December 2008 | GXP in the news
On My Mind
Maintaining the Technical Advantage
Vice Admiral, USN, Director, NGA
The following article is provided courtesy of The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Pathfinder magazine, November/December 2008.
In offices, labs and forward-operating bases, talented members of the NGA team are developing innovative and effective ways to produce the highest-quality geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) necessary for the problem at hand. Technology is often given credit for revolutionizing a process, but the real credit goes to the people behind the technology. They innovate, build and operate the tools and techniques to give our warfighters and policymakers the information they need to do their jobs. But there are many factors that influence how NGA approaches technology development.
Asymmetric threats, adversarial nations and rapidly expanding technologies require NGA to adapt and think systematically about what we are doing now, what we should be doing and how we will do so in the future. In the recently released Vision 2015: A Globally Networked and Integrated Intelligence Enterprise, the Director of National Intelligence reiterates our need for multiple, integrated collection systems, for integrated processing, exploitation and dissemination architecture, and for collaborative analysis. The key design principles of Vision 2015 are adaptability, alignment and agility; these principles are guiding NGA’s technology priorities. Incorporating multiple sensors into our architecture and analysis and improving exploitation tools and techniques are two examples of how technology is improving our operations.
Sensor Advantages
Over the last several years, combat operations have demonstrated what full motion video (FMV) brings to the fight. As airborne reconnaissance advances, wide-area surveillance (WAS) enables a better view of the battlefield and multiplies the effectiveness of each mission. The added value that airborne imagery brings to a large number of missions and operations reinforces our need to fully support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) efforts.
Additionally, NGA and our mission partners are leveraging existing capabilities and adapting them to new applications. Hyperspectral imagery, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and advanced radar applications are providing high-resolution terrain information that promises feature detection, extraction and attribution. In Afghanistan, we have seen firsthand the impact of these new applications in a collaborative coalition effort. NGA and numerous partners used hyperspectral imagery to gain a better understanding of the terrain of Afghanistan, creating foundation data that assisted in a variety of mission sets. These valuable, dynamic capabilities produce exponentially more data that require significant storage and exploitation space and appropriate extraction tools that make sure it is used effectively.
Exploitation Advances
Improving our sources and fusing national technical means (NTM) with commercial and airborne assets adds significant value to our capabilities. Still, our real power resides in our ability to perform geospatial analysis and work with our U.S. and allied counterparts. Our analysts require tools that enable them to discover, exploit and share existing imagery and data. Tools like Consolidated Analytic Spatial initiative (CASi) and GEOINT Online (GO) allow for quick retrieval of vast quantities of data in a user-friendly format. NGA is looking outward for other tools to aid in exploitation, like SOCET GXP®, Adobe® PDF, Microsoft® Virtual Earth™, ESRI Arc Explorer™ and Google™ Earth. Our analysts continue to seek out more collaborative tools as they see the power to intuitively find the imagery and geospatial information that they need to produce accurate, relevant and timely GEOINT.
To maintain our technical advantage, NGA continues to develop a diverse array of GEOINT sources, tools and techniques. Technology has played a major role at NGA and will continue to do so, particularly as we focus outward and work more closely with Defense and Intelligence Community partners every day. And at the end of the day, we must all remember that our people drive our analysis, innovation, creativity and progress.
Robert B. Murrett
Vice Admiral, USN
Director
The article is also available online:
www1.nga.mil/Newsroom/Pathfinder/0606/Pages/OnMyMind.aspx