COMMERCIAL GEOINT STRATEGYThis Commercial GEOINT Strategy establishes a roadmap for preparing the community and workforce for new sources, instantiates new, more agile acquisition models, and integrates the commercial sources to provide easy customer access. This strategy will enable NGA to move toward: greater unclassified operations; more production and publication of unclassified intelligence; and the augmentation of unclassified intelligence with classified sources when required.NGA’s Commercial GEOINT Strategy articulates both customer-focused objectives and a set of implementation imperatives that guide the actions necessary to achieve these objectives... The ... implementation imperatives establish an adaptive framework that moves smoothly with, and profits from, what Mr. Cardillo has characterized as the “Seismic Shift” that will continue in the GEOINT industry. Focusing our implementation of this Strategy on the ever-evolving needs of our customers is essential to NGA’s success.National Geospatial-Intelligence AgencyNGA_461c7536-37f6-11e0-ab15-5c497a64ea2aRobert CardilloDirector Cardillo’s 2015 NGA Strategy addresses increased customer demand for actionable GEOINT services and new opportunities for using geospatial big data analytics to answer our hardest questions. Flowing from the NGA strategy, a forthcoming NGA GEOINT Concept of Operations (CONOPS) will highlight NGA’s commitment to harnessing unclassified sources of GEOINT as the foundation for global awareness and persistence. The explosion and diversity of unclassified sources provides exploitation opportunities that can deliver greater background and context to enhance the focus of our national assets against hard problems and knowledge gaps. NGA requires a seamless integration of all GEOINT, regardless of source or classification, to enable anticipatory analysis and to create online, living knowledge that reduces the time between questions and answers—thereby providing faster and more consequential impact. NGA’s plan for harnessing unclassified GEOINT spans all domains—space, air, surface, subsurface, and cyber2—and relies heavily upon commercial providers bringing their unique data, services, and rapid innovation together to strengthen the value of GEOINT.NGA’s CustomersNGA’s customers require a broad range of services, including the delivery of geo-referenced imagery and data, Foundation GEOINT products and services, and intelligence analysis. Increasingly, many customers operate on dramatically reduced timeliness, driving a need for persistence—collection at the speed of the observable—from multiple sources. Accordingly, some customers are now willing to consider a trade of confidence level for speed, in order to support both operational and policy decision cycles. NGA needs to meet these new customer desires as well as the traditional requirement for high-confidence analysis.Commercial Sources of GeointelligenceToday, commercial sources are critical to NGA’s mission success, and their importance will only increase into the future. The increased global coverage these sources provide is a key enabler for persistent GEOINT and the sheer numbers of commercial satellites and satellite operators will increase the collective resiliency of overhead architectures. Furthermore, multiple companies, operating independently, with geographically dispersed downlink and ground architectures will significantly increase collective commercial diversity, providing resiliency on the ground as well. Many of the emerging commercial providers are also planning extensive contextual and analytic capabilities, integrating information from remote sensing, social, economic, and other sources into new product classes. These multiple approaches using varying sources to provide analysis against specific problem sets also contributes to overall resiliency.CompaniesDomestic and foreign companies are using lower cost development approaches to deliver unprecedented revisit rates through constellations of satellites that, collectively, number in the hundreds. NGA will achieve a dramatic transformation by harnessing this ongoing increase in persistence, and the growing demand for business intelligence built on that persistence, by using commercial GEOINT in ways that have never before been possible.COMMERCIAL GEOINT: DELIVERED AT THE SPEED OF DECISION MAKING. BUILT INTO OUR BUSINESS._91e044da-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bTo establish an environment that allows us to discover and answer questions, help us identify and meet challenges, and ensure we continually improve our consequence to our customers._91e045de-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bDiversityTo meet ... new customer needs and the continually increasing level of traditional ones, NGA is adopting a new Commercial GEOINT Strategy. This strategy will foster a more diverse, resilient, agile, and responsive GEOINT program that provides seamless user access to the best mix of commercial GEOINT (including imagery, analytic