The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) wants companies’ help in improving NGA’s collection orchestration.
Collection orchestration is the execution of imagery priorities among competing demands from the National Command Authority, combatant commands, the intelligence community, military services, and commercial companies to deliver “the right image, at the right place, at the right time,” in NGA parlance.
“Collection orchestration has become more and more complex,” NGA Deputy Director Tonya Wilkerson told a virtual industry strategy summit hosted by NGA on Nov. 15. “Newer sources of commercial imagery, coupled with allied approaches to collection, give us more options and permutations from collection than ever before.”
“Where does your technology fit in with ours? Tell us how we can better lead collection orchestration for the nation’s security,” she said.
The past decade’s proliferation of high-resolution commercial imagery has illustrated that the U.S. government is no longer the holder of the keys to the kingdom.
Defense ministers from NATO countries, including Finland, Sweden, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and France, announced the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) initiative in February. At the center of APSS is the “Aquila” program, which is to be “a virtual constellation of data available from verified surveillance satellites allowing allies to share space-based earth observation data from both national and commercial sources.”
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, as members of the Five Eyes Alliance, also appear to want more commercial imagery for their intelligence needs.
Wilkerson said on Nov. 15 that the “Geoint enterprise expects to see an 1,100 percent increase in available geoint data in the next five to 10 years.”
On August 7, 2017, then NGA Director Robert Cardillo cited a similar figure in saying that NGA’s “new and expansive view of the world…in the next five years, has the potential to see us receiving a million times more geospatial data.”
NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth has suggested that the wide availability of commercial imagery may point to a new “rheostat approach” that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to help analysts keep pace with the geoint data increase by pinpointing what images or image segments bear a closer look (Defense Daily, Nov. 2).
Such an approach would likely leverage NGA’s Maven, which has focused on reducing U.S. military sensor-to-shooter timelines.
The 2008 revision to Executive Order 1233 makes NGA the functional manager of geospatial intelligence. The office of the director of national intelligence defined collection orchestration in 2017, NGA has said, and the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security detailed collection orchestration in policy and strategy documents in 2020 and 2021.
NGA said that it is the head of geospatial intelligence collection orchestration but that details on it are classified.