NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp

NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp will retire over the summer. (James Williams/ODNI)

GEOINT 2022: The outgoing National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency director has unveiled a new set of “mission imperatives,” alongside the technical means the agency needs to pursue to improve its performance — with the top priority being assured positioning, navigation, timing and targeting.

“We need to make these changes in order to increase our speed and keep ahead of the GEOINT being created every day,” Vice Adm. Robert Sharp told the USGIF GEOINT 2022 annual conference here in Denver. “These concepts are not new, but we’ve never put them on paper in public before.”

Sharp is retiring and in June will be replaced by Vice Adm. Trey Whitworth.

Key to the new “2022 Tech Focus Areas” strategy is changing the agency’s long-time focus from primarily classified data towards encouraging the use of the least classified data possible, to enable rapid dissemination to users, including military commanders. In addition, the document says, NGA needs to re-orient from primarily relying on US government data towards gathering more commercial, allied and open source data, as well as automating analytical processes to the greatest extent possible.

“We are in a GEOINT revolution,” Chief Technology Officer Alex Loehr writes in a forward to the document. “To lead this revolution, we must fundamentally change how GEOINT workflows begin, which data and sources are prioritized, and which domain is primary.”

NGA 2022 Tech Focus Areas

NGA is shifting its priorities to meet future needs. (Infographic: NGA)

Army Gen. Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, echoed this sentiment in his kickoff speech at GEOINT.

“The flood of new imagery capabilities is overwhelming. Data driven technologies like artificial intelligence are essential …  to sift through the mountains of data across security classifications, in order to [draw] conclusions and to enable decision advantage,” Clarke said.

NGA’s new technology investment document is a revamp of its first “Tech Focus Areas” published in 2020, with a pivot away from a using a “technology lens” to a “mission lens” for guiding future work, explains Loehr in the forward. “These mission imperatives are determining how we allocate out time, energy, people, and resources, so they are crucial to understanding where we are heading.”

The document details four mission areas that NGA now will prioritize:

APNT&T

To deliver assured positioning, navigation, timing and targeting (APNT&T), NGA is investing in:

  • “Stabilizing, Modernizing, and Transforming Critical Geodetic Infrastructure.” This involves updating the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84), NGA’s global reference model based on a set of constants and parameters that describe the Earth’s size, shape, and gravity and geomagnetic fields. “Efforts will focus on streamlining processes, eliminating legacy manual activities, enabling greater efficiency, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and automating standards implementation.”
  • “Consistent and Accurate Operations in a GPS-Denied Environment.” This includes “hardening our delivery of the WGS 84 system, along with developing theater models built with higher fidelity, accuracy and new phenomenologies exploitable by next-generation warfighters, weapons, and collection systems.” NGA also must modernize its Safety of Navigation capabilities, the document says.
  • “Global Dynamic Modeling.” This involves using more automation, instituting standards and overhauling data management practices to create “system-independent, enterprise managed data services accessible to all authorized users.”
  • “Precision GEOINT.” NGA needs to “automate precise imagery processes,” as well as “incorporate computer vision” into how it produces imagery products.

Accelerated Tasking Orchestration

The goal under this mission imperative is to “significantly reduce critical timelines to deliver the highest-quality geospatial data, information, and imagery to our customers.” This requires automating how data is collected via machine learning, and building “AI, software, interfaces, and databases for rapid remote sensing and geospatial data collection needs and planning.”

Data Access and Data Integrity

This is defined as the need to “deliver trusted GEOINT data that is readily discoverable, accessible, and interoperable while preserving and protecting its integrity.” In particular, the document says, NGA must ensure the validity of commercial, foreign and open source data to ensure against manipulation by adversaries. To do this, the agency is investing in “secure data services,” “data integration and optimization,” “cross-domain services,” and delivering reliable GEOINT data to “theater and tactical edge users” in denied or degraded environments.

Analytic Workflow Modernization

This mission area is concentrated on accelerating NGA’s creation of analytical products, largely through automation and modeling.

The new Tech Focus Areas are linked, Sharp noted, to two other strategy documents focused on software. The first, “NGA CORE: Common Operations Release Environment” describes the agency’s new software development environment. The second, “The NGE Software Way” details how NGAO “will build software.”