products and services, and contextual information and knowledge) to fulfill National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) and Allied System for Geospatial-Intelligence (ASG) mission needs.ResilienceAgilityResponsivenessDynamismThe remote-sensing industry’s evolving global coverage, rapid revisit rates, diverse spectral content, aggregation of open source venues, and growing analytic capabilities will allow NGA to “embrace emergent commercial capabilities with the same dynamism that we embraced National Technical Means (NTM) decades ago.”PersistenceNGA must harness the rising bow wave of persistence from established and emerging commercial GEOINT providers to deliver an expanding spectrum of GEOINT offerings (imagery, open source, analytic products, and other services) at the speed of decision making.AnalyticsAs commercial GEOINT offerings evolve from just pixels to imagery-based analytics, most commonly delivered as services, NGA will capitalize on this commercial revolution (see Figure 1). This will allow its workforce to transform their tradecraft from traditional reconnaissance imagery analysis, which is becoming increasingly commoditized, to a practice of geospatial analysis applied to a fast-flowing stream of big and increasingly diverse commercial and national data sources. By exploiting a continually expanding suite of commercial data extraction, processing and reporting services, NGA analysts will increase their ability to exploit commercial GEOINT within the decision cycles of our intelligence, tactical, and Foundation GEOINT customers.Decision MakingEnable our intelligence customers to make informed decisions in operationally relevant timelines by supplying increasingly diverse imagery, intelligence products and services._91e046c4-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bCustomer Consequence 1Traditionally, the NGA workforce exploited raw imagery data (e.g. pixels) by performing analytic processes to extract information, supply context, and provide consequence through the production of intelligence reporting and Foundation GEOINT products. Today, rapidly emerging commercial providers are building significant capability to distill raw data for themselves from multiple sources into first order imagery analytics. The Commercial GEOINT strategy capitalizes on this rapidly growing, commercially available capability, so that the NGA workforce can focus on creating coherence from chaos, by developing tradecraft that can “detect patterns of activity, interpret behaviors, create insight and understanding from the tsunami of data, and enable decision advantage for our customers.” This strategy enables a workforce and work role transformation by establishing an enduring NGA engagement with commercial GEOINT providers. This will ensure that we quickly identify and validate the most mission relevant industry capabilities, readily adapt to their use, and forge resilient industry partnerships. Doing so delivers the following outcomes: * NGA analysts will continuously evolve and apply models of our national security problems and apply deep contextual analytics to massive collections of geo-referenced observations that we obtain from a multitude of traditional, open and commercial sources. * The NGA workforce will maintain and continuously evolve their expertise and tradecraft to apply exquisite NTM capabilities against the hardest intelligence problems. * NGA and its IC GEOINT partners will achieve an allocation of requirements between NTM and commercial capabilities that maintains an appropriate balance of those sources. * NGA will work collaboratively across industry to encourage a common set of standards, protocols, and formats that facilitates the ingest of imagery/products from multiple commercial providers. We will maintain insight into emerging commercial capabilities using an institutionalized, but agile assessment framework that addresses utility and integration issues proactively. * The NGA Image Quality and Utility (NIQU) assessment team will employ agile, flexible, and efficient procedures to certify that commercial imagery and products are sufficiently “fit for purpose.” NGA will be able to respond to and integrate new products that address our customer needs rather than having to be compliant with rigorous government specifications. * In those instances where security risks are acceptable, NGA will establish direct access to commercial providers’ storage and processing environments, enabling our analysts to interact with data at its storage source (“data at rest”), reducing the storage and processing burden on the NSG and ASG architectures. For those commercial capabilities that do not flow directly through our architecture, NGA will provide governance for internal users and guidance for direct customer interaction._91e04912-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bData, Information & KnowledgeMinimize uncertainty, reduce loss of life and improve mission success for our tactical customers by