Editor’s m

essa

Clichés, while often groanworthy, nearly always start 

as profound observation. They become trite for the very 

reason that they make sense; otherwise, they would not 

be repeated to overuse. 

Consider the well-known 'can’t see the forest for the 

trees.’ At its core is a warning that limited focus will not 

suffice; one must be able to consider the big picture in 

order to succeed.

That message resonates throughout the National 

Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends: Paradox of 

Progress” released in January 2017. The report makes 

it clear that nations must think broadly and face shared challenges together: 

“The number and complexity of issues beyond the scope of any one individual, 

community or state to address is increasing — and doing so at a seemingly faster 

pace than decades ago.”

The nations that will thrive, according to the report, are those that “invest in the 

infrastructure, knowledge and relationships that allow them to manage shock — 

whether economic, environmental, societal or cyber.”

That same thinking forms the rationale for functional management of the 

intelligence disciplines. Both individual stakeholders and the broader communities 

they form can maximize effectiveness by collaborating within a formal structure. 

That means collectively addressing challenges such as terrorism, natural disasters 

and disease outbreaks, to name but a few.

The Department of Defense established the director of the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency as the functional manager of the GEOINT enterprise in 

May 2011. That means that in addition to his role as director of NGA, Robert 

Cardillo serves as the principal advisor to the director of national intelligence 

and the secretary of defense on GEOINT performance. As designated leader of 

the discipline, he must facilitate the integration of plans, policies, programs and 

standards that unify community efforts, not just NGA’s.

This issue of NGA Pathfinder explores what it means to lead the GEOINT 

community. It’s not about bureaucracy. Functional management determines the 

degree to which our national security agencies can share information during a 

terrorist event and how effectively we can coordinate with our allies during times 

of war. It enables search-and-rescue missions and contributes to the fight against 

diseases and drug-resistant superbugs.

These are all things that NGA does — but not in a vacuum. The agency is one 

of nearly 50 members comprising the National System for Geospatial Intelligence, 

or NSG. A broader Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence, or ASG, includes the 

NSG members plus America’s closest allies, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand 

and Canada.

The main features in this issue bring to light how the NSG gains strength 

through unity. The cover story illustrates the breadth of efforts. A second feature 

explores the move toward integration and interoperability among NSG members. 

A third examines how the National Geospatial-Intelligence College, headquartered 

at NGA Campus East, endeavors to develop professionalism through community 

training and certification.

Other articles also illustrate the importance of big-picture collaboration. A 

commentary by partners in New York City discusses the interoperability of public 

utilities. Another article addresses employee collaboration to enhance professionalism. 

The issue closes out with a look at how the ASG ensures that the GEOINT 

community maintains a global view. After all, we can only overcome universal 

challenges if we have a perspective broad enough to see them clearly.

Together we will succeed.

V/r,

Jeanne Chircop

Editor

We provide GEOINT for 

our Nation's Security.

NGA Pathfinder promotes awareness and 

understanding of geospatial intelligence, and is 

published by National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency’s Office of Corporate Communications.

NGA Pathfinder is an authorized Department 

of Defense publication for members of the 

DOD. Contents of this publication are not 

necessarily the official view of, or endorsed 

by, the U.S. government, DOD or NGA. 

Articles in NGA Pathfinder may be reproduced 

in whole or in part without permission, unless 

stated otherwise. If reproduced, credit the 

author and “National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency, NGA Pathfinder magazine.” 

Reproduction of graphics, photographs and 

imagery is subject to the original copyright.

NGA Leadership

Director: Robert Cardillo

Deputy Director: Sue Gordon

OCC Leadership

Director: William Caniano

Chief News & Information: Don Kerr

Editor: Jeanne Chircop

Copy Editors: Dale Lehner

Christine Fennema

Designers: Craig Thoburn, Karen A. Ortiz

Photography: Anthony Boone, Erica Knight

and David Richards

Contact us

Send letters to the editor to 

Pathfinder@nga.mil

Telephone: 571-557-5400

DSN 547-5400

Approved for Public Release, 17-350
FEATURES

14 unity of effort: 

Creating stability despite uncertaint

22 interoperability: 

Managing the challenge of conflicting priorit

26 professionalism: 

Strengthening the workforce during rapid cha

4 Know the Eart

6 Team NG

10 Viewpoi

18 Collaborati

20 Show the W

30 Telling Our S

36 In

38 Understand th

DEPARTMENTS
4|NGA.MIL 

KNOW 

What gt 

NGA’s quest to ‘know the earth’ like ne

By Nancy M. Rapavi, Office of Corporate Communications
| Know the earth |

Pathfinde

The United States began using the U-2, 

a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, in 

1956 to collect optical imagery over the 

Soviet Union and other denied regions. 

But within a few short years, vehement 

diplomatic objections by the Soviets and 

the downing of Francis Gary Powers’ 

U-2 flight in May 1960 highlighted 

the significant risks and limitations 

associated with airborne collection over 

adversarial territory. U-2 flights over the 

Soviet Union were suspended. 

The Eisenhower administration was 

well aware of the perils and pitfalls 

of airborne collection prior to the 

Powers incident and had been working 

to harness technical innovations to 

continue acquiring critical imagery by 

more secret means. By August 1960, 

Corona, the first U.S. space-based 

reconnaissance satellite, was acquiring 

imagery of the Soviet Union, the 

Chinese mainland and other areas of 

interest to the intelligence community. 

(See related story, page. 28.)

While collection from space 

represented a leap in technological 

innovation by itself — much like 

the aircraft method used to capture 

image capsules ejected from Corona 

— the fact that later Corona variants 

were equipped with sensors capable 

of collecting stereoscopic images 

facilitated advancements in image 

science, analysis and ultimately more 

detailed and informative products.

Today, National GeospatialIntelligence Agency’s analytic 

modernization efforts are leveraging 

key advancements in sensor technology, 

image exploitation techniques and 

correspondingly, geospatial science 

disciplines to improve tradecraft 

and provide enhanced products and 

services to a growing customer base.

Among the latest tradecraft innovations 

are the object-based GEOINT approach 

and activity-based intelligence, which 

enable analysts to move well beyond 

a snapshot of time in layered analysis, 

to a narrative that can be continually 

updated from multiple sources and 

GEOINT disciplines. From bathymetry 

and geodesy to big data, innovations in 

GEOINT tradecraft are helping analysts 

'know the earth' like never before. 

James Ford, chief of NGA’s 

bathymetry branch within the 

maritime safety office, said NGA can 

perform sophisticated depth analysis 

in water of less than 20 meters — using 

multispectral imagery and radar — 

with innovative tools such as the littoral 

bathymetry toolkit and the River Eye 

Current Retrieval, or RECR.

“NGA developed these tools and is 

working on others to improve our ability 

to collect shallow water data,” Ford said.

The tools are constrained by 

environmental factors such as clouds, 

water clarity, sun angle and wave fetch, 

and don’t always meet the 'safe for 

navigation' standard, Ford said, but they 

can be used to estimate conditions in 

denied or restricted areas. 

“For uncharted areas, innovative tools 

like the LBT and RECR present methods 

that help obtain necessary information 

for missions such as route planning and 

sensor placement,” said Ford. 

Another example of tradecraft 

innovation is in the geodetic field, 

where modern geodetic survey 

techniques rely heavily on cuttingedge tradecraft. Surveying equipment, 

techniques and tradecraft are constantly 

updated in order to create more 

accurate outcomes.

Take the World Geodetic System 

1984, or WGS 84, as an example. 

The system is the Department of 

Defense standard for mapping, 

charting, positioning and navigation. 

NGA’s geodesists regularly update 

this system to ensure reference 

coordinates reflect the most recent 

data and changes to the Earth’s 

surface and center. 

“WGS 84 may sound like an old 

system, but the great thing about WGS 

84 is that it is a system of systems,” said 

James Friederich, a senior GEOINT 

officer in NGA’s Office of Geomatics. 

“Rather than one big thing, it is made 

up of pieces and parts that are basically 

interrelated to each other in some way.”

And those pieces have their own 

adjustments — from mid-term updates 

that reflect the earth’s dynamic geophysical 

process to short term updates that provide 

a daily 3 centimeter update of the position 

of the spin axis of the earth.

Friederich said that other innovations 

in the realm of geodetic survey 

equipment include systems that gather 

magnetic data to help NGA build 

models of the earth’s magnetic field. 

The results will be used by navigation 

systems in aircraft, ship and on land.

“NGA is leading the way for the DoD 

and the international scientific community 

on recognizing the potential shortfall for 

measuring the earth’s magnetic field,” 

Friederich said.

While the world of tradecraft 

innovation will always be asking for the 

“what’s next?” there is significant senior 

leadership interest when it comes to 

developing innovative approaches to 

further enhance tradecraft. 

“We are moving from a factory-like 

approach to a data-centric, customercentric and analyst-centric approach,” 

said NGA’s director of analysis, Sue 

Kalweit, as she described analytic 

modernization, or AMOD, during a 

recent NGAmeeting. “Analysts are 

working across the NGA enterprise team, 

across the enterprise, across the NSGASG [National System for Geospatial 

Intelligence and Allied System for 

Geospatial Intelligence] and industry.” 

AMOD’s way forward includes 

redefining relationships with partners 

and customers by emphasizing 

innovative approaches to analysis, 

collaboration and dissemination. 

