NGA Pursues the Need to Get Closer to Ground Ops…and Faster
At GEOINT today, Col. Bill Harmon, on loan to the NGA from the U.S. Army Forward Support Team of the U.S. Central Command, was most insistent about getting the right information to troops. Most of the geoint products are made to be used within 24 hours. The most useful information was that which can be merged to help tell the story to the men and women on the ground. Fusion centers are places where analysts are sitting side by side to process the data even faster.
He made a special point to mention how commercial imagery makes it possible to share imagery with are foreign coalition partners.
"On any given day we probably have over 100 forward deployed people. Teams as small as 1 or 2," said Harmon. "We need to put our analysts down into the organizations that are in the fight. If you are trying to do that from a remote location, you just won’t be relevant. There is a need for a long-term review for a particular issue, and that does help forward deployed analysts. (But) It is key to get the analysis to the right level…In the current environment, it is still sending hard drives downrange to people. We need to make data discoverable. But if we could truly know where the data exists out there, it would be truly awesome."
