The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently released the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) Enterprise Commercial GEOINT Strategy 2021-2025, calling on the larger GEOINT community to leverage more commercial technologies and methods to help the enterprise move faster and grow stronger.
“New sources breed new methods. New methods breed new doctrine and policy. The way forward must include shareable intelligence produced at a pace that wins both the physical and communications battle for hearts and minds,” NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp stated in an introductory letter in the strategy. “Commercial GEOINT is a critical element of our national strategy, and the NSG will be the primary driver for national security use cases.”
The strategy creates tactical goals to give analysts discoverable and shareable content on all domains. These goals also provide standards for users to deliver protected and interoperable GEOINT, produce GEOINT at the lowest classification level, and share it at the broadest level.
The strategy sets a variety of initiatives in four different areas:
- Drive unity of effort to increase transparency, commonality, and coordinated purpose.
- Diversify sources and build capacity through partnerships to ensure that NSG members can continue their mission if their usual source is unavailable, and increase the capacity at the enterprise level.
- Improve data security and develop processes to mitigate risks and strengthen commercial GEOINT, and find ways to isolate and manage risks to harness new capabilities quicker.
- Influence and foster commercial capabilities to continue work with industry to support rapid innovation, ensuring continuous progress in improving commercial utility solutions against challenges.
The NSG harnesses the benefits of working with commercial GEOINT and also combines technology, policies, capabilities, doctrine, activities, people, data, and communities needed to produce GEOINT in an integrated multi-intelligence, multi-domain environment.
The agency utilized previously released strategies – the National Strategy for Space, National Defense Strategy, and Defense Space Strategy – as a reference in developing its own strategy. It also deliberately utilized industry engagement to develop the strategy.
“By taking a community approach to commercial GEOINT and giving access to responsive and innovative tools and capabilities that will help us meet the challenges of the 21st century and beyond,” Adm. Sharp said in a press release.
In the last few years, NGA has developed a slew of strategies to increase the nation’s GEOINT dominance and efficiency by delivering world-class GEOINT that provides a decisive advantage to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals, and first responders.
Separately, NGA said it appointed Tonya Wilkerson, the CIA’s associate deputy director for Science and Technology/Strategy, as the agency’s ninth deputy director.