“Don’t go at it alone,” Kalweit said.

It’s a message often echoed by NGA 

Director Robert Cardillo.

 “What got us here won’t get us 

there,” Cardillo has said many times as 

a reminder that teamwork, innovation 

and new ways of thinking are constantly 

needed to respond to a changing national 

security environment. 

With a new analytic roadmap and 

AMOD leading the way, NGA continues 

its journey toward the future.
Tea

6|NG

By Carling Uhler, Ctr., Office of Corporate Communications

Canadian Army Maj. Doug Bug

NGA SALUTE
Know a service member worthy of an 

NGA Salute? Send your suggestion to 

Pathfinder@nga.mil.

| Team NGA 

Pathfinde

Young Doug Bugeaud always believed he could 

make a mark on the world, even if he didn’t know 

exactly how or where he would do it. 

“I joined the military because I was one of those 

silly guys who came to save the world,” said the 

Canadian Army major. “You hear jokes about people 

doing that, but I wanted to make the world a better 

place for everyone who didn’t have the advantages 

that some of us do have.”

Thirty-five years later he is still helping people — 

including the American and Commonwealth partners 

he currently works alongside as one of the Canadian 

Forces intelligence liaison officers serving at the 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

He’s also seen a good amount of the world in 

the process. Born in Montreal but raised in western 

Canada, Bugeaud joined the Canadian Forces in 

1982. He has since lived 

in Cambodia and Florida, 

among other places, and 

now resides just outside 

the U.S. capital. Speaking 

from his post inside NGA’s 

Springfield, Virginia, 

campus, Bugeaud said he 

couldn’t be more honored 

by his current duty.

“We [United States and 

Canada] have a long history 

of working together very 

well. Our mindset is close 

enough that we can work 

together, quite successfully, 

to whatever the aim or 

particular mission.” said Bugeaud. “It’s really an 

honor to have been chosen to come serve here.”

Before landing at NGA, Bugeaud’s military career 

took him from infanteer to intelligence officer to 

international liaison. It also took him to the other side 

of the world. 

Bugeaud deployed to Cambodia as a mission expert, 

where he was the operations adviser. He commanded 

a group of 16 platoons of de-miners as part of an 

organization comprising of foreign military advisers 

and 15,000 Cambodians de-miners. He simultaneously 

served in senior military intelligence and operations 

roles, where he gained expertise to specialize in the 

intelligence field.

Bugeaud became an intelligence officer in 1997 

after 14 years in infantry. While stationed back in 

Ottawa, Bugeaud learned the specialized geospatial 

intelligence tradecraft. The city is home to the 

Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, where 

components provide imagery and imagery intelligence, 

and geospatial information and geomatics, to support 

Canada’s national security objectives. 

Bugeaud also deployed to U.S. Central Command 

headquarters in Florida during his military 

tenure, where he served as the Canadian Forces 

intelligence liaison officer. He continues his liaison 

duties at NGA, where he serves as the operations 

officer for the Canadian Forces liaison team and 

NGA Commonwealth partners. That requires him 

to represent the team in NGA activities that are 

operations oriented. 

“I keep Canada informed of what’s going on in the 

States and the States informed of what’s going on in 

Canada,” Bugeaud said.

Canadian Army Lt. Col. Kevin Ng, Bugeaud’s 

supervisor, described the operations officer as an asset 

to any team he joins.

“Doug Bugeaud is a well-rounded, go-to GEOINT guy, 

who is equally as comfortable leading an infantry attack 

as he is developing a strategic 

analysis model,” said Ng.

Bugeaud credits good 

teamwork and communication 

as keys to achieving success as a 

Commonwealth liaison at NGA. 

“A large part of my job is 

being a funnel — a conduit for 

information to get to the right 

person or get the right people 

talking,” said Bugeaud. “At 

NGA I’m constantly meeting 

with Commonwealth partners 

to ensure we work together on 

operational matters.”

Off the job Bugeaud has 

collaborated with a completely 

different kind of partner– his Shepherd dogs. In Canada 

he was a trainer in dog agility competitions, instructing 

and leading his dogs through timed obstacle courses. 

Now in his third tour in the United States, he enjoys 

spending time with his closest partners — his family. 

Bugeaud will celebrate his country’s sesquicentennial 

anniversary this year while serving away from his 

Canadian home. But just as he dreamed of in the days of 

his youth, he is still making a positive mark on the world.

At NGA I

constantly meeting 

with Commonwealth 

partners to ensure 

we work together on 

operational matters.“

“
EA

8|NG

I m NG

Dustin Gard

By Dale Lehner, Office of Corporate Communications
| Team NGA 

Pathfinde

Dustin Gard-Weiss brings a different perspective to 

geospatial intelligence functional management just by 

being at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Currently on a joint-duty assignment from the 

Chief of Naval Operations, Gard-Weiss is the first 

member of the National System for Geospatial 

Intelligence — NSG — to serve as associate director 

for functional management. As such, he is responsible 

for executing the functional management mission 

on behalf of the GEOINT functional manager, NGA 

Director Robert Cardillo. 

During Gard-Weiss’ years with the Navy, he 

served on the NSG Senior Management Council, the 

governing body of the NSG; the Navy GEOINT Office 

was a part of his staff. At NGA, he chairs the National 

Geospatial Intelligence Committee, or GEOCOM, and 

also directs the NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office, the 

only office at the agency devoted to supporting the 

director’s functional management responsibilities.

Changing how we think 

The NSG is evolving how it executes the mission, 

according to Gard-Weiss.

“If we just thought ‘community first’ in everything we 

did, it may not change what the outcome was; but it will 

change how we do business, how we interact with each 

other and across our GEOINT enterprise,” he said. 

Separate from Cardillo’s role as functional 

manager, NGA, as the NSG member with the deepest 

geospatial intelligence expertise, has the chance to 

play an ever-increasing leadership role within the 

enterprise — to help set GEOINT standards; develop 

tradecraft and training; and contribute to the creation 

of the systems needed for information-sharing among 

all NSG partners and beyond. 

“Ultimately I see a world where we are far more 

integrated, far more dependent upon one another,” 

said Gard-Weiss. 

Building a more cohesive and interoperable 

GEOINT enterprise will take more than new ways 

of thinking, however; it also requires member buyin, creative partnering and strong leadership. At 

Cardillo’s direction, Gard-Weiss intends to use NGA’s 

GEOINT Enterprise Office as the leadership change 

catalyst. He also stood up a partner engagement 

division within his office to look at partnerships 

specifically through a functional management lens. 

Understanding it’s not a monopol

“We have to consider that this is not just a U.S. 

government game anymore,” said Gard-Weiss.

He says the first step is to take a look at the NSG 

member relationships and make sure all needs and 

capabilities are understood and that relationships 

are true partnerships, not just a provision of goods 

and services. Understanding the capabilities that 

enterprise members bring to bear will allow a 

paradigm shift in how business is conducted. This 

understanding will enable the enterprise to “marry” 

the capabilities of one organization with the mission 

needs of another, according to Gard-Weiss. Sharing 

expertise across the community strengthens the 

enterprise and reduces duplication.

Gard-Weiss cautions that what’s needed for 

this “interdependency is the knowledge that the 

intelligence is reliable; that [it] meets the standards set 

by, and for, the enterprise.” He said analysts must have 

the same training and certifications, and a standardized 

tradecraft in place so as “to have confidence in the 

work being done across the enterprise.” 

Widening the partnership cir

The Department of Defense defines the NSG as 

including not just government, but also industry 

and academic partners; several international allies 

are considered associate members. Gard-Weiss 

believes a necessary step in strengthening the 

enterprise is to evolve these commercial, academic 

and international partnerships. 

For instance, we need to harness the innovation taking 

place in industry and apply it across the enterprise in 

ways that we have not been done before, said GardWeiss. To do that he is exploring what an enterprise-level 

relationship with industry might look like, including the 

possibility of facilitating enterprise-level licenses. 

Ultimately Gard-Weiss wants to ensure that if “one 

member is leveraging a commercial capability or 

technology” for their mission needs then a) the broader 

enterprise is aware, and b) the other enterprise members 

get to share in that capability as well. In the same vein, 

enterprise leadership needs to think holistically about 

the best investments for the enterprise.

He also supports partnering with academic 

institutions that are teaching geographic information 

systems and intelligence analysis skills at both the 

undergraduate and graduate levels.

How do we “leverage that brain power” and “how 

do we harness that time they [students] are spending 

in class?” asks Gard-Weiss. He even considers how 

“could we federate some production responsibility 

with an academic institution, where that class is 

responsible for ‘x’ in an unclassified way?” 

Next is to rethink international partnership. 

“Think about the commercial and governmental 

capabilities that are being developed around 

the world, beyond our traditional circle of 

Commonwealth partner nations,” said Gard-Weiss. 

Expanding that circle is on his to-do list.
10|NGA.MIL 

Vi

ewpoin

En

inte

conti

publi

By Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf, City of New York; and 

Mark Reichardt and George Percivall, Open Geospatial Consortium 
| VIEWPOINT |

Pathfinder

Editor's note: The views expressed in this article are those of the 

author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the intelligence community, the 

Department of Defense or the United States Government. 

Since the development of enterprise geospatial information 

systems in the 1990s, the idea of accurately depicting 

underground infrastructure has been on the minds of many 

GIS directors across the United States. New York City 

planners were among those who anticipated significant 

benefit from the integration of enterprise data.

