Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), suggested last week that commercial imagery was meeting the timelines of combatant commands (COCOMs).
“Our day is really predicated on what can we get for the COCOMs, for the Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and the Secretary [of Defense], and, of course, for the rest of the cabinet-level readership, the DNI [director of national intelligence], and the IC [intelligence community], but there’s so much overlap, frankly, in there,” he told a Defense Writers Group breakfast on Aug 30. “I think that there was some fact-finding to see if there was anything to some of these myths that we’re slow in the way that we’re delivering commercial imagery, and I’ll defer to some of the people who did that fact finding, but what I’m reading right now is they were busting the myth as well with the feedback coming from the COCOMs. My inbox would be full of emails, if we were failing in this regard, and it is not. I do not get negative reports from the COCOMs on our timelines.”
A letter last Sept. 21st from the CEOs of Planet Labs [PL], Maxar, BlackSky [BKSY], Umbra, HawkEye 360 and Capella Space to DNI Avril Haines raised issues that the companies said they face in their dealings with DoD and the intelligence community (IC).
“More and more, users within the DOD are calling for taskable and non-taskable commercial collection capacity and access to new and archived data to inform planning and operational missions,” the letter said. “Warfighters need accelerated access to inform time-dominant decision making. Comments publicly made by the Space Force and others suggest that the DOD may not be receiving the support they need through current IC collection management processes, often referring to the process as time-consuming and unresponsive. The USG [U.S. government] should coordinate amongst DoD entities to ensure that COCOMs have timely access to satellite data and are being prioritized to meet operational needs in their area of responsibility—U.S. industry can support these increasing requirements.”
Defense Daily emailed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Sept. 3 to check whether Haines has sent the companies a response to their letter last September and will add any relevant response to this story.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has one long-term, “program of record” contract for commercial satellite imagery, the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL), that went into effect in May 2022 (Defense Daily, March 19).
The EOCL has a five-year base period and five one-year options and includes Planet, Maxar, and BlackSky. The potential value of Maxar’s deal is $3.2 billion and for BlackSky $1 billion. Planet has not disclosed the value of its award.
Funding above the $10 billion for EOCL to increase the number of dumps of commercial satellite imagery per day may be needed to increase the frequency of timely images for COCOMs.
NGA has Maxar’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (G-EGD) portal that the agency says allows 400,000 vetted users, including those at COCOMs, to gain quick access to EOCL through a CAC card.
Introduced in 2011, G-EGD has been NGA’s primary delivery mechanism of unclassified satellite imagery to the federal government and allies.
While G-EGD allows COCOMs to access EOCL images quickly, “thanks to advances in industry, end users now have the opportunity to order up more types of commercial imagery like SAR [synthetic aperture radar] and spectral from more vendors across more requirements than what G-EGD can currently deliver so there is a gap or lag between what NGA provides and what the market can deliver,” one analyst said. “Most COCOMs don’t know what they are missing and will trust NGA to methodically integrate commercial data that has been validated. Other users believe NGA is moving too slowly in a fast commercial imaging market. As an example, at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war none of the commercial SAR providers were yet integrated into G-EGD.”
NGA’s Joint Mission Management Center (JMMC), which Whitworth said achieved initial operational capability in May, is to spur more cross-agency and military service collaboration in satellite taskings.
Such tasking prioritization is “typically where the rubber meets the road,” Whitworth said on Friday. “There’s a certain amount of time and a certain amount of sensors. What’s gonna go first? What’s going to go last? What falls below the cut line, etc.? That is exactly the type of conversation and process that will be integrated into the JMMC.”
Another analyst said that the NRO and NGA need more personnel at the COCOMs with direct, non-space operational experience, such as infantry and naval ship officers, pilots, and tank commanders.
While the future will include U.S. spy and commercial remote sensing satellites, the IC may be wary of losing turf to the ever advancing commercial players.
“Neither the NRO nor NGA have been required by OSD, ODNI, or even by the Congress to explain or justify their benign–or malevolent–intent for U.S. industry,” the analyst said. “And, for reasons I still don’t understand, the commercial imagery companies continue to ‘color within the lines’ regarding their relationship with the NRO and NGA, clearly ignoring the old saying that one sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.”