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Testimony of Dr. Christopher J. Scolese 

Director, National Reconnaissance Office

House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Strategic Forces

Hearing on “Fiscal Year 2024 National Security Space Programs”

Wednesday April 26, 2023
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Chairman Lamborn, Ranking Member Moulton, members of the Subcommittee, it is a 

pleasure to be before you today and represent the dedicated workforce of the National 

Reconnaissance Office (NRO). 

Thanks to the support of Congress and the efforts of the talented NRO workforce, I am 

pleased to report to you and the American people that the NRO is creating the most 

capable, diverse and resilient overhead intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance 

(ISR) constellation in our history.

We See It, Hear It, Sense It:

At the NRO we are building the space systems that allow the U.S. to see it, hear it and 

sense it. Our capabilities, in space and on the ground employ cutting edge technologies 

to provide more information, faster than ever before to help solve the nation’s hardest 

intelligence challenges and provide our warfighters, analysts and policymakers with real 

time situational awareness and vital intelligence that can only be obtained from space. 

From providing the warfighter geolocations and situational awareness tools, to providing 

high resolution imagery to intelligence analysts to inform decision making, to providing 

support to aid natural disaster responses such as wildfires, the men and women of the 

NRO are making the world and our country a stronger, safer place. 

Our demonstration systems are proving concepts, reducing time for deployment of 

operational systems and are allowing us to fill key intelligence gaps more quickly. The 

integration of commercial systems into our architecture coupled with our demonstration 

systems make intelligence more available and sharable for our commanders on the 

ground and allies. The agility we are building into the architecture is allowing us to be 

more responsive, we are designing and delivering systems that can perform multiple 

types of intelligence missions enabling us to quickly pivot from supporting traditional 

national level analytical support, to supporting military requirements for crisis events in 

Ukraine, while simultaneously being able to provide support to humanitarian efforts in 

places like Turkey and Syria.

The men and women of the NRO are smart, creative and work tirelessly to bring ideas 

to life through innovation, streamlined acquisition approaches and partnerships. We 

tackle the toughest technological challenges so that our customers and partners can get 

answers to the toughest intelligence questions of today and the future. As we 

accomplish our mission we are good stewards of the taxpayer’s dollars, achieving our 

14th consecutive clean financial audit in 2022. Our blended workforce of military, DoD 

and IC civilians are the reason the NRO has set the standard for space based ISR for 

over six decades. While we are proud of our heritage, we know that staying ahead 

requires us to do things smarter, faster and more efficiently than ever before, and the 

men and women of NRO take this to heart in every aspect of our mission, to go above 

and beyond.
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Staying Ahead of Our Competitors:

In my previous appearances before this committee, I have reported on the increasing 

complexity of the space domain and the speed at which the U.S. advantage from space 

is being challenged, particularly by China and Russia. Our competitors are developing 

weapons to destroy or interfere with our satellites kinetically or via directed energy from 

locations on the ground and in space. This includes cyber intrusions and cyberattacks 

that will be a perennial threat to all of our systems. We are seeing rapid investment and 

advancements in the space domain from our competitors in just about every area. As 

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines noted during her Annual Threat 

Assessment testimony to Congress earlier this spring, China’s commercial space sector 

is on pace to become a major global competitor to U.S. and allied space industries by 

2030.

To stay ahead of the competition and ensure that we can continue to operate in a 

heightened threat environment, the NRO with the support of Congress over the last 

several years, has continued to modernize our architecture in space and on the ground 

– to have more capabilities and to become faster, more agile and more resilient. These 

investments are already beginning to payoff, the NRO’s future constellation is taking 

shape today, we are building the future now. We are growing our capabilities to help 

expand our intelligence advantage, while at the same time taking the steps to ensure 

our space systems and ground infrastructure are able to maintain operations through 

any contingency or threat.

Building NRO’s Future Architecture Today:

The diversified, proliferated architecture we are building includes large and small 

satellites, both government and commercial, in multiple orbits so that we can spend 

more time over a given area, and minimize the time between observations, giving us 

both more capability and a higher degree of resilience. We are in the midst of building a 

new constellation that will take us from dozens of systems on orbit in 2023, to hundreds 

of systems on orbit in the next few years.