providing timely and relevant commercial data, information and knowledge—provided where they need it, in a form and in domains where they can readily consume and share it._91e04a3e-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bCustomer Consequence 2This strategy ensures that NGA provides responsive services to our customers by working outside the bounds of the traditional TCPED cycle. For our tactical customers, this will include provisioning commercial imagery, image-derived analytics and context-based products through non-government internet-based services, commercial relay, or direct downlink. As global space-based commercial communications networks evolve (e.g., small satellite-based internet constellations), NGA will seek opportunities to capitalize on emerging high bandwidth service to traditionally disadvantaged locations to deliver an even broader complement of Foundation GEOINT and intelligence products. Implementing these responsive GEOINT services ensures the following outcomes: * Warfighters, first responders, and humanitarian aid providers consider NGA’s provision of timely and relevant unclassified GEOINT indispensable to their missions. * NGA will increase its impact as a force multiplier to these many customers, especially those who need shareable and up-to-date imagery. * Our customers in harm’s way will have unparalleled situational awareness that is enabled by NGA’s continuous efforts to improve delivery of the best GEOINT available._91e04b24-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bAwareness, Insight & UnderstandingImprove awareness, insight, and understanding for our many Foundation GEOINT customers by supplying increasingly persistent and diverse commercial data streams, Foundation products, and services that enable Map of the World’s feature-rich GEOINT on demand, as well as other vectors of Foundation GEOINT._91e04c1e-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bCustomer Consequence 3Improve awareness, insight, and understanding for our many Foundation GEOINT customers by supplying increasingly persistent and diverse commercial data streams, foundation products, and services that enable Map of the World’s feature-rich GEOINT on-demand, as well as other vectors of Foundation GEOINT. Emerging commercial GEOINT capabilities include diverse phenomenologies, rapid revisit imagery collection, and higher-order downstream GEOINT products and services. NGA will leverage opportunities these commercial capabilities provide to continuously improve capability, cost, and efficiency of Foundation GEOINT production and provisioning. Ensuring that NGA looks increasingly to the commercial sector to provide higher order Foundation GEOINT will result in the following outcomes: * NGA will reduce mission costs by divesting from internal and directed Foundation GEOINT production, leveraging these emerging commercial providers. * In those instances where NGA continues to directly execute Foundation GEOINT production, commercial GEOINT will be used to tip and cue change-based foundation imagery collection and GEOINT production in a way that provides Foundation GEOINT that is: more relevant; high quality; quickly delivered; and cost effective._91e04d5e-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bImplementationInform and shape the future acquisition approaches for Commercial GEOINT._91e04e76-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bAll of the implementation imperatives below inform and shape the future acquisition approaches for Commercial GEOINT. These acquisition approaches—what NGA buys and how it buys it – must deliberately evolve as the new Commercial GEOINT industry evolves, grows, and matures. NGA’s future acquisitions must accommodate two realities that are in dynamic tension: (1) real innovation is fueled by diversity, and (2) fiscal resources have become more constrained and will remain so. In addition, Commercial GEOINT acquisition must be agile. Agility ensures that our acquisitions keep pace with the rate of industry innovation and can change course—as warranted—as the industry evolves. In order to procure emerging commercial GEOINT capabilities that better meet our mission needs, we must also remain agile enough to readily divest ourselves of less effective capabilities. Likewise, as we capitalize on increasingly diverse commercial capabilities, we must also leverage opportunities to increase resilience. The implementation imperatives in this strategy consist of four distinct, but interweaving “lanes” of action. While actions in one lane may necessarily precede actions in another, all of these lanes are continuously moving forward. In fact, NGA is already engaged in several initiatives across the Agency and the GEOINT community that fit into these lanes. This Commercial GEOINT Strategy, along with defining new actions, establishes the interrelationship between those existing initiatives and the path forward for the systematic integration of new commercial capabilities into the GEOINT