Efforts ebbed and flowed during the early years, until the 

9/11 attack on the World Trade Center proved the need for 

integrated utility information. It took more than 10 days after 

the disaster to assemble utility data for the affected area and 

register it to the city’s base map, due to different formats 

ranging from digital maps to paper drawings. A decade later 

Hurricane Sandy reinforced that a lack of comprehensive and 

integrated infrastructure information contributed to a lessthan-full understanding of the storm’s damage.

The Open Geospatial Consortium is now working to develop 

underground infrastructure interoperability standards that will 

shape how information is organized and integrated about the 

infrastructure networks that support cities, counties and other 

municipalities across the United States and around the world. 

Expected benefits range from improvements in day-to-day 

management of street openings and construction projects, to 

more effective large-scale planning and emergency response.

Springing from a conversation between Mark Reichardt, 

OGC president, and Alan Leidner, director of the Center for 

Geospatial Innovation of the Fund for the City of New York, 

the project has grown to international proportions. Sponsors 

for the first phase of the project include the Ordnance Survey 

of Great Britain and the Singapore Land Authority in addition 

to the Fund for the City of New York, under the leadership of 

Mary McCormick, Ph.D. Project participants expect that dozens 

of cities and urban-related organizations around the world will 

follow the initiative’s progress, hopefully even contributing to it.

Early effort

Even before GIS gained widespread attention, the 

Department of City Planning led the New York City GIS 

effort in the 1980s by creating a street centerline, a parcel 

layer and a geocoding engine. In the late 1980s the city’s 

Department of Environmental Protection, which had adopted 

a computer-aided design and drafting platform, began 

building a seamless water main layer. Under Wendy Dorf’s 

management, the effort encompassed NYC’s entire 6,000-mile 

water and sewer system. In a related effort, DEP’s upstate 

sources division, which manages the city’s water supply, also 

developed a GIS system that encompassed its entire network 

of streams, reservoirs, lands and aqueducts. 

From 1995 to 1999 New York City, with funding from 

DEP, developed its photogrammetric base map and began 

registering all the GIS layers created prior to the newest, 

most accurate map. Soon thereafter DEP’s Bureau of Sewers 

embarked on an effort to create a seamless digital map of its 

sewer system in a way that would enable the water and sewer 

layers to be viewed together.

A GIS coordination office located in the NYC Department 

of Information Technology and Telecommunications, 

working with the Department of Transportation and the 

Law Department, then sought to have the city’s private 

utilities develop electric, gas, steam and telecommunications 

layers registered to the accurate base map. An agreement 

with NYC’s electric utility, based on provisions of the city’s 

franchise agreement, was close to being signed when the 

terrorist attack on the World Trade Center took place. 

9/11 effect

The 9/11 attack revealed both the necessity and risk of 

integrating infrastructure data. DEP formed an Emergency 

Mapping and Data Center to respond to the disaster, with 

Leidner at the helm and Dorf in charge of organizing a ‘deep 

infrastructure group’ whose mission was to collect, inventory 

and integrate all infrastructure information for the area 

beneath and adjoining the Trade Center complex. It took more 

than 10 days to assemble and register the data to the city’s 

base map due to its widely varying formats. The effort proved 

essential, however; it delivered critical information to the 

response community, including the location of a 22,000-gallon 

tank of compressed Freon located beneath the WTC. 

While this work revealed how important it was to have 

uniform digital data for all infrastructure layers to support 

rapid integration and analysis during a disaster, it also 

provided a rationale for infrastructure owners to lock down 

their data due to security concerns. For 15 years following 

9/11, there was no further movement in NYC to integrate 

private and public utility data. 

While NYC efforts stagnated, those at the federal level 

gained momentum. The U.S. Geological Survey, National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Department of 

Homeland Security recognized the need to identify the 

locations of critical infrastructure. The agencies collaborated 

to link infrastructure managers from across the nation 
Viewpoint

12|NGA.MIL 

through a secure computer system that provided access to 

hundreds of layers of integrated infrastructure information. 

Through an application called OneView, users could see 

relationships between different infrastructure networks 

that had never been understood before. OneView proved 

that infrastructure data from many sources could be 

standardized, integrated and used for a wide variety of 

analytical and operational support uses — all without 

compromising security.

Hurricane San

New York experienced another chapter in GIS 

development in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall 

near Atlantic City and caused the largest storm surge ever 

experienced in nearby New York harbor. Subway and 

vehicular tunnels flooded, wastewater treatment plants were 

damaged and coastal communities suffered devastating fires 

caused by electrical short-circuits as salt water came into 

contact with exposed circuitry.

Perhaps most emblematic of the disaster was the 

flooding of the East 13th Street electric substation and the 

ensuing blackout of Manhattan south of 34th Street. The 

blackout led to a series of cascading effects that included 

the failure of backup generators and the evacuation of 

the New York University Medical Center and Bellevue 

Hospital along the East River. 

Many in the New York GIS community understood that 

the lack of comprehensive and integrated infrastructure 

information had contributed to a less-than-full understanding 

of the potential damage that could be caused by a storm like 

Sandy. Impacts on public services were severe.

New solution

New York’s GIS efforts gained momentum when city 

planners reached out to the Open Geospatial Consortium 

in 2014 to develop an infrastructure data development and 

integration program for the city. OGC serves as a global 

forum for developers and users of spatial data information 

and services, and develops open international standards 

for geospatial interoperability. With the help of OGC’s 

chief technology officer, George Percivall, and a $25,000 

grant from the Fund for the City of New York, the OGC 

Underground Infrastructure Interoperability Standards 

Project was launched. 

Percivall and his OGC colleagues quickly identified 

several existing and complementary standards and 

compliant implementations that could meet New York’s 

needs. OGC standards for aboveground infrastructure were 

already mature and operational; however, the city’s need for 

underground infrastructure maps and models would require 

development of new standards. 

Abo

OGC members had previously applied the OGC CityGML 

standards to model aboveground infrastructure. For the 

new project, a team from Germany’s Technische Universität 

München used a combination of software to create and 

publish a virtual 3-D model of New York City. 

The city model is based exclusively on open data from the 

official Open Data Portal of NYC. Twenty-six different datasets, 

totaling four million 2-D and 2.5-D geospatial data objects, were 

integrated to create the 3-D model via a fully automated process 

developed by TUM. The total data size is around 1.6 terabytes of 

XML data -- around 80 gigabytes compressed — including more 

than 1 million building models, 150,000 streets and more than 

860,000 land parcels.

Bel

While OGC standards are in operational use for aboveground 

mapping and modeling, there are technical and community 

challenges involved in setting consensus standards for 

belowground modeling. Several OGC working groups are 

considering how to address belowground models by extending 

existing standards such as OGC CityGML and OGC land and 

infrastructure standards. 

Research both within the OGC context and more broadly is 

developing approaches to underground infrastructure modeling. 

The OGC Underground Infrastructure Concept Development 

Study is the first step in a multi-part OGC initiative to address 

the NYC underground infrastructure needs. The CDS will help 

develop and document an in-depth understanding of all the 

components necessary to enable standards-based infrastructure 

data interoperability in an underground environment. 

During 2016, OGC coordination enabled professors 

from the Delft University of Technology — the largest and 

oldest Dutch public technological university — to conduct 

research in conjunction with Columbia University on the 

NYC underground requirements. At the suggestion of a 

Columbia professor, future plans call for the addition of data for 

underground soil conditions, including bedrock, soil type, water 

table, moisture levels and foundations. 

Leveraging innovation

The CDS focuses on underground interoperability 

requirements in the NYC urban landscape, but its research 

can extend to broader regions. Because of commonalities with 

efforts planned by the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and 

the Singapore Land Authority, those entities joined the Fund for 

New York City in sponsoring the CDS phase.

To support the CDS, OGC recently released a request for 

Information; responses will inform the final CDS report, 

which will include a full set of use cases, architectural 

options, promising technologies and other relevant 
Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf are veterans of the GIS response 

to 9/11 and have been engaged in GIS programs in New York City 

for more than two decades. Leidner serves as director of the Center 

for Geospatial Innovation of the Fund for the City of New York; Dorf is 

currently director of New York Geospatial Catalysts. 

Mark Reichardt and George Percivall, of the Open Geospatial 

Consortium, are senior leaders of the OGC Innovation Program, 

which uses a multistep collaborative methodology for interoperability 

initiatives. Reichardt serves as OGC president; Percivall is the 

consortium’s chief technology officer. To comment on the collaboration 

between NYC and OGC, contact Leidner at aleidner@fcny.org or 

Reichardt at mreichardt@opengeospatial.org.

Have an idea for a GEOINT or 

national security Viewpoint contribution? Send 

your query to Pathfinder@nga.mil. 

| VIEWPOINT |

Pathfinder 2017

information. The CDS will in turn define the scope 

for subsequent steps of a multi-phase underground 

infrastructure interoperability initiative able to develop 

and demonstrate the value of common information 

standards and practices. 

For both NYC and OGC, the ultimate goal of the effort is 

to ensure that cities, states and municipalities have reliable 

and integrated geospatial data, standardized information and 

practices they need to most safely ensure continuity of services 

for their customers.
F

eatu

14|NGA.MIL 

A “paradox of progress” is how the National Intelligence Council describes the future in 

its most recent “Global Trends” report. On one hand, access to new technologies and global 

connectivity can be disruptive; hardening and widening divisions of status, culture and belief. 

