UNCLASSIFIED

Statement for the Record

Ms. Betty Sapp

Director, National Reconnaissance Office

Before the House Armed Services Committee

Subcommittee on Strategic Forces 

3 April 2014

NOT FOR PUBLICATION UNTIL RELEASED BY THE 

HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

STRATEGIC FORCES SUBCOMMITTEE

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

UNCLASSIFIED
INTRODUCTION

Chairman Rogers, Ranking Member Cooper, and distinguished Members 

of the Committee, I am pleased to appear before you today on behalf of 

the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to discuss National Security 

Space Activities. It is an honor for me to appear alongside our 

mission partners from the Department of Defense (DoD), Mr. Douglas 

Loverro, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, Mr. 

Gil Klinger, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space and 

Intelligence, Lt General John Raymond, Commander, United States 

Strategic Command, Joint Functional Component Command for Space, and 

General William Shelton, Commander, Air Force Space Command. The 

NRO’s close relationship and continuing collaboration with our mission 

partners are vital to maintaining our Nation’s superiority in space. 

The unclassified nature of today’s hearing precludes me from 

discussing many details of NRO programs, as well as sharing some of 

our greatest successes. However, I welcome additional opportunities

to meet in another setting to discuss with you NRO capabilities, 

partnerships, and value of the NRO contributions to National Security. 

NRO Priorities

 The NRO remains committed to maintaining its stellar record of 

acquisition and program successes, while also delivering a more 

capable, resilient, and affordable future NRO architecture to respond 

to emerging threats and dynamic mission needs. Over the coming years, 

the NRO will incorporate revolutionary new technologies into our 

architecture that will provide enhanced support to the warfighter 

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while also improving the resiliency of our systems. These 

technologies are made possible in part by our investments in research 

and development, and we will continue these strong investments to 

drive enhanced future capabilities. We also continue to improve our 

relationships with our key mission partners to adapt on-orbit systems 

and capabilities to support current warfighter needs.

State of the NRO 

I would like to begin with a few words about the current state of 

the NRO. We are committed to smart acquisition investments and 

practices to ensure the continued coverage and availability of our 

vital National Security systems and we work tirelessly to continue to 

deliver these systems on time and within budget. To that end, last 

year our acquisition programs successfully delivered and launched two 

new satellites into orbit, and just last week we successfully launched 

yet another critical capability for our nation. In addition to our 

primary missions, one of our launches also carried 12 university and 

government CubeSat payloads for the NRO and the National Aeronautics 

and Space Administration (NASA). Our CubeSat program allows us to 

demonstrate new technologies at an affordable cost while also 

strengthening our ties with university Science, Technology, 

Engineering and Mathematics programs. We are on track to continue our 

launch and program successes through the remainder of the year as 

well, with two more satellite launches scheduled for later this year. 

These successful launches are a visible testament to the diligent 

efforts of our program teams who successfully acquire and deliver 

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these complex systems, and each one signifies enhanced intelligence 

capabilities for the warfighter. 

The NRO remains committed to maintaining the health of the launch 

vehicle industrial base to provide our systems with assured access to 

space. The NRO, in partnership with the Air Force, recently finalized 

a new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) acquisition strategy 

aimed at promoting competition among certified launch providers while 

also stabilizing launch cost and sustaining the industrial base. 

Consistent with the New Entrant Launch Vehicle Strategy, the NRO, Air 

Force, and NASA, are working together to evaluate new entrant launch 

vehicle capabilities. We are working with launch providers to ensure 

the new commercial capabilities being developed can provide the same 

robust levels of mission success that have been the cornerstone of our 

EELV program; we are also relying on our Air Force mission partner to 

hold a competitive acquisition for one of our launches later this 

year, provided Air Force certification is completed. We are dedicated 

to working with the Air Force, NASA, and commercial space providers to 

ensure our Nation’s launch and space industrial base remains strong 

enough to meet our mission requirements. 

The tremendous successes of our satellite programs are a 

testament to the strength of our workforce. As you know, we draw our 

personnel from across the DoD and Intelligence Community (IC), and the 

talented people of the NRO allow our significant and continued mission 

success. This year we are taking steps to develop a core NRO 

workforce to further strengthen our workforce and to provide 

continuing opportunities for growth and development to our personnel. 

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A dedicated NRO workforce will provide us with enhanced stability 

across core NRO functions and increase our ability to evolve the 

workforce in the long-term while allowing us to continue to leverage 

rotational personnel for their innovation and experience. By 

strengthening our core NRO workforce while also leveraging community 

workforce strengths, the NRO will continue to provide the Nation with 

the premier space reconnaissance capabilities for National security.

