NGA Future Is ‘Hybrid’ Of Commercial, IC Sources: Gauthier

When I spoke last June to

David Gauthier, head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Commercial and Business Operations Group was working last June with the NRO to fully separate their missions regarding commercial satellite images and analysis. In this interview, Gauthier details how far NGA has come in its work with commercial providers, and its efforts to expand use of new commercial products to create a “hybrid” pool of up-to-the-minute geospatial awareness data and analyses for warfighters on the battlefield, as well as the Intelligence Community.This interview was edited for clarity and brevity (mostly mine!)

Q: It would be good if you could just give me a five minute overview of where you guys are since last year: what’s been accomplished, what’s new, what’s significant?

A: I can certainly do that. We spoke last summer, when we were in the middle of really following through on the agreements between NRO and NGA that transferred commercial imagery purchasing to the NRO, and left NGA in a place where we will govern community requirements and deliver imagery to the end user. We have now focused our own purchasing more on geospatial data, products, and analytic services. One of the things we were still doing at that time was that NGA still had a contract with Planet Labs for imagery. We had been experimenting with using satellite imagery from the Dove constellation for about three years. We started that in 2016, and had just continually rolled those experimental contracts over to keep going because they started showing promise for our analytic users and the combatant commands. But having NGA continue to buy commercial imagery was outside of our agreement with NRO.

In October last year, we transferred that contract over to the NRO. Now the CSPO [NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office] put Planet on contract for that work, and is continuing to deliver that to our users worldwide. There was no break in service. We just rolled that contract over to the NRO and they picked it up.

My focus now with that level of imagery, the lower resolution but high revisit imagery, is to ensure that we have all the documented requirements from our users for that type of imagery going forward, so that as NRO continues to be the procurement partner they have our documented requirements and can procure off the commercial market exactly what we need. That was one big step in the right direction: getting the Planet contract transitioned, focusing on documenting requirements from what we learned using that imagery, and [figuring out] what it’s good for across our mission set.

The other thing we did last Fall was we began documenting our evaluations of commercial analytic services. We had done either small scale contracts, or in some cases were receiving services for free, for evaluation purposes to look at a couple of things:

• Can we understand some form of economic analysis by looking at oil storage in different countries from satellite imagery?
• Can we look for illicit fishing and logging activities based upon an analytics service?
• Can we monitor facilities that are part of our foundational military intelligence mission: the facilities of foreign militaries? Can we monitor them with commercial services and effectively outsource some of those more tedious tasks that we do?

We evaluated those … analytic services, among others, to see what would provide the most value to our users and to our mission, [which ones] we could carry into more extensive evaluations and procurements in FY20 and FY21. I can go into more detail on any of those if you’re interested, but why don’t I wrap it there.

Q: Can you tell me what’s your budget in 2020, and what was the ’21 budget ask?

A: Well, I’m not really at liberty to say exactly what our budget numbers are.

Q: So, second question. With regard to evaluating analytical capabilities, have you actually found that this is useful and that you’re able to save money or save time?

A: Yes, we have.

Q: Are you now contracting with specific companies to do those tasks?

A: We are about to contract with a number of companies to do more than we did under the evaluation step. We’re looking to expand our capability in using commercial analytic services for this. So over the next few months, we will be contracting for those services.

Q: I know that a number of NGOs have used satellite imagery to do things like monitor North Korea’s launch sites. Is that a good example of things that you might be able to do with commercial services? 

A: Yes, that’s exactly the type of work we’re looking to do. Under the evaluation period, the analysts were more comfortable giving the companies what I would call ‘lower priority countries and targets’ to follow, just to see if this would pan out and be successful. And the users were excited enough about the outcome and that they have decided to [go forward for operational uses.] I can’t give you exact budget numbers, but I can tell you that over the two-year period we’re going to scale up by about 20 times what we were doing in the evaluation period as far as how much we’re going to purchase for operations.

I think that that speaks to how well the analysts thought that the trial went, and that they’re ready to expand into more operational capability.

Q: On EnhancedView, where are we with that? [EnhancedView is DoD’s premier commercial imagery procurement program, in the past awarded by NGA as a sole source contract to Digital Globe now Maxar Technologies. NRO took over in 2018 but as of the end of last year had yet to make a final decision of whether to stick long term with that arrangement.]

A: EnhancedView is still being managed by the NRO.  They have our documented requirements for the future. NRO is going to plan for the next contract after EnhancedView sometime in the future. … So, we have that as a current capability — that was no different than what NGA was doing. NRO will be evaluating the market, taking our requirements set, and determining for themselves how they can best satisfy those needs.

Q: So, that’s essentially the same thing they were doing last year?

A: Yes.

Q: Okay. How does what’s going on with all-domain operations — this idea of connecting all sensors to all shooters that includes trying to figure out how to better perform battle management of DoD satellite networks in particular — affect what you’re doing? Or does it? 