On the other, such progress can improve living standards, generate new knowledge, promote 

peace-building and enable cooperation to address transboundary and global challenges.

Creating stability despit

By M. Karen Walker, Ctr., GEOINT Enterprise Office

UNITY OF EFFO
| Feature |

Pathfinder

NIC publishes a global trends report every four years to 

help intelligence professionals and national decision-makers 

understand the currents shaping the global landscape in the 

distant future; this edition forecasts trends through 2035. In 

stressing the dichotomy of progress, the 2017 report helps 

intelligence professionals and national decision-makers 

anticipate the most likely implications for specific disciplines 

and missions, including geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. 

Consider for instance how commercial sensor, satellite and 

information technologies have led to exponential growth of 

georeferenced data that anyone with a smart phone can access 

to keep up with events and ease everyday tasks. The Center for 

Global Enterprise estimates that about 3.4 billion people around 

the world use the internet and 2.2 billion people use social media. 

Ninety percent of the digital data currently available has been 

produced in the past two years; the total volume of digital data is 

projected to be 50 times bigger in 2020 than what existed in 2010.

While more data leads to deeper insight, this explosive 

growth makes it harder for intelligence professionals to know 

which data stream to mine first and how to extract the most 

valuable nuggets of information. To overcome the paradox of 

big data, the GEOINT community has made interoperability a 

priority, i.e., empowering intelligence professionals to readily 

discover and share GEOINT content from all sources for use by 

common exploitation and analytic tools.

Automating collection and exploitation tasks is an impetus 

for interoperability, according to National GeospatialIntelligence Agency Director and GEOINT Functional Manager 

Robert Cardillo.

“The solution to key intelligence questions lies in maximizing the 

integration of all available GEOINT sources. Automation enables 

our analysts to be interpreters, to find the meaning behind the 

data,” he said. 

Automation is an efficiency that is equally important when 

data is scarce. Imagine the difficulty of monitoring threats 

and hot spots in an expansive region such as sub-Saharan 

Africa without automation and its capacity for broad-based 

change detection. 

“I’d much rather our analysts spend energy on developing 

mental models of Boko Haram, sectarianism and resource scarcity, 

rather than rescanning imagery every day,” Cardillo said. 

Additionally, standardizing facets of interoperability — i.e., 

developing, applying and enforcing common standards across 

the entire community — creates an open and dynamically 

updating, multi-domain architecture capable of delivering 

foundational geospatial content to all authorized users and 

thus facilitates the transformation of geospatial information 

into valuable intelligence.

Diversity of contributor

The widespread availability of geospatial information 

and analytics has created new opportunities not only 

within industry, but also for educators, journalists, policy 

advocates and practitioners. The application of geospatial 

technology to uncover and prevent human rights violations 

is one example. 

•	Framwork  The National System for Geosp

Intelligence, or NSG, is the operating framework for collaboration

among GEOINT producers, consumers and influencer

•	Wha i does  The NSG advances the GEOINT fu

facilitating community strategy, policy, governance, standards 

and requirements to ensure responsive, integrated national 

security, humanitarian and related civilian security capabilities.

•	Memers  GEOINT components of the intel

community, military departments, joint staff, combatant 

commands and other U.S. government departments and

agencies form the core of the NSG and are referred to as the 

NSG community. 

•	Wider ommunity  NSG members regularly co

with America’s closest allies — Great Britain, Australia, N

Zealand and Canada — in an operational structure known as 

the Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence. At times, the N

community may form partnerships with additional organizations 

to accomplish a specific GEOINT mission. These broad

community partnerships constitute the GEOINT enterpri

•	Leaership  By executive order implemented

Department of Defense and intelligence community directives

the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agenc

serves as the functional manager for the GEOINT disciplin

this responsibility is distinct from leadership of NGA.

•	Ho itworks  NSG work is conducted throu

National GEOINT Committee, or GEOCOM, wh

supported by NGA and chaired by an associate director

for functional management. Through the GEOCOM, 

members establish enterprise priorities, goals, objectives 

and performance measures. They identify best practices and 

areas for improvement, and develop integrated approaches 

for advancing the GEOINT mission. They also marshal a

invest resources to optimize the value returned to community 

stakeholders. Senior members of the GEOCOM form 

highest decision-making body for the NSG — the NSG Senior 

Management Council

A structure for Collab

National GEOINT Committee NGA Director Robert Cardillo (right) 

serves as functional manager for the GEOINT enterprise. Dustin 

Gard-Weiss (left), director of the NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office, 

supports Cardillo by serving as both associate director for functional 

management and chair of the GEOCOM.
Feature

16|NGA.MIL 

“Nearly ubiquitous internet-enabled 

mobile telephony with cameras 

means that bystanders and victims of 

human rights abuses can collect and 

disseminate information and images 

in real-time,” according to a panel of 

experts who spoke at a November 2016 

symposium convened by Harvard 

Kenedy School’s Carr Center for 

Human Rights Policy.

 The challenge, as reported in the 

event’s conference report, “Human 

Rights & Technology in the 21st Century,” 

is finding a way to authenticate and 

manage the vast amounts of data 

available from different sources.

Welcoming new participants, 

especially from the open-source 

community, into the GEOINT 

enterprise is not without risk for 

those charged with advising decisionmakers on courses of action. Whereas 

each contributor offers a particular 

and unique account of an event, 

decision-makers need a complete 

story that hangs together and rings 

true. Collaborative storytelling — the 

generation of dynamic mission threads 

that keep decisions actionable — runs 

on trust and confidence, not only in 

the storytellers themselves, but also 

in the sensor models, the processingbased algorithms, and the tools and 

techniques used to analyze the data. 

“Collaborative if not simultaneous 

editing and review of products from 

multiple authors, each bringing their 

unique perspective and expertise to 

the problem, enriches the intelligence 

we produce,” said Joseph Fontanella, 

Ph.D., co-chair of the National 

GEOINT Committee’s analysis and 

production subcommittee. 

NSG Mission Manager Jeffrey Reinier 

likewise sees a connection between 

professionalization and trusted products.

 “Policymakers are less concerned 

about whose seal is on a product, so long 

as that product is accurate,” said Reinier. 

“The goal is to move the right data to the 

right people at the right time, regardless 

of whether that product comes from a 

theater or national partner.”

As more GEOINT professionals 

train and perform to a core set of 

standards, the greater the potential for 

shared use. That is why the GEOINT 

community lists interoperability and 

professionalization among its top three 

priorities: Interoperability aids data 

discovery; professionalization ensures 

its proper and authoritative use.

“Enterprise-wide professionalization 

and certification programs better 

enable us to share production 

workloads and focus collection and 

exploitation during surge and crisis 

operations,” said Fontanella.

Certification is a formal, standardsbased process of training and testing 

that enables people to demonstrate 

competencies in GEOINT tradecraft, 

according to Collin Agee, co-chair of 

the National GEOINT Committee’s 

training and professional 

development subcommittee.

“Certification generates selfconfidence, confidence in others, and 

confidence in community products, 

ensuring that GEOINT professionals 

keep pace with state-of-the art tools and 

tradecraft,” said Agee.

Unity of effor

The implications of an expanding 

GEOINT enterprise, as measured by 

the diversity of its sources, the plurality 

of its contributors and the reach of its 

influence, fit the “paradox of progress” 

described in the “Global Trends” report. 

It is reasonable to ponder whether the 

GEOINT community should heed the 

report authors’ warning of polarization 

and hardening divides that often occur 

during periods of rapid expansion. 

NSG members have considered 

this question and affirmed their 

commitment to establishing a unified 

GEOINT enterprise. 

The NSG statement of principles, 

issued in 2016, conveys what it 

means to be a community member: 

to create an environment of trust and 

accountability; to partner strategically 

to advance the enterprise; and to use 

a common framework that develops 

actionable needs.

“Members of the GEOINT enterprise 

are committed to understanding 

and embracing each other’s unique 

capabilities and contributions,” said 

Dustin Gard-Weiss, associate director 

for functional management and director 

of the NGA GEOINT Enterprise 

Office. “We find strength in community 

— working toward an interoperable 

enterprise in which differing mission 

areas and interests are fully integrated.”

Unity of effort completes the triad 

of GEOINT community priorities. 

Compared with interoperability 

and professionalization, unity of 

effort best expresses the functional 

manager’s responsibility to sustain a 

cohesive community through a period 

of rapid expansion.

Michael Hayden, former director 

of both the Central Intelligence 

Agency and National Security Agency, 

discussed unity of effort in May 2011 

testimony delivered before the Senate 

Homeland Security and Governmental 

Affairs committee. 

In contributing to the committee 

members’ assessment of post-9/11 

intelligence reform, Hayden said, 

“Congress chose ... to recalibrate for 

the intelligence community the critical 

balance that any complex organization 

needs: the balance between freedom of 

action for the parts and the unity of effort 

for the whole. Too little autonomy for 

the parts leads to inaction, inflexibility, 

hesitation and lost opportunities. 

Too little unity of effort means that 

individual excellence is not synchronized, 

harmonized, exploited or leveraged.”

Finding and sustaining that balance 

is no small feat. Gard-Weiss believes 

that it begins with a change in attitude.

