National Reconnaissance Office Director Discusses Aggressive Satellite Launch Mission

Bruce Carlson, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), was a most entertaining speaker on stage at the GEOINT conference, especially for someone who is one of the nation’s leading technology spymasters. Displaying a wry sense of humor, Carlson entertained the audience with an adroit understanding of the mission at hand. The history of the NRO is that it is an agency that was only declassified in 1992 and was moved to a location in Chantilly, Virginia. And if you’ve ever driven by their facility, it still screams, “go away!”

Charged with launching the nation’s spy satellites, the NRO is now on the most aggressive launch campaign in 20 years according to Carlson. But he also cautioned that it’s a different business than it was back then. There are fewer people and less infrastructure to support the NRO’s mission. But Carlson was on a mission to produce a new generation of launch vehicles.  His priorities were very succinct: execute launches on time and budget; improve the business of launch; improve research and technology investment; and invest in the NRO workforce.

Carlson says that he has increased the size of the science and technology portion of his budget within his budget even though his budget has shrunk. He sees as one of his main goals as guaranteeing a process of mission assurance. He wants to increase the number of missions by simplifying some of the processes although there are certain lower limits that they cannot go under.

Carlson said that his requests for imagery to the NRO always overtax the resources he can provide. Some users will get commercial imagery because NRO cannot always satisfy all the requests. NRO does not see the commercial space initiative as a competitor to the NRO’s mission.

Carlson’s goal over the next six months is to demonstrate competency to carry out this aggressive mission in launching a new generation of satellites an modernizing the geriatric constellation now in existence. "We are concerned about our susceptibility to attack," said Carlson who essentially operates the fourth largest communications company in the US.

See the video of his entire remarks.

[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

DHS Seeking Coherent Mission for Geospatial Intelligence #GEOINT

Caryn Wagner, the Undersecretary of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spoke on making progress in developing a coherent departmental culture. She said that she was working on the foundational things that more established departments do such as a quadrennial departmental review. Modeled on Department of Defense, quadrennial reviews are the culmination of much deliberation and thought about the mission of the DHS. Wagner said there were many disparate components and capturing the vision and the way forward was a significant undertaking to be able to secure the homeland.

She said that one of the first goals was to find the department’s "analytical niche." With a mission of fighting counterterrorism, Wagner said that DHS receives much data on travel and that travel analysis is one large area of expertise. Her challenge is to come up with creative ways to display that information such as depicting travel routes of interest and visualizing geographic patterns.

In discussing priority areas, Wagner said that securing the borders is a main focus. She said that DHS is looking at creating an intelligence fusion center in El Paso, Texas, where the department can pull all the data together and combine it to produce better situational awareness for all agencies to come up with actionable information. Wagner believes there will be many customers for that information as they watch trends along the border. She stressed a multi-INT approach with geospatial data underpinning analysis but making sure we data can be shared among agencies at lowest possible classification level.

I came away from this presentation concerned that the mission of DHS had not been established long ago and question why DHS is just now getting around to understanding their “analytical niche.” Wagner admitted that DHS is a “young” agency. However, with the important mission of securing the homeland it appeared that functional areas related to geospatial intelligence had yet to be discerned.

[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

New NGA Director Sees #GEOINT App Store for Warfighter

Letitia Long, the newly appointed director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), replacing Admiral Robert Murrett, spoke for the first time at the GEOINT conference today (read her prepared remarks from her keynote). Long has a lengthy resume in the intelligence community (IC) and was recommended by Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence (DNI) for her new post. She articulated a vision for the agency based on needs she experienced while working as the second in command at the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

During her remarks at the GEOINT conference,  Long said that she wants to provide online and on-demand access to NGA’s knowledge as well as access to content, services, expertise and support plus the tools that allow users to serve themselves.  She wants to create new value for NGA’s expertise and interject human geography with other resources. Long said, “I want to fundamentally change the user’s experience.” By “user’s” Long is referring to forward deployed personnel in theater as well as coalition partners. Having seen the potential of the agency she now commands she commented that, “Nobody will go to war without us.”