enterprise. The “seismic shift” will not subside; rather the pace of evolution in the commercial GEOINT industry will likely accelerate. Keeping pace with this evolution, living with continuous change, and adapting or adopting those emerging capabilities that can best improve consequence for GEOINT customers will remain the core of NGA’s normal operations.Learning & UnderstandingLearn and understand the evolution of the commercial GEOINT industry as it occurs through a collaborative relationship network that: engages and informs our industry partners; become a force multiplier for our government partners; and ensures we satisfy the evolving needs of our customers in a timely manner._91e04fac-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bImplementation Imperative 1NGA must adopt and maintain a proactive, but not prescriptive posture regarding advances in the commercial GEOINT industry and with technology advances in general. We will expand our current engagement with industry to improve their understanding of NGA’s needs, and influence them as appropriate in order to shape the GEOINT future. NGA’s messaging to industry will be spearheaded by the Agency’s senior Industry Innovation Advocate. In addition, the execution of the commercial GEOINT strategy will remain closely aligned with the goals and direction of senior leadership (e.g., the GEOINT Solutions Marketplace initiative). We will engage with our NSG/ASG stakeholders and customers continuously. We will actively collaborate with those partners and customers who are currently developing their own strategies for understanding and capitalizing on emerging commercial GEOINT capabilities. We will draw on their lessons learned, as well as our own, to inform our commercial GEOINT acquisition approach - which must necessarily evolve as the industry itself evolves and matures. Doing so provides many bilateral benefits. We multiply the return on our respective investments in developing knowledge capital, and NGA benefits from direct insight into our customers’ perspectives. Open, early communication and honest exploration of issues—including fiscal constraints—provides a transparency that instills in our customers a sense of confidence, knowing that NGA hears and is responsive to their voices. Our engagement with industry, hand-in-hand with our mission partners, will be just as open and transparent. We will gain deep understanding of emerging providers’ business models, capability and deployment schedules, and targeted markets. Our engagements with industry will vary widely, because each company is unique and continuously evolving. We will collaboratively explore opportunities to partner with these emerging providers, seeking to discover the best alignment between our mission needs and their business objectives. Honest and early exchanges will ensure NGA develops sufficient understanding of the emerging provider to assess the value of their continued engagement. Commercial GEOINT providers will similarly benefit from an early understanding of NGA’s mission needs, interest, and contractual boundaries. Armed with this insight, companies can make better informed decisions whether or not to align their own capital investments with NGA’s needs. It is inevitable that, in some cases, there will be insufficient business incentives for continued engagement with NGA. Importantly, NGA must also inform and collaborate with oversight and policy makers. The ability of commercial GEOINT providers—especially satellite operators—to be effective and responsive mission partners requires governmental policies that do not hamper innovation. Equally important is a common understanding that our budgetary decisions also drive how well industry perceives NGA as a partner. These engagements, coupled with the technical evaluation approaches outlined in Implementation Imperative 2 below, underpin the NGA Director’s objective to develop successful partnerships. The success of the partnerships between NGA and the emerging commercial GEOINT companies will depend on mutual transparency and openness to all sources that add insight. This will ensure that we are able to excel in the open.Exploration, Experimentation & EvaluationExplore, experiment, and evaluate commercial GEOINT data and products, analytic services, and knowledge building methodologies as they evolve, to discover the art of the possible, the reality of their potential, and the feasibility of integrating them into the NSG and ASG._91e050c4-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bImplementation Imperative 2A critically important first step in identifying important waypoints in the commercial GEOINT Strategy roadmap is to review the quickly evolving commercial/open GEOINT landscape and determine the best ways to operationally integrate the capabilities of multiple companies in this industry. We will develop a deep understanding of their technical capabilities, products, and services, and build an early, well-informed assessment of their applicability to