“Instead of ledgering what we as 

individuals spend and receive in return, 

unity of effort takes a community-first 

stance,” he said.

Understanding of need

Achieving unity of effort requires an 

understanding of members’ needs and 

unique capabilities, according to GardWeiss. Also needed are: synchronized 

mission management to efficiently 

apply community contributions, 

resources and activities; repeatable 

metrics to assess performance; and 

a network of open, collaborative 
| Feature |

Pathfinder

partnerships. Each of these aims advances unity of effort 

by changing the conversation with community members 

and promoting a change in perspective.

As GEOINT functional manager, Cardillo recently 

issued a statement of GEOINT needs intended to change 

the conversation about current and future capabilities.

“The statement is an initial attempt to capture and 

represent needs holistically, as an enterprise, from 

a mission perspective,” said Chris Sullivan, chief of 

the Future Needs branch within the NGA GEOINT 

Enterprise Office. Sullivan led many of the community 

engagements that resulted in the composite list. 

Within the list, integration, collection, characterization, 

automation and anticipatory analysis figure prominently 

in how enterprise members convey high-confidence, 

anticipatory intelligence to their partners and customers. 

Also at stake are remote-sensing architecture decisions, 

integration of commercial and foreign partners’ data, and 

advanced analytics in enterprise capabilities. Paramount 

is the ability to outmaneuver foreign adversaries.

“It’s about putting aside your personal links to the 

mission that you are working, to think about the mission 

of the whole organization or even the whole enterprise,” 

said Zoë Jenkins, a senior analyst with the Australian 

Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation. 

Commitment to chang

Reflecting on the “Global Trends” report, Gard-Weiss 

said that “the things we anticipated four or five years ago 

are coming to fruition in ways we did not expect -- and 

requiring us to work together in different ways.” 

Strategic partnerships pool and diffuse knowledge, 

with cascading benefits for members of the enterprise. 

They produce results beyond what any member can 

achieve on its own. Functional management provides 

the authorities and structures to change the space in 

which individual agencies and analysts perform, to 

work seamlessly with partners inside and outside of 

government, at home and abroad. With this change in 

perspective, NSG members, in partnership with key 

international partners, will create, curate and produce 

more customized and anticipatory intelligence. 

Even with a broadened, community-first perspective, 

organizational and policy limitations remain, especially 

when managing the mission across and between GEOINT 

data environments and organizational boundaries. 

Enterprise members are working to overcome these 

limitations by integrating activities and data with others 

within the defense and intelligence communities, and 

international, academic and industry partners.

GEOINT community members are committed to 

understanding and embracing each other’s unique 

capabilities and contributions. Together, they are 

demonstrating how to define problems, invest resources, 

execute missions and address challenges as an enterprise.

Demo

the capa

in

The Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment,

government-industry partnership, is dedicated 

to enabling an enterprise culture of information 

sharing. MACE partnerships demonstrate glob

interest in the assessment of commercial and opensource geospatial data and analytics.

MACE evolved from a communitywi

conversation about the capabilities of new 

commercial small-sat constellations and their 

potential for the Intelligence Surveillance and

Reconnaissance system of systems. Catalytic

funding from NGA, through its GEOINT enterpr

investment program, has enabled MACE 

conduct a series of analytic exercises, known as 

sprints, to develop an initial concept of operations 

for the GEOINT community. Private indus

conducts the sprints, with government sponsors 

including NGA, the National Reconnaissanc

Office, the Defense Advanced Research 

Development Agency, Department of Homel

Security and the U.S. Army, as well a

Commonwealth partners and other foreign allies.

Four sprints conducted in 2016 addressed

humanitarian assistance needs and scenarios 

involving the monitoring of adversaries’ mobile 

systems. Each sprint layered in new sources and

phenomenologies, beginning with commercial 

electro-optical imagery and automatic 

identification systems, and later encompassing 

commercial synthetic aperture radar and 

hyperspectral imagery.

“MACE demonstrates that the GEOINT enter

has the capacity to innovate, and the means to 

organically create a suite of capabilities that 

holistically address a mission-related need,” 

said Joseph Rouge, MACE champion 

co-chair of the National GEOINT Committee

collection subcommittee.

The sprints enabled geospatial analysts to test, 

select and execute the most effective collection and 

exploitation strategy for enduring missions. They 

also addressed policy issues, such as privacy and 

operational security, and enabled multinational 

and industry partnering through innovative 

contracting. Collectively the sprints facilitated the 

development of a commercial GEOINT concept 

operation for the enterprise.
18|NGA.MIL 

Collaboration

throughout the intelligence community, 

not just within NGA. 

Talks, workshops and mentorin

NPN organizes a range of events and 

programs for the benefit of its members. 

Initiatives include NGA Education and 

Development (NED) Talks, fashioned 

after the private-sector TED Talks, 

and NED Books, which are speakerled discussions around professional 

development books that group leaders 

identify as being of potential interest 

and benefit to NPN members.

When possible, NPN members plan 

activities to coincide with other events. 

For instance, in support of Women’s 

History Month in March, the group 

hosted a NED Books session focusing 

on the book “Presence: Bringing 

Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest 

Challenges,” by Amy Cuddy. With a 

panel of speakers to lead the discussion, 

the session was open to the entire 

workforce, not just to NPN members. 

NPN hosts an annual Interagency 

Mentoring and Collaboration 

Workshop as its flagship event. This 

year’s IMCW was held in January 

in honor of National Mentoring 

Month. The event featured a series 

of speed-mentoring sessions to spark 

mentoring partnerships.

Another element new to IMCW in 

2017 has been the participation of other 

NGA professional organizations and 

affinity groups. At the direction of its 

chairman, Britany L. Reid, NPN offered 

each of these organizations a station at 

the event where their representatives 

could meet with workshop attendees, 

distribute brochures and other materials, 

and discuss the services and benefits 

they offer. In exchange, the participating 

groups informed their members of the 

partnership and promoted the work 

to them. This arrangement benefitted 

all entities involved by offering 

them exposure to a larger network 

of prospective members, and IMCW 

attendees learned about services and 

opportunities available to them via a 

variety of NGA organizations.

Broader collaborati

The mentoring workshop is but 

one of many forums through which 

individuals, offices, organizations 

and agencies can build collaboration 

capital in the IC. Another is the 

annual IC Collaboration Summit 

that took place at NGA Campus East 

in March. This exchange “for the 

community, by the community,” as it 

was promoted, is part of a grassroots 

movement to encourage and support 

collaboration across the IC enterprise. 

The annual summit focuses on tools, 

methods and best practices across the 

community. Personnel participate from 

agencies such as the Defense Intelligence 

Agency, National Security Agency and 

NGA. Many members of the NPN 

consider it a natural extension of their 

NGA-centric professional development to 

participate in the wider community event. 

NGA employees who participate in 

either IC-wide or NPN-focused events 

and programs believe they profit from 

the professional partnerships they 

cultivate by doing so. By networking, 

exchanging information, sharing best 

practices and supporting one another’s 

initiatives, they are amassing a store of 

rich knowledge and priceless support 

for their future success.

Exchangng a weal

the road t

By Marlene Weeks, NGA Professionals Network, Communications Team

Collaboration is the new ‘currency’ of 

our business, both within the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency 

and the larger National System for 

Geospatial Intelligence. It requires an 

initial investment of time, energy and 

expertise, but those who collaborate 

with colleagues realize a valuable 

return. Partners enjoy the benefits 

of shared knowledge, resources and 

networks; improved efficiency; and 

even economy of scale.

At NGA, one group that banks 

on building positive relationships 

is the NGA Professionals Network, 

an organization that for more than 

13 years has provided professional 

development, networking and 

mentoring opportunities for the 

agency’s workforce. The intrinsic 

value of the group is that it was 

formed and continues to be managed 

by employees to serve other 

employees and each other in the bid 

for greater professionalism.

NPN’s membership comprises 

a diverse group of more than 1,000 

employees from across NGA. whose 

members voluntarily commit to 

developing and demonstrating 

leadership skills. They work to improve 

the careers and professional experience 

of the NGA workforce by promoting 

a full spectrum of horizontal and 

vertical networking opportunities and 

strengthening organizational ties to 

mission. The organization serves as 

a forum in which to voice concerns, 

exchange ideas and address workplace 

issues. Above all, the NPN provides 

a vehicle for increasing collaboration 

and cohesion by building professional 

relationships with colleagues 
| Collaboration |

Pathfinder

Collaboration is the new 

‘currency’ of our business, 

both within the National

Geospatial-Intelligenc

Agency and the larger

National System fo

Geospatial Intelligence.

“
20|NGA.MIL 

Show the way

“Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned” 

published by The Institute for National 

Strategic Studies. 

Flying the missio

Chris Ring, a current National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency employee, 

served in the Somalian humanitarian 

aid effort and provided mission impact 

as a C-130 flight navigator in the U.S. 

Marine Corps. Twenty-five years later 

he still emphasizes the essential role 

that aeronautical products produced 

by NGA’s predecessor agencies 

played in ensuring aviation safety and 

mission accomplishment. 

known as Operation Restore Hope, due 

largely to regional instability that limited 

success of the humanitarian efforts. This 

phase provided direct military support 

to ensure that a secure environment 

existed for the safe distribution of 

incoming aid. Once Operation Restore 

Hope established a suitable framework 

for secure operations, the mission 

transitioned to a more permanent 

peacekeeping force, coined UNOSOM II. 

