing things digitally can save real-world materiel from wear and tear while also boosting the amount of hours one can practice. Hake described the FMS as an “industry gold standard for immersive training and mission readiness support.”

Lockheed is the world’s largest defense contractor when ranked by defense-related revenue, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis. The company earned $63 billion in 2022.

Maxar stood at No. 77, reaping $952 million. The company was tapped earlier this year for additional work on One World Terrain, considered a critical component of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment.

The defense tech company on May 6 made public its Pulsar products, which it said are capable of countering drones, geolocating forces and neutering improvised explosive devices. The equipment comes in variants for fixed use, mounting aboard ground vehicles, and integration on aircraft. A version that can be slung onto troops’ backs is also being eyed.

Electronic warfare represents a battle over the electromagnetic spectrum, which militaries rely on to communicate, discern friend from foe and guide munitions to targets. Pentagon investment in sophisticated EW atrophied in the years following the Cold War, but fighting in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East reignited interest.

“There’s a realization that the United States military is not where it needs to be, in terms of operating in this kind of high-EW threat environment, and then having the types of agile capabilities to defend our forces and fight back offensively,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters at a briefing.

“We’re not going to go talk about ideas that we have, share glossy renderings of what they might look like in the world, and then go seek to build them and deliver them years later,” he added. “We tend to do the opposite.”

The Pulsar line has been in development since 2020 and was funded internally. It is software-defined, meaning updates can be dished out quickly and constraints imposed by hardware are lessened, and leans on advanced computing to retool for novel threats.

A war with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific, for example, might introduce previously unseen technologies and electronic signatures. The time it takes to counter them could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

“Each system can process the data where it is, and then many systems that are networked together can learn from each other, just using small metadata,” said Sam El-Akkad, the general manager of radio frequency and EW systems at Anduril. “If one system sees something new, all the other systems are trained to see that new thing and recognize it in the future.”

While Anduril declined to specify where Pulsar has been used, deployment was described as happening across “multiple continents.”

The company in 2022 mentioned the EW equipment after winning a nearly $1 billion counter-unmanned aerial systems contract from U.S. Special Operations Command. A memo obtained by Defense News that same year described it helping to “mitigate incoming threats.”

“Pulsar is not just a figment of our imagination,” El-Akkad said. “At a high level, we’re in production of these systems, so we’re pumping them out and they are being used.”

The images and other readings gathered from afar were critical to grasping the situation in Eastern Europe at the time, and their continued dissemination, including through the press, aids public understanding of the war.

Among those involved in the capture and distribution of such information is Maxar Technologies, which provides satellite imagery to the Defense Department and intelligence community, among other national security pursuits.

In February 2023, for example, the Colorado-based company won an additional round of work on the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain, which compiles extremely accurate virtual maps of territory across the globe for military purposes. It’s considered a key piece of the service’s Synthetic Training Environment, an immersive training-and-rehearsal tool. The company is also involved with Project Maven, launched by the Pentagon in 2017 to detect targets of interest in footage captured by uncrewed systems.

C4ISRNET reporters interviewed two Maxar executives — Tony Frazier, executive vice president and general manager of public sector earth intelligence, and Jennifer Krischer, vice president and general manager of intelligence programs — on the sidelines of the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis.

Portions of the interview below, conducted May 23, have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Where do you see the future of One World Terrain and, by extension, the Synthetic Training Environment going? What does that look like?

Frazier: We started with a focus of helping the Army modernize its training with geospecific data, with a goal of being able to provide soldiers as realistic an experience as possible.

Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais, she was the first cross-functional team lead for the Synthetic Training Environment. Her vision at the time was: If we can have reps and sets with hundreds of experiences in the virtual environment, then we can help soldiers be safe when they actually deploy.

That has continued to be the core focus of the program. That being said, as we exposed the data to different parts of the community, there was insatiable demand from the operational users to apply it to current missions. Whether it was in support of the Afghan drawdown, there was data that we provided over Ukraine — using it for operational mission-planning was very prominent.

Even the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, there was a reference to One World Terrain, and I think it did a nice job of highlighting the variety of use cases that had been proven out.

So what we’re seeing is, as we build out more complete, global coverage of that capability, being able to use it as a reference layer to integrate other data sources against it, and have all those data sources inherit the same accuracy, that foundation really enables a form of sensor fusion that we haven’t been able to see at scale.

One example that we are demonstrating is how we can apply 3D geo-registration software that uses that reference as a way to take — whether it’s space-based, or airborne, or even an unmanned surface vehicle — a sensor feed and use the terrain as a source of registration to tie that down, both in terms of the right location and the right orientation, so that you’re able to inherit the same accuracy as that base.

Think about a realtime feed from a drone. That would then allow you to be able to know exactly within this type of radius where that pixel is. That, I think, is probably one of the more breakthrough opportunities, in terms of taking it fully operational.

Q: How has the conflict in Ukraine shaped or factored into Maxar’s business? What is that consumption like — is there an increased need for satellite imagery or your other products?

Frazier: We support a global mission, and we’ve been providing these capabilities for decades. And you can look at every major event, and Maxar has played a role in that, in some capacity.

I think what’s unique about Ukraine was that at all phases, the crisis leading to conflict, we were able to, through different channels, expose our capability in a way that was helpful to the mission.

The focus of the Defense Department now is integrated deterrence — the role that commercial was able to play to bring transparency to what was happening, with troop buildup and, as it pivoted to conflict, what was happening on the ground.

The combination of what was exposed through the media, through our partnerships there, along with the fact that the intelligence community, Defense Department, allies and partners were all able to access current imagery over those areas, just allowed a level of interoperability and mission planning that, I think, has helped support the mission, but also helped a lot of decision makers think through ways that can be applied, more broadly.