A: There is certainly an indirect effect. And I would say it looks good for commercial services because the combatant commands and General Raymond [who is double-hatted as head of both Space Force and Space Command] are asking for more shareable and standardized data formats. When they say shareable, a lot of times that lowest common denominator means unclassified information. So, one of the best ways we can provide unclassified shareable information to the commands is to give them commercial services and commercial capabilities for GEOINT. That’s coming back around as a demand signal to me and my shop — to figure out what are the best capabilities in the commercial market to offer up to those users and for those needs.

Q: In other words, it’ll push a step-up in how much commercial stuff you guys feel as needed. So, you would then send the requirements to NRO to purchase more [commercial satellite imagery] to fulfill the growing demand from the Commanders? 

A: Yes. If it’s imagery, we would certainly create more demand for the NRO. On the flip side, if it’s analytic services, or the commands want evidence of adversary activities that they can use to counter the adversary narrative in public, that kind of evidence can be readily displayed in some of our analytic services and products that we’re purchasing off of the commercial services.

I have a very good example for you. There’s something called MARI, it stands for the Multi-source Analyst Ready Information service provided by Maxar. It’s a machine learning algorithm that takes multiple sources of information — public domain, satellite imagery, AIS [Automatic Identification System] signals from maritime traffic, and other things.

We worked with the US Fish and Wildlife service, who was helping the government of Gabon find illicit fishing and logging activities in their nation. We evaluated this analytic service with Maxar, they trained it up and it provided these alerts to US Fish and Wildlife, who provided them to the Gabonese military, who then went out and raided these vessels in illegal areas. And the military was very successful at raiding and shutting down some illegal fishing and illegal gold mining activities.

One of the interesting factors in all of this is that the illegal activities were Chinese in nature. So, we ended up getting the secondary benefit of shareable and unclassified evidence that could be used to counter Chinese influence in Africa.

Q: Do you think you can reduce your reliance on classified satellite systems by using commercial data? Can you give me a percentage where you think you might be going with how much from classified sensors and how much from commercial sensors?

A: Well, I can’t give you a percentage, but I will tell you that the trend is that a larger percentage of our work will be able to be accomplished using commercial systems than in the past. And that’s largely due to the increase in availability of commercial imagery and commercial service providers in the market. Basically, if that’s where the bulk of the data is, then we will work where the data exists. We do foresee in the future a hybrid architecture, where we definitely require both national systems for their capabilities and commercial systems for their capabilities.

Q: Is there an overarching strategy that you have for moving to that hybrid system? Is there a five-year plan?

A: Well, I would say we’re not that mature yet with a five year plan. We’re evaluating the capabilities in the commercial market as they emerge against our mission needs — looking for those areas where there’s great value and utility using commercial services instead of national. We’ll be working over time to migrate mission and analysis workflows, and everything else.

So, for the example of foundational military intelligence, you mentioned North Korean sites, that NGOs have looked at. We’ll be looking at dozens of foreign military installations with commercial services over time. That is what I would consider to be baseline reporting requirements that we provide to the warfighter and policymakers every day. The more we can do those updates on a daily basis from commercial imagery, the more our analysts are freed up to spend time using other sources to amplify what they know about those facilities. And to spend more time doing trend analysis and network analysis — why and how [the adversaries] are doing things as opposed to simply observing what they happen to be doing.

Q:  Last time I saw you, we talked a little bit about the promise of synthetic aperture radar [SAR] imagery. Do you see a stronger commercial capability that might provide you with almost real-time revisit rates?

A: Well, that’s certainly the goal of some of the commercial providers. As we look at Capella Space, their goal is a constellation of 36 satellites that provide the 15 minutes revisit — day, night and in bad weather — which is fantastic and would lend itself to great monitoring of those military installations we care about around the world. So, that’s the goal.

The constellations haven’t really proliferated yet. They’re on track to launch a number of satellites this year. But, we’re expecting them to have that capability and we expect to utilize it.

One thing we did over the past year was we did work with a company called Ursa Space Systems. They’re an analytics company that uses SAR from a number of providers. They helped us look at oil storage. We validated the value of using commercial SAR to provide oil storage levels at scale. So, it really is helping us get to better economic analysis.

Q: But, you haven’t evaluated them for looking at military installations?

A: Not to my knowledge. Not yet.

Q: But that would be a next step, right?

A: Yes. And when we are going to contract with analytic service providers later this year, we’re not specifying what type of imagery or what type of raw data they need to go get. So, if they want to use SAR, that would be fantastic.

Q: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to tell me?

A: The only other thing that comes to mind is…  we can get so much better at humanitarian aid and disaster relief missions using commercial [imagery and services]. And nothing highlighted that more than in December and January, Puerto Rico had a pretty bad earthquake and some aftershocks, and they were able to use satellite imagery to look at the size of crowds at aid stations throughout the country to help FEMA. When a lead federal agency asks for our help, we’re allowed to then provide that imagery — in this case to FEMA. We were able to help them with the size of crowds at their various aid stations and showed where there was likely the worst damage in the environment.

Q: And being able to share this kind of intelligence also helps us work with our allies better, correct?

A: Absolutely. Being able to share US commercial imagery with our allies is very helpful in partnering with them, and likewise they can share their commercial capabilities back with us. It’s a win-win partnership.