The United States, in support of the 

U.N., sent troops to assist relief efforts 

during each phase of the mission. Those 

efforts are summarized by Kenneth 

Allard in the government-sponsored 

The world watched in dismay as 

tragedy mounted in Somalia in 1992. 

Lacking any effective centralized 

government and plagued by drought 

and territorial chaos among clans and 

various warlord-controlled factions, 

Somalia faced a dire situation marked 

by starvation, violence and death. 

As the death toll increased, the 

international community responded by 

forming the United Nations Operation 

in Somalia, or UNOSOM, to provide 

humanitarian aid and help pacify 

tensions in the region. UNOSOM created 

a united task force six months later to 

spearhead a second phase of action, 

NGA shows the w

Navigating t

th

By Melanie Pittaluga, Aeronautical Navigation Office
Pathfinder 2017

| Show The Way 

National Imagery and Mapping Agency 

in 1996 and later become NGA in 2004. 

In Somalia, due to the specific 

mission needs of the U.N. operation, 

the uncontrolled nature of the 

airspace and the predominant use 

of dirt runways, Ring relied on a 

regionally specific loose-leaf booklet 

for navigation. This specialized 

FLIP product provided airfield data, 

visual landing procedures for softsurface airstrips and special handling 

procedures for position reporting in 

uncontrolled airspace.

 “While flying 14-plus hour missions 

in uncontrolled airspace, the looseleaf product was our only lifeline for 

navigating from point to point and 

ensuring collision avoidance, where 

aircraft separation was accomplished via 

inter-plane radio coordination between 

hundreds of flights daily,” Ring said. 

Ring recalls one specific mission 

made possible by this DMA product 

during his second deployment. A 

U.S Air Force AC-130 gunship was 

conducting weapon-systems testing off 

the coast of Somalia during Operation 

Restore Hope. A malfunction caused 

an explosion and uncontrollable fire 

during flight, which caused the aircraft 

to crash into the Indian Ocean one mile 

off the shore. Fourteen crew members 

were onboard the AC-130; six survived 

the crash, seven tragically died, and 

one went missing. 

The crash prompted a four-day 

search-and-rescue mission for the 

missing pilot. Ring and his unit took 

rotations flying search patterns during 

daylight hours, scanning the area in 

what ultimately proved an unsuccessful 

attempt to recover the airman.

“The search was facilitated by the 

loose-leaf booklet,” said Ring. “It 

was the sole source of information to 

navigate safely while conducting this, 

or any other, mission.” 

Supporting the flyer

By 1999, nearly six years after 

deploying to Africa, Ring was 

employed by NIMA. He was assigned 

to the very office that had created the 

loose-leaf FLIP products he had relied 

Ring deployed three times as a flight 

navigator during the Somalian crisis, 

twice during Operation Restore Hope 

and once under UNOSOM II. Stationed 

in Mombasa, Kenya, Ring and his 

crew flew daily missions to deliver 

humanitarian aid and provide logistics 

support to the military operations. 

Due to lack of infrastructure and 

governmental oversight, positive air 

traffic control and coordination were 

extremely limited. 

The only area in Somalia that had any 

form of controlled airspace, according 

to Ring, was the immediate airport 

environment surrounding Mogadishu, 

which was managed by U.S. Air Force air 

traffic controllers. Most relief sorties were 

conducted in the uncontrolled airspace 

of the Mogadishu Flight Information 

Region, however; roughly encompassing 

the territorial boundaries of Somalia. 

The advanced flight management 

systems and global positioning system 

technologies of today were not widely 

implemented in Department of Defense 

aircraft at that time; aerial navigation 

rested solely on flight navigators like 

Ring, who used flight information 

publication — FLIP — products 

provided by the Defense Mapping 

Agency. FLIP products support all 

phases of flight, from mission planning 

to en-route operations, and are updated 

routinely to ensure accuracy. DMA was 

one of the agencies that would form the 

upon so heavily during Operation 

Restore Hope and UNOSOM II. With 

a deep appreciation for how NGA 

aeronautical products facilitate mission 

accomplishment, even in the most 

uncertain of circumstances, Ring has 

been able to develop deeper subjectmatter expertise in the processes and 

technology that keep American and 

allied aircrews aware and safe in flight. 

He is now a branch chief in the NGA 

aero navigation office.

“It has been an incredible experience 

understanding the process our agency 

uses for taking even sparse source 

[content] from host nations and making 

sure that the information is validated and 

safe for our aircrews to fly worldwide, 

even in the most remote locations,” 

said Ring. “It is also remarkable to 

watch as we streamline workflows by 

striving to modernize technology and 

develop coproduction efforts during this 

transition from legacy paper products to 

a data-centric environment.” 

The aero office will continue to focus 

on digital data into the future. Its 

team members are moving forward 

in finding ever better ways to provide 

NGA customers with missioncritical digital products and services. 

One example is the NGA aero app, 

according to Ring. In this app, an 

electronic 'flight bag' provides FLIP 

and can be displayed on a portable 

tablet. The app consolidates nearly 120 

pounds of paper products into digital 

format and also allows for increased 

situational awareness and improved 

safety of navigation.

Ring is keenly aware that his 

career span reflects the range and 

development of NGA’s aeronautical 

safety offerings. From paper FLIP for 

navigating the skies over Africa to 

an electronic flight bag app, NGA’s 

aeronautical products, services and 

geospatial intelligence ensure that 

each aircrew, anywhere in the world, 

is equipped with the tools necessary 

for mission success. And who could 

be better to help lead the continued 

development of those tools than a 

former flight navigator who has relied 

on them himself?
F

eatu

22|NGA.MIL 

Intero

Managing the challenge of confl

By Chris Sullivan, NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office
| Feature |

Pathfinder

At every given moment on every given day, America’s 

geospatial intelligence officers are on the lookout for anything 

in the world that might have the potential to affect our 

national security. While daunting, the task is made doable by 

collaboration through the U.S. government's National System 

for Geospatial Intelligence and its member status with Allied 

partners in the Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence.

Missions provide a focal point and common reference for 

members of these communities to assess GEOINT needs. 

Geopolitics in the South China Sea is one example. This 

region is characterized by complex interactions between 

competing national interests, and physical and human 

geographies. The extensive, interrelated mission needs of the 

entire community must be understood to meet geopolitical 

and defense requirements across the region.

Concurrently, the community must maintain awareness 

of additional mission needs across the globe. Chief among 

them is monitoring the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq 

and Syria, and watching Russia’s posture in Crimea. Also 

imperative is keeping an eye on humanitarian assistance in 

sub-Saharan West Africa and monitoring nuclear programs, 

including the detection of unsanctioned and illicit nuclear 

activities. Overarching is the requirement to stay current 

on adversaries’ military doctrines and their capability to 

develop and launch theater ballistic missiles.

Collectively, these global GEOINT needs drive enterprise 

integration, relating directly to community members’ mission 

readiness and collective response, and how the GEOINT 

enterprise meaningfully affects national security decisions.

Whereas mission needs are primary, they can also be 

unconstrained. Community members must make value 

trades—i.e., ranking requirements for precision and 

resolution, range of coverage, frequency of collections, etc.

and mitigate risks that accompany the procurement of any 

large-scale, complex system. 

“Eventually, we have to constrain user needs into 

affordable and technically feasible requirements," said Jeff 

Coleman, co-chair of the NSG future needs working group. 

“Our challenge is collecting and validating specific needs 

from our enterprise to answer our customers’ toughest 

intel challenges, and then translating those needs into into 

required capabilites that acquisition agents can build to.”

The community’s move toward an open content paradigm 

adds an additional dimension to the user needs imperative. 

This paradigm entails the integration of georeferenced 

content from open and government-owned platforms, the 

latter including but not limited to the exquisite National 

Technical Means, or NTM, array. 

Moreover, the integration occurs continuously in near real 

time, as processing and exploitation tools chew through data 

gathered throughout the day, every day of the year, across 

the spectrum of sensors. Community-wide adoption of the 

open content paradigm will generate GEOINT holdings that 

are current, dense, diverse, discoverable and high quality, 

available through common access and shared use. 

"Rather than imaging a relatively small percentage of the 

earth each day, we need to think about ways to search and 

monitor all of it every day to identify changes in normal 

patters," said Andy Marotta, deputy division chief for GEOINT 

futures within the NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office. 

Advanced analytics, such as structured observation 

management and object-based production, change how we 

measure GEOINT’s value. 

“Once change is detected, we focus on those sources and 

analytics that will most effectively and efficiently track, 

characterize and identify our most critical intelligence 

needs,” Marotta said. 

Transforming

Transforming GEOINT into an integrated and persistent 

enterprise is among the GEOINT functional manager’s most 

important roles. Advancements in technology and tradecraft 

put this transformation within reach. Positive changes are 

benefitting the community in the immediate term even while 

it plans for the longer haul.

Today’s means and mission

The GEOINT enterprise already has the technological 

means to create a more integrated architecture of 

interdependent government and private sector systems.

“Our industry partners’ innovations and leadership help NGA 

and other members of the enterprise integrate and expand 

multilayer capabilities,” said NGA Director Robert Cardillo, 

who serves as function manager of the GEOINT enterprise.