Long wants to create a “GEOINT Store Front” based loosely on a commercial “app store” model for specific application areas to support many geospatial functional areas thereby . Longs sees this as a way to improve discoverability of NGA’s products and to empower developers to create apps. She believes that a warfighter working on an iPad is the ideal candidate for someone developing a custom “common operational picture” specifically for their immediate purpose.

She said she wants to empower users to give them a selection of services and to leverage social media and crowd sourced information. As such she said that she wants to make more data available online so as to free up NGA staff for doing more of the advance applications. Long sees the need to create value in her agency by broadening and deepening the NGA’s analytical expertise and move toward a participatory posture. “If we can use our GEOINT expertise, before crises arise… we will have given policy makers more time to consider policy options,” said Long.Though her vision is much more in tune with technology than Murrett’s I found her presentation muted and steeped in typical government speak. Long on vision and short on specifics. Perhaps she needs to work into her role but her vision is too broad. She’ll need to become much more knowledgeable about the technology to speak more impactfully about the direction of the organization and the applications of geospatial information.

See the video with her complete remarks.

[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

Clapper Looking to Integrate Geospatial with DNI #GEOINT

Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, the former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) called GEOINT “the most integrative of all the disciplines… it’s the foundation layer over which all other forms of intelligence can be overlaid.”

So, does it help to have the former NGA director as the new DNI? Clapper sees the role of DNI as an integrator of intelligence functions and as such has a unique perspective of where geospatial information can be inserted into other agencies and capabilities. To that end, Clapper sees a role for geospatial information in supporting the growing importance of cyber security and wants to develop a common operating picture for the new cybersecurity directorate.

But Clapper admits to time management challenges with his new role. Clapper must balance time between his role as managing intelligence between the national security agencies and keeping the White House briefed on the latest intelligence. Clapper says he is not quite there yet.  He is looking to make Robert Cardillo his first deputy to be the defacto COO his office (ODNI)while hopefully freeing himself doing outreach to his domestic customers as well as foreign partners.

Part of this challenge is related to some ambiguity of the role and size of the ODNI. Is it too big? Clapper says that to a certain extent that’s true but when you parse out the functions some of the duties are mandated by law. He said that there was a tendency to use the ONDI as a place to stick various functions. Clapper is trying to reduce some of these functions and make the ODNI more efficient.

Before becoming DNI, Clapper was the Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence at the Department of Defense. Now, as DNI, how is Clapper integrated with DoD? Before leaving, Clapper agreed to be “joined at the hip” with the Secretary of Defense. Clapper says he understands that much of the national intelligence programs are embedded in DoD.  “After being whipsawed between the two camps, in candor we probably won’t do exactly what the DoD will do but we will stay in touch with the DoD.”

[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

UAV’s Fill the Skies: So Much Data, So Few Ways to Analyze It

At the Intergraph 2010 conference, the defense and intelligence group was demonstrating their Motion Video Analyst (MVA) solutions to help manage data from the growing usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in support of the warfighting efforts in the Middle East.

As a consequence of too much data, the need for analysts is likewise increasing.  Algorithms are being developed for pattern recognition but the data will be useful only so long as the data is handled correctly said Rob Mott of Intergraph. In addition, the establishment of persistent surveillance by UAVs is likely resulting in even greater volumes of data.

Data volumes of video are so massive they are now being described in terms of "Yottabytes."

Intergraph has brought to market Motion Video Exploitation, a combination of several technology convergences: Integrated flight plans; real time video enhancements; ground target indicators; geospatially referenced video, storage and search.

And even the gaming industry is being tapped for innovation. Intergraph is adopting an Xbox controller to be integrated into the MVA button assignments in hopes of helping the analysts to be more effective. The company believes it alone can take multiple video feeds and integrate them into a 2D mapping environment.