Will U.S. Space Force or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), or a combination of the two, have responsibility for rapid, within minutes commercial geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) support to the Combatant Commands (COCOMs)?
“I think the Space Force is the right place to do the servicing of the tactical user with time-dominant commercial products for quick-turn operational needs,” said David Gauthier, the chief strategy officer at GXO, Inc. and the past director of NGA’s commercial and business operations. “One reason is that using a central authority in charge of all purchasing is an old school mentality about how to drive efficiency by making everybody go through one centralized management approach.”
“That efficiency is probably true when timelines don’t matter, and there is a scarce resource that you’re trying to be efficient with and be fair across multiple communities,” he said. “However, in this case, tactical timelines matter more than ever, and commercial capabilities, for the first time, can meet those timelines on their own. We also don’t have a scarce resource anymore. We’re not trying to prioritize a scarce resource across 1,000 competing needs in the federal government. We can allow all these abundant resources to meet different needs on different timelines.”
“What I think NGA has had to do in the past is scoop up everybody’s requirements and aggregate them and then apply a scarce amount of resources to the maximum effect against those requirements,” Gauthier said. “What that means is, if it’s a Bell Curve of commercial requirements, all the stuff in the middle of the Bell Curve will get met, and the things on the end will get dropped as a lower priority. What I think happens is the stressing tactical timeline requirements are on one of those tail ends, and those just don’t get purchased or satisfied with commercial services. A better way might be allowing an organization, focused on just that problem, to go use their resources and solve it with commercial services. It may not be the high-end GEOINT that only NGA can provide, but it still satisfies a tactical need on a rapid timeline.”
The NGA, for its part, said that it has had a presence at the COCOMs since 1997–the year after the establishment of NGA’s predecessor–the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). Of NGA’s 14,500 employees, more than 1,000 work at the COCOMs, NGA said, and the “small footprint” in 1997 at the COCOMs “has grown ever since.”
NGA said that it is able to respond to COCOM GEOINT requests within minutes and that the agency “is the best postured entity in the US government to provide rapid GEOINT to the COCOMS.”
“As the Combat Support Agency charged with providing GEOINT, NGA is already (a) integrated with the COCOMs and [military] services, (b) operating at the speed of combat, (c) optimizing speed of delivery between NTM [National Technical Means] and commercial sourcing, and (d) dedicated to ensuring the taxpayer pays only once for these services,” the agency said. “NGA collaborates with the Space Force accordingly. While NGA is not responsible for commercial pixel acquisition, we are dedicated to accelerating all aspects of commercial GEOINT.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2024 defense report last July said that receiving intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target tracking data “in a tactically relevant timeline is essential to the success of a mission” and that the committee was “concerned that the current tasking prioritization may not best suit Combatant Commander needs.”
The committee also said that advanced technology adversaries–read China and Russia–portend at least a partial DoD reliance on new, fast-to-field commercial space technology to replace airborne assets, such as the now retired Northrop Grumman [NOC] Joint STARS ground moving target indication plane, and thus fulfill traditional Title 10 ISR and target tracking missions. New space phenomenologies, such as hyperspectral, could, for example, replace work previously done by aircraft, such as the Air Force’s MQ-1 Predator by General Atomics.
Before the Predator’s retirement in 2018, the drone conducted improvised explosive device (IED) detection missions in Afghanistan and Iraq through the use of an RTX [RTX] Airborne Cueing and Exploitation System Hyperspectral (ACES Hy) sensor, which DoD said led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of pounds of IED precursor chemicals like ammonium nitrate.
The fiscal 2024 minibus appropriations conference agreement, like last July’s Senate defense bill, provides $40 million for U.S. Space Force’s commercial Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Tracking (TacSRT) services under the Space Systems Command commercial space office’s TacSRT pilot.
The latter began last year through the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) Marketplace, which has become the Bluestaq Global Data Marketplace.
Last month, Chief of Space Operations Gen B. Chance Saltzman told the Air and Space Forces Association’s warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo., that the TacSRT pilot program “will leverage the Global Data Marketplace to deliver commercially sourced sensing and data fusion analytics to meet the unclassified space awareness needs of our down range joint and partner warfighters.” Saltzman said that the TacSRT pilot has supported four of the 11 Combatant Commands, including “rapid” response to “earthquakes in Morocco and Japan, floods in Libya, and the most recent outbreak of wildfires in South America by providing near real time information.”
One of the companies receiving task orders under the TacSRT pilot is the Ithaca, N.Y.-based Ursa Space. Last September, the company said that it had worked with U.S. Southern Command to crack down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing through the use of Ursa-fused “Automatic Identification System (AIS) data with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-based vessel detections to allow for optimized, higher resolution tasking, and to also track and report on suspicious vessels in the area.”
“Ursa was able to demonstrate rapid delivery with a limited imaging window of 24 hours and one day’s notice to schedule the tasking, despite the potential for reduced viable space assets due to each vendors’ unique orbit pattern and tasking requirements,” the company said.