These capabilities include the exquisite NTM platform; 

commercial satellites, including small sats; and other airborne, 

ground-based and open sources. The digital revolution in 

data plays an integrative role as well, according to the U.S. 

Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s “2016 State of GEOINT 

Report.” Collecting geographic source data on a nearly 

anytime, anywhere basis involves much more than highly 

capable overhead systems, according to the report’s authors; 

it builds on many years of cartographic work that produces 

state-of-the-art geospatial data for maps and charts. 

Technological advances are critical but insufficient to achieve 

persistence, which Cardillo defines as a change in mindset. 

“Ubiquitous collection and common access allows us to go 

wherever the data exist; the change in mindset allows us to 

apply data wherever the mission demands,” he said.

When analysts tackle an intelligence problem, their aim 

is to combine sources and methods in the best possible way 

to create insight and understanding for decision-makers. 

Because threats are dynamic and complex, and because 

those who want to do harm are agile and unpredictable, 

intelligence products can no longer be considered finished.

“We are shattering the boundary conditions that have 

always separated tasking, processing, exploitation and 

dissemination” said Marotta. 

The interplay of means and mission is made productive 

through continuous feedback, collaboration and integration 
Feature

24|NGA.MIL 

among sensors, automated processors, advanced analytics 

and analytic models, according to Marotta. 

Architecture for the f

Building this self-organizing, highly interdependent 

GEOINT enterprise takes a community-wide effort. 

“Enterprise members are changing how they think 

about future capabilities,” said Dustin Gard-Weiss, 

associate director for functional management and 

director of the NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office. “We 

envision a systems-of-systems architecture that emerges 

whole and integrated, with interoperability designed 

in, so that decision-makers receive a complete analytic 

picture with sufficient time to formulate a response and 

shift assets to execute the mission.”

A deeper understanding of GEOINT needs and future capability 

requirements drives this endeavor. “Needs are the foundation 

upon which all capabilities are built,” said Gard-Weiss.

Needs frame operational capabilities traceable to 

an organization’s unique missions and functions, he 

added. A need is a capability required to meet a gap in an 

organization’s current or future capabilities; a requirement 

is a validated need. Think of the distinction this way: To go 

about your daily business productively, you need to tell time. 

Wearing a watch meets that need; the features you value in a 

watch are the requirements. 

The conversation about needs is broadly scoped; it has evolved 

from finely framed collection-driven requirements to consider 

the enterprise-wide capabilities that producers, users and 

enablers of GEOINT depend upon to carry out their missions. 

“If we start with needs, we have confidence that we’re 

building the right system; layering in community-validated 

requirements ensures we build the system right,” said Jim 

McMahon, chief of the GEOINT futures division within the 

NGA GEOINT Enterprise Office.

With this aim of building the right systems, community 

members have come together to identify gaps, develop 

solutions, and understand the pros and cons of system 

architectures while they’re still on the drawing table. 

This effort places needs at the forefront of capabilities 

development and programming, to capture, validate and 

prioritize needs from an enterprise perspective.

Articulating Mission N

Just as building the right system begins with needs, 

community members trace needs back to their unique 

missions which together advance national intelligence and 

military strategies.

“If we don’t capture needs correctly, then there are multiple 

missions that won’t be satisfied” said McMahon.

The GEOINT community’s overarching needs are 

summarized in a new statement of needs document issued in 

March by Cardillo and his functional management team. The 

statement describes the role of GEOINT in solving the most 

vexing intelligence problems, with an expansive view of 

potential solutions and a trajectory to develop and leverage 

capabilities as an enterprise. 

The statement represents a community action agenda; 

community members shaped it through a series of 

engagements led by Cardillo’s functional management team. 

The statement is intentionally unclassified in order to reach 

a wide audience across industry, academia, foreign partners, 

and of course the entire NSG. 

Much as the NSG Strategy directs community effort 

toward three overarching priorities deemed most critical to 

building a unified enterprise, the new statement of needs 

focuses attention on those needs that must be met in order to 

convey anticipatory intelligence with high confidence. 

“The statement captures what’s at stake in making remotesensing architecture decisions, integrating commercial and 

foreign partners’ data and advanced analytics in enterprise 

capabilities; and outmaneuvering our adversaries,” said 

Gard-Weiss. “As the enterprise expands, new members of 

the GEOINT community can use it to forge more strategic 

and productive partnerships.”

Setting an agenda through the NSG Strategy and articulating 

a common set of needs are only the first steps toward 

transforming GEOINT into an integrated and persistent 

architecture. An overarching enterprise capabilities document 

describes the GEOINT capabilities required to address these 

needs and gaps in the mid-2020 timeframe. The ECD is a 

product of the formal community governance processes used 

by the intelligence, defense and civilian agency communities; 

these processes ensure fair advocacy and unbiased assessment 

of requirements, and assure that dissenting views are 

represented and considered fully.

The ECD assesses the current state of the GEOINT 

Enterprise and examines various strategic drivers, including 

the geopolitical context and broad technological changes 

that demand greater agility, interoperability and integration. 

Enterprise members will rely on the ECD to conceptualize 

future GEOINT collectors and data providers and their 

ground-enabling components. They will also use it to make 

more specific acquisition-focused recommendations and 

establish lower-level requirements and specifications for 

systems and their components.

Formalizing the proce

As GEOINT functional manager, Cardillo is 

aggressively pursuing all opportunities to put user 

needs at the forefront of capabilities development and 

programming. His goal is a single, easy to use, easy 

to access process to gather, vet, validate and track 

satisfaction of needs. Only then can the enterprise reach 

its full GEOINT potential to: provide the contextual and 

temporal foundation to know the earth’s geography and 

geodesy; enable safe navigation of the planet’s waters, 

airspace and terrain; and provide the knowledge that 

tethers natural phenomena, manmade objects and human 

activities to time and space.

M. Karen Walker, Ctr., GEOINT Enterprise Office, 

contributed to this article.
| Feature |

Pathfinder

 Ess

•	Operate more with and in the open, leverage nongovernment

sources, and understand how these data could be used or 

manipulated by adversaries

•	Receive recurring collection to support discovery and

forensic GEO

•	Detect, observe and monitor details to identify and

understand changes in signatures

•	Characterize objects through diverse temporal, spatial and 

spectral sources to defeat denial and deception practices

•	Monitor and track objects and activities for sufficient periods

of time to determine patterns of life and maintain custody

•	Model the relationships between events, objects and activities

essential to predictive analysis

•	Assess objects to detect change and provide context for

known and unknown activities

•	Convey dynamic events across the globe using various sources

•	Ensure access to foundation knowledge at all times, against

all threats, on the appropriate security domains supporting 

the full range of operations to address intelligence, military, 

scientific and civil GEOINT ne
Feature

26|NGA.MIL 

By Mark Orsborn, Ctr., National Geospatial-Intelligence College

Profe

Stren

the wo

du

cha
| Feature |

Pathfinder

Just ask Dwight Dean, a National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency staff officer involved in training and developing the 

myriad professionals comprising the GEOINT community. 

Dean is one of several NGA professionals who support the 

National GEOINT Committee’s training and professional 

development subcommittee.

“It is an exciting time to be here because there are limitless 

possibilities to advance GEOINT for our nation,” said Dean. 

NGA has experienced a tremendous amount of progress 

in its GEOINT capabilities in recent years, and the rapid 

advancement in technology is a catalyst of that growth, 

according to Dean. In a world that is becoming more digital 

by the minute, he notes that things are moving at a pace 

never seen before. 

That is where the excitement comes into play.

“If we get the right group of people together, there are 

no limits to what they are capable of creating,” said Dean. 

NGA Director Robert Cardillo, who also leads the 

National System for Geospatial Intelligence, or NSG, as 

the functional manager for GEOINT, acknowledges just 

how much of a revolution is happening.

“We are living in the golden age of GEOINT, a time when 

our access to data and sources from across a variety of 

platforms is greater than before,” Cardillo said during a recent 

National Intelligence University president’s lecture series.

Evolving tradecra

The importance of being active drivers of GEOINT is 

something that Cardillo has long emphasized. He asserts 

that professionalization helps with the acceleration and 

proliferation of data and technology.

Business experts agree that keeping ahead of technology 

is important for long-term stability and growth. 

Organization and attention to detail are key components 

in sustaining that growth. To help with this, the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence College, commonly known as NGC, 

is working diligently to provide education and training 

solutions that keep up with demand and help lead the 

GEOINT tradecraft far into the future. 

NGC’s goal is to be a key player in the professionalization 

of the entire GEOINT enterprise. The first step in achieving 

that goal is to establish a set of core competencies that 

all GEOINT professionals must have to be successful in 

their profession. Standardizing those skills is important to 

instituting shared knowledge and adopting best practices, 

according to NGC Director Monique “Q” Yates. Agreements 

between internal and external customers will help build 

trust and grow the capabilities of GEOINT. 

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Dostie, who 

serves as chief of military services for NGA, is now on his 

third tour supporting the agency. He notes that advanced 

GEOINT capabilities have rapidly progressed in a short 

amount of time.

Why cer

The professionalization and certification 

process helps organizations and its members 

in three key ways:

1. Increasing functional effectiveness —

The effects of a collection of people is far 

greater than just one person. If members

of an organization are certified in 

multiple functional areas, it will enhance 

qualifications and operational efficiency. 