NGA’s mission needs and compatibility with our CONOPS. Developing this knowledge requires that we acquire pre-operational test and evaluation data and services, which NGA will use to assess operational utility, identify integration issues, and explore new tradecraft possibilities. NGA will not execute these assessments independently. Rather, we will collaborate with other community initiatives to develop a cohesive cross-community understanding of needs, capabilities, and possibilities. In addition, NGA will launch a series of “NGA Director Challenges” that engage the NGA workforce to explore a broader scope of foundation and intelligence mission requirements to discover “what questions to even ask.” Through participation in these challenges, the NGA workforce will become an agent and advocate for transformation. NGA will consolidate the experience and knowledge our analysts, community partners, and customers gain as they work with pre-operational products and services, and use this knowledge to better shape future operational commercial GEOINT acquisitions. Figure 2 depicts the force multiplying effect of such collaboration between several current unclassified initiatives. NGA will also collaborate with similar assessment teams in the classified environment who are investing in research and development, like the Advanced Campaign Cell and the Washington Innovation Center. Importantly, these assessments will be iterative because the commercial GEOINT industry is evolving rapidly and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The assessments are designed as short term (~90 day) investigations into the capabilities of the most mature of Commercial GEOINT providers. These technical assessments, along with the deep, honest dialogues outlined in Implementation Imperative 1, will establish and maintain forward momentum on the D/NGA’s priority for industry interaction: “We must embrace emergent capabilities with the same dynamism that we embraced NTM decades ago. We have to engage the private sector as partners, not serial providers. And we have to think about what the GEOINT enterprise can provide, not just what NGA can provide.”Acquisition & DeliveryAcquire and deliver mission relevant commercial GEOINT capabilities that are sufficiently mature and can be efficiently integrated—always with the goal of improving mission success for NGA’s customers and adapting to their evolving needs._91e05204-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bImplementation Imperative 3The continuing technological evolution and increasing diversity of the industry over the next decade require that NGA’s acquisition approach remain both agile and adaptable. Our contractual relationships with providers will vary depending on their product/service offerings, business models, evolving customer requirements, and the analytic tradecraft analysts develop and implement using Commercial GEOINT. The actions executed in both Implementation Imperatives 1 and 2 will contribute substantively to the evolution of NGA’s acquisition approach to Commercial GEOINT during the coming decade. Customer needs, technical assessments, and maturing capabilities will drive our Commercial GEOINT acquisition priorities. Mission relevance, volumetric need, form of delivery (product or service), business model, and NSG/ASG integration requirements will all drive Commercial GEOINT contractual approaches. NGA will use a structured, evolutionary approach in adopting and adapting Commercial GEOINT capabilities as they evolve. Our pre-operational assessments (both business and technical) and customer engagements will identify those capabilities that will be targeted for initial operational acquisition. As industry’s capabilities mature and NGA learns from early operational use, acquisition plans will be changed to acquire new capabilities and to better align our acquisitions with our customers’ requirements. Ultimately, this will result in a cohesive commercial GEOINT acquisition approach that establishes resilient and enduring partnerships between NGA and industry.Adoption & InstitutionalizationAdopt and institutionalize commercial GEOINT capabilities as a core component of our mission-driven operations._91e0536c-7d14-11e5-9dee-68b8f9773b4bImplementation Imperative 4Most of the actions to achieve this imperative require participation across NGA directorates and offices. Representative activities include modifying architectures, codifying tradecraft and processes that use new forms of commercial GEOINT, developing the training programs that enable the transformation of NGA’s workforce, and implementing successful change management efforts. We will ensure that these organizations’ leadership: are members of our stakeholder coalition; participate in pre-operational assessments; and embrace the transformation principles that NGA’s Director has articulated.2015-10-27https://www.nga.mil/MediaRoom/PressReleases/Documents/2015/52757_Commercial_GEOINT_Strategy_Publication.pdfOwenAmburOwen.Ambur@verizon.net