Thanks to our talented personnel, we have also made tremendous 

strides in the development and optimization of our Ground and 

Communications systems. Our Ground Enterprise continues to develop 

innovative techniques and find new ways to process mission data, 

providing an architecture that is responsive to user needs, more 

resilient in the face of projected threats, and much more efficient 

and effective in providing mission capabilities. Additionally, we 

continue to improve our network and cloud security processes and 

optimize our network infrastructure as we integrate with the IC 

Information Technology Enterprise.

In addition to developing, acquiring, launching, and operating 

the world’s most technically advanced systems, we have also sustained 

our success in optimizing our business systems. For the fifth year in 

a row, the NRO received a clean audit opinion on our financial 

statements, a truly unprecedented accomplishment within the IC. This 

positive outcome was the result of continued hard work across the NRO 

and the culmination of a diligently planned and executed effort to 

continue our effective financial management. NRO’s internal processes 

for proper funds management and accurate financial reports have been 

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validated, and we are successfully positioned to continue to sustain 

this clean audit into the future. 

SPACE PROTECTION

 The NRO fully recognizes that space is an increasingly contested 

and congested environment. While foreign nations understand our 

country’s reliance on space and seek means to deny our space 

advantages, our ability to operate in the presence of threats helps to 

deter foreign actions and maintain a strategic advantage. To that 

end, the NRO has worked jointly with the Air Force to align the NRO’s 

space protection activities with Air Force Space Command, the DoD, and 

the broader space community. The collaboration across the defense and 

intelligence communities enhances the NRO’s capability to effectively 

plan for emerging threats, and greatly strengthens the architecture to 

ensure continued operational freedom.

NRO CONTRIBUTIONS: CRITICAL TO THE FIGHT. 

Lastly, I would like to highlight the real bottom line for the 

NRO – our support to the warfighter. In addition to traditional NRO 

ISR systems and support, we provide a wide array of focused 

capabilities to help solve specific, critical ISR needs for deployed 

personnel around the world. We’ve brought dozens of innovative ISR 

solutions to the fight. These services, products, and tools directly 

contribute to the highest priority missions, to include: counterImprovised Explosive Device (IED) efforts; identifying and tracking 

High-Value Targets; and improved battlespace awareness.

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However, the most important capability we provide to the fight is 

our people – our on-site problem-solvers. We typically have about 70 

men and women deployed into harm’s way on any given day serving as 

liaison officers to units, providing technical expertise, or 

supporting those focused NRO programs. Every day, they have a direct 

and positive influence on combat operations and mission success, to 

include saving the lives of U.S. and Coalition forces. 

I’ll cover just a few highlights, and while the NRO’s greatest 

successes may not be discussed in this setting, I am proud to share 

just a small part of what we bring to the fight. At the request of 

the DoD, the NRO developed and fielded the Communications Externals 

Geo-fusion System (CEGS). One of the key capabilities of the system 

has been to cue emitter locations in near real-time to full-motionvideo operators, effectively speeding up the “find” portion of the ISR 

mission. The ability to combine CEGS geolocations with GEOINT has 

been used with great success, and has regularly contributed to 

enhanced battlefield awareness during combat operations, insurgent 

attacks, and convoy operations.

Another highly successful program has been our Tactical Defense 

Space Reconnaissance (TacDSR) program, which pursues highly-selective,

short-term, high-impact advanced research and development efforts to 

integrate NRO capabilities into military platforms, combat systems, 

and weapons for operational warfighters. TacDSR directly answers 

emerging war fighting intelligence requirements of the combatant 

commands, DoD services, agencies, joint staffs, and other tactical 

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users. Since its inception, the TacDSR program has successfully 

transitioned more than 70 percent of all TacDSR programs to DoD users.

A real strength of the NRO is our ability to fuse multiintelligence data to support warfighter intelligence needs. We have 

helped the warfighter visualize large volumes of data temporally and 

spatially, establishing patterns of life, identifying the unusual 

within a multitude of fused data sets, and integrating full motion 

video data with automated multi-intelligence tipping, cueing, and 

alerting capabilities. Our cutting-edge solutions combine GEOINT and 

SIGINT, and span the space, air, and ground operational domains to 

improve the warfighter’s common operational picture and enhance his 

effectiveness in finding, fixing, and finishing targets. 

 

CONCLUSION

The men and women of the NRO embody our core values of Integrity 

and Accountability, Teamwork Built on Respect and Diversity, and 

Mission Excellence. It is our highly skilled personnel who go above 

and beyond to execute our mission to provide “Innovative Overhead 

Intelligence Systems for National Security.” Driven by our 

extraordinary people, the NRO will continue on the path of delivering 

acquisition and operations excellence, as well as the unparalleled 

innovation that is the hallmark of our history and the foundation of 

our future. We encourage you to continue visits to the NRO, our 

mission ground stations, and satellite factories for detailed 

discussions on how our systems directly support the national security 

of the United States. 

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Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for your 

continued support of the National Reconnaissance Office and the 

opportunity to appear before you today.

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