It also increases knowledge sharing,

problem solving and the creation of relevant 

policy. Professionalization guarantees the

ability for manpower to surge, if necessary, 

for mission critical operations.

2. Furthering objectives of the profession —

Certification helps document and track 

the knowledge, skills and abilities gained 

in every position. It tracks professional

development from basic know-how to 

more complex material and even widens 

the range of transportable skills.

3. Creating professional mobility — 

Establishing excellence through

certification not only builds a 

professional cadre, but it provides them 

mobility to help advance their career. 

Having clear standards allows people to

develop themselves appropriately and in 

line with their occupation.
Feature

28|NGA.MIL 

 “NGA and the entire NSG have achieved tremendous 

progress since transitioning from imagery intelligence 

and defense mapping days,” Dostie said, making 

reference to NGA’s founding as the National Imagery 

and Mapping Agency in 1996. NIMA was renamed 

NGA in 2004. 

“[It’s] nothing like a name change or simple evolution 

in time ... more a revolutionary advancement in 

technology, critical thinking and collaborative effort,” 

he said. “GEOINT is the smallest intelligence discipline 

and provides the most bang for the buck ... quite a 

return on investment!” 

Finding common grou

Given the progress achieved and the many 

security benefits GEOINT provides our nation and 

its allies, there is still room for greater optimization, 

varying lexicon and component-specific curriculum 

among NSG partners, according to Air Force 

Master Sgt. Justin Parker. He claims even better 

interoperability and communication can be achieved 

by increasing expertise and identifying best practices 

through training standards, certification and other 

professional initiatives.

“Communication is one of the biggest challenges we 

currently face,” said Parker, who serves as the Air Force's 

GEOINT professional certification program manager.

Moving to a system where information is shared is 

very helpful in the overall mission, according to Parker. 

He said, “Agencies that have worked together before 

will have an even better understanding of each other 

and what each other does.” 

The Department of Defense is no stranger to 

partnerships, despite each component having a distinct 

mission. DOD is currently taking steps to identify and 

understand the needs of each of its components as it 

pertains to GEOINT certification. 

In a related step, NGA’s Cardillo, in his functional 

manager role, signed a memorandum in February 

2016 that requires the entire DOD to identify and 

code billets requiring GEOINT certification. The 

memorandum also requires that all eligible candidates 

be certified in GEOINT professional certification — 

GPC — fundamentals by the end of calendar year 2017.

The GPC is the largest certification program in 

the intelligence community. GPC is managed by an 

independent program office within NGA created to 

support Cardillo in his role as GEOINT functional 

manager and all the components of the defense 

intelligence enterprise. GPC maintains the highest 

number of programs and people taking tests, as well 

as the largest amount of professionals with earned 

credentials. There are currently 11 certification 

programs within the GPC. Three of them are officially 

accredited by the National Commission for Certifying 

Agencies — GPC Fundamentals, Imagery Analysis and 

Aeronautical Analysis. 

The February 2016 memorandum further stipulates 

that a GEOINT certification program with national 

accreditation across all components must be developed 

and implemented by the end of 2019; some individual 

components have established earlier suspense dates for 

their workforces.

Expanding the reac

Cardillo also stresses the importance of thinking 

of the GEOINT enterprise on a larger scale instead of 

through a microscope. He identified professionalization 

as one of the top three NSG priorities in the 

community’s 2016 strategy. Several action items were 

established to help realize that commitment:

•	 Establish and sustain GEOINT education using 

shared curricula, training centers and instructors to 

expand cooperative learning opportunities.

•	 Employ certification across the NSG to create 

a trusted world-class workforce of GEOINT 

professionals with universally recognized skills.

•	 Adopt analytic modeling and support training to 

discover new objects, relationships or behaviors 

using object-based production and activity-based 

intelligence.

•	 Develop the next generation of GEOINT 

professionals with the talent and conviction to 

confront future security challenges.

Professionalization will play an important role in 

the maturation of the GEOINT enterprise, according to 

Yates. She believes the NGC is just beginning to scratch 

the surface. 

“We are only experimenting with virtualized classes 

today,” said Yates. “This capacity, once fully achieved, 

will allow us to host training anywhere and push 

materials virtually to multiple classrooms and people 

across the enterprise.” 

NGC is establishing partnerships around the globe 

to increase its scope and expand GEOINT training 

based on a core, shared mission. Those partnerships 

will lead to a more effective GEOINT enterprise 

capable of exceeding the challenges in front of it. The 

path ahead is indeed exciting, and what a better time 

to be here than now.
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2017

Enterprse tr

NGA Director Robert Cardillo recently tapped National Geospatial-Intelligence College Director Monique “Q” Yates to co-chair the National GEOINT Committee’ GEOINT training and professional development subcommittee, along with Colin Agee, senior advisor for intelligence communi

U.S. Army Intelligen

Since being named as co-chair, Yates and her staff have secured agreements on nine training standards

for GEOINT training and are expanding the college through a multitude of initiatives. Efforts are organi

along the principles of leading, differentiating and brokering training.

NGC will lead the way in making training accessible to the entir

GEOINT enterprise throug

Mobile training teams — The MTT program delivers instruction in support of extended learning sites

and provides onsite mobile training support to the NSG military, government and contract employees 

at their home locations. NGC utilizes adjunct professors to help meet the amount of requests received 

at any given time. If there is no training offered at a specific location, students can search an online

database for an MTT course in a different location that may be close to their facility.

Web-based training — NGC offers web-based training in an effort to increase accessibility of training 

to students. The MTT program moved a portion of relevant curriculum to the World Wide Web to h

alleviate the workload of its instructors. In addition, external training through the educational platform

Blackboard offers an array of courses customers can access both in the office and at home

Learning Advisory Board — The NG LAB enhances cross-organizational support for addres

strategic workforce learning needs in the rapidly evolving GEOINT environment. NGC is increasi

participation for international and NSG partners to help scope those needs.

NGC will broker the relationship between curricula needed an

external partner contributions through: 

Curriculum implementation — NGC is making investments to create learning opportunities that are 

current, engaging and accessible to the entire GEOINT enterpris.  If during that process the 

finds a third-party curriculum that is a better use of resources, it will be adopted and implemented in 

lieu of developing training from the start. 

Partnerships — Partnerships with different communities and organizations are a critical component

for sustaining the long-term development of the workforce. NGC is enhancing its outreach and 

engagement with the IC,DOD and international partners, as well as with the commercial 

academic sectors.

NGC will differentiate itself to either lead or broker in order to creat

value for its customers through: 

Resource allocation — As NGC continues to grow and develop its training curriculum, it also focuse

on proper resource distribution. For instance, because the NGC receives more MTT requests than it ca

meet, it has criteria to prioritize the delivery of that training. One of the options inside of the differentiate

model is to move some courses to a web-based format, allowing broader customer base access. 

Strategic investment — Understanding the ability to say “no” is important when determining where

to apply resources. NGC identifies areas to reduce efforts in order to be able to provide the best 

possible product. In the case of the Program of Study for Advanced Geospatial Analysis, for instan

NGC realized the program was a wise choice for divestment based on relative performance and 

importance. As a result, NGC refined its investment in the program and retained a percentage of the

courses that best meet the needs of its customers.
Telling our s

30|NGA.MIL 

Next NGA 

Crafting the latest

in a history of ne

By Jessica Daues, NGA Office of Corporate Communications
| Telling Our Story

Pathfinder 2017

The story of St. Louis Place is 

written in the language of hope and 

opportunity. Part of it is told in Native 

American dialect, other parts in French, 

German or Polish. Some details are 

conveyed with an Irish brogue and the 

most recent ones with a soulful AfricanAmerican lilt.

The area that will become the 

National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency’s future St. Louis campus 

has been home to many diverse 

populations over the decades. Just like 

NGA, previous residents came to start 

a new chapter in their life story. The 

area was first settled by French farmers. 

Next came German and Irish craftsmen, 

entrepreneurs and laborers. Later, 

African-American families formed their 

own communities in the neighborhood. 

When NGA moves into its new 

campus at the site, the agency 

will become part of the newest 

chapter of the North St. Louis 

neighborhood’s history. It’s a history 

that not surprisingly is rooted in Native 

American culture.

The first occupants of St. Louis Place 

didn’t actually live there but instead 

pitched the occasional Native American 

small hunting camp, said Joe Harl, an 

archaeologist leading the excavation of 

the NGA site. 

Back then the site was open prairie. 

“It’s about a mile from the nearest 

water source, and they [Native 

Americans] preferred wooded areas to 

make homes and burn fire,” Harl said. 

The prairie provided good hunting, 

though; especially for larger animals 

such as bison.

Harl said the first permanent 

residents of what would become St. 

Louis Place were French farmers in the 

1760s, when much of North America 

was claimed as New France. The future 

NGA site was used as a common field; 

families who lived there were assigned 

long tracts of the land to farm. France 

sold St. Louis to the United States as 

part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

The NGA site, located about two 

miles northwest of the heart of St. Louis, 

remained rural until the 1840s, when 

workers arrived to dig dirt and stones to 

build a reservoir nearby, Harl said. With 

the reservoir completed in 1850, workers 

continued to quarry the site for limestone 

and clay to make bricks. The city annexed 

the St. Louis Place neighborhood in 1855, 

and portions of St. Louis Place were 

subdivided and sold to individuals to 

build homes and businesses. 

The streets near St. Louis Place Park, 

just northwest of the future