I know you recently covered the Global Information Dominance Experiments series.

One of the things that’s helped us do is have conversations with different stakeholders across the community, who have been looking at how do I take the increased commercial collection, some of the innovation that’s happening with applied machine learning, so computer vision, to be able to interpret imagery quickly, the types of technology I referenced earlier with our 3D, where we can georeference that data on quick timelines, and then how can that support different forms of experimentation. That is demonstrating how new use cases for how commercial can be applied to the here-and-now missions.

We’ve supported Project Convergence and Scarlet Dragon; those were examples of exercises and experimentation that we supported with commercial capabilities. I think we’re seeing that there’s a lot of interest.

Q: The big news at GEOINT yesterday was Project Maven, with Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth talking about its transition to a program of record. How do you envision Maxar taking part in Project Maven, and what do you hope to contribute?

Krischer: We’re already contributing to Project Maven.

We are generating algorithms around both electro-optical and our synthetic aperture radar imaging capabilities. So object detection, using those different modalities.

We also have been working with Project Maven for years now on providing low-latency imagery so that we can run the algorithms against the imagery in a sensor-to-shooter methodology that really resonates with the warfighter. So we’ve already been doing these things.

We envision the future of Maven as being: How do you bring the vast computer-vision algorithms sets to bear on the different missions, whether it be the intel analyst or the warfighter in the field, and how do you enable the warfighter to do these things?

We’re working kind of hand-in-hand to understand what it needs to be and helping shape the future, so that it’s not vendor-locked, it’s really meeting the users where they need the information.

Frazier: In our conversations, the intent is to enable geospatial AI at scale. And, as a result, as these capabilities get more mature, you want to be able to take advantage of all the collection that’s happening across the constellation.

For the U.S. government, the constellation includes commercial as a part of that. That’s why EOCL is electro-optical commercial layer. With the contracts that were awarded to us, and Planet and BlackSky, and then what’s being done now to add other modalities, like radar and radio-frequency sensing and the like, the goal is to create an architecture where you can quickly run the algorithms against that source to then get the information out to those users.

We’ve had a lot of use of our existing systems to apply computer vision against the imagery that we’re hosting and disseminating now, across the community, and now it’s about how do we actually do this at scale, have more machine-to-machine exploitation at scale. The last couple of decades have been focused on how humans visualize imagery.

Q: With Project Maven, and with a lot of these things like Joint All-Domain Command and Control, there’s just an incredible amount of collection and data that has to be sorted through. So you can’t ignore the AI or ML portion on your side, right? That has to be baked in, basically?

Krischer: Absolutely.

Frazier: Correct.

Q: Is there a need for a One Space Terrain? Maybe with a more artful name?

Frazier: I can see that happening.

You heard the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, his comments, about how they’re supporting the lunar mission. And I think, yeah, we need to have an accurate representation of all domains, where we expect to safely navigate, to be able to mitigate threats, et cetera.

The company is one of three firms on contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that develops and operates spy satellites, to provide imagery over the next 10 years through its Electro-Optical Commercial layer program, or EOCL.

Maxar’s contract, awarded in 2022 and valued at more than $3 billion, is largely focused on providing imagery of the Earth but it includes a provision to experiment with using its satellites to provide “non-Earth” data, which includes high-resolution imagery of the space environment.

Tony Frazier, Maxar’s executive vice president and general manager for public sector Earth intelligence, said the company is doing “a limited collection” of this type of imagery, and is discussing with the Pentagon how its satellites could be used for this mission.

“Part of what we’re doing is we’re educating them on that and making sure they’re taking full advantage of that investment, but then also making them aware of additional capabilities that we’re adding that currently aren’t supported through the program,” Frazier told C4ISRNET in a May 23 interview at the GEOINT Conference in St. Louis. “An example that has been super interesting and has kind of led to new conversations with the Department of Defense is around what we’re doing with non-Earth imaging.”

Frazier characterized Maxar’s work in this area as being in the “study and evaluation phase,” adding that it could inform future requirements. He said that while Maxar builds its satellites “with a sense of enduring missions in mind,” it also considered the possibility that they could be used in new ways, especially as the government looks to protect satellites from new threats in space.

“It’s a way that we can actually get more utility out of the constellation,” he said.

Improving domain awareness

Satellites that observe activity in orbit contribute to what DoD calls space domain awareness. The mission is a high priority for U.S. Space Command and the Space Force as they grow increasingly concerned about congestion and debris in low Earth orbit, located about 1,200 miles above the planet, and aggression from adversaries like Russia and China.

The Space Force uses a mix of ground-based and in-space sensors to conduct the space domain awareness mission. Its fleet of radars, known as the Space Surveillance Network, observe space from the ground and feed data into command and control systems that catalog space objects.

The service also has sensors in orbit that provide domain awareness and, in partnership with the National Reconnaissance Office, will launch its newest space observation satellites this summer, dubbed Silent Barker.

SPACECOM provides the data collected by those sensors to government, civil and commercial agencies.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyses satellite imagery and turns it into usable data, also coordinates with the service and SPACECOM on intelligence it receives about in-space objects and activities.

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth told reporters during a May 22 briefing his team is considering how it might grow those partnerships and is considering making room for more Space Force operators to serve within the agency.

“I’m really excited about where we might take the relationship,” he said. “I’ve asked the team to explore whether we have the right number of Space Force billets in our own team. And I sense that this year will be a year of definition as to our official relationship with the Space Force.”

NRO Director Chris Scolese, said during a speech at the conference that the agency is working with the Space Force to make sure the commercial satellite imagery it collects is “available as broadly as possible.”