As we add more satellites with more capabilities and push ISR capabilities beyond what 

was thought to be possible, we are thinking differently about how we will task, collect 

and disseminate our space based intelligence. We are advancing and improving 

automation and multi-intelligence processes, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine 

learning (ML) to make sure we can deliver the right information at the right time to the 

right place, whether it be to the warfighter in the field, a commander on the ops floor, or 

an analyst at one of our Intelligence Community partners. As more data is made 

available, we must guard against adding complexity for our users. It is essential that we 

simplify interfaces and focus on the basic intelligence question. We must let machines 

enabled by AI and ML focus on the “what” and “how,” and allow humans to focus on 

what they do best—answering the “why.” It is why the NRO is building tools that help 

warfighters and analysts make sense of this data by fusing it together for better 
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situational awareness and decision advantage. NRO tools are in use at every 

combatant command and have proven critical in supporting EUCOM’s operations during 

the Ukraine crisis. 

Mission Enhancing Partnerships:

We know we can’t solve today’s challenges on our own. We depend on our 

relationships with other government agencies, other nations, academia and the private 

sector to identify new opportunities to optimize our talents, tools, and effectiveness. One 

of the most critical of these relationships is with the U.S. Space Force. During my last 

appearance before the committee, I highlighted the work we are doing together to 

protect and defend assets in space. Since I last testified before the committee, the

partnership with Space Force has only grown stronger. Today the NRO and Space 

Force are working hand-in-hand to shape the future of Ground Moving Target Indicators 

(GMTI), which will provide day, night, all weather detection and tracking of ground and 

maritime targets for the warfighter. Working with the Space Force and other military 

services, the NRO’s flexible acquisition approaches will allow us to develop and acquire 

reliable and resilient GMTI systems at speed, delivering this critical capability to the 

warfighter, for the warfighter, in the very near future. I am also pleased to report to the

committee that the joint NRO and Space Force SILENTBARKER system will be 

launching later this summer. This new capability will improve space situational 

awareness. These joint efforts are just a few examples where we are leveraging the 

best of what the Space Force and NRO have to offer to accelerate U.S. advantage in 

space.

Our partnerships with allies continue to expand and help to provide us increased 

capabilities and flexibilities. During the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, NRO systems have 

provided vital support to our European allies and partners in NATO. We are 

strengthening partnerships with traditional Five Eyes allies such as the United Kingdom, 

Australia, New Zealand and Canada taking advantage of multiple launch venues, 

shared satellite investments and exchanges of technologies and data. We are 

establishing and growing relationships with Japan, the Nordic countries and others who 

want to partner with us and contribute to our collective security.

The NRO is leveraging the power of the U.S. space industry to help us create the 

architecture we are building today. From commercial imagery and commercial RF, to 

launch services, to spacecraft, to communications, to cybersecurity and information 

technology, the NRO is integrating U.S. industry innovations across our lines of effort. 

We are working with both traditional and emerging space industry firms to help us meet 

mission. Our Strategic Commercial Enhancements Framework and the Director’s 

Innovation Initiative are examples of tools we are using to help identify new 

technologies to help us meet mission needs. For instance, just last month the NRO 

awarded study contracts to a group of six commercial providers to evaluate 

hyperspectral imagery capabilities. As we increase our reliance on the U.S. space 

industry to take advantage of the speed and innovation they can bring to our
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architecture and our efforts to stay ahead of the competition, we are also paying close 

attention to ensuring that the quality of systems, materials and integrity of the supply 

chain are not compromised in the name of speed.

Conclusion:

At the NRO we have spent 60 years seeing, hearing and sensing things you can only 

learn from the vantage point of space. We are using that vantage point to help find the 

answers to some of the nation’s most important national security questions. Providing 

our warfighters, policymakers and decision makers the intelligence they need, when 

they need it. 

Mr. Chairman, what was a vision just a few years ago is quickly coming into focus. The 

future is now. I am confident that the NRO, our people and partners are all committed 

not to just keep pace, but to accelerate our advantage in space. The safety and 

security of the world and our nation are counting on it. 

Thank you for having me today. I look forward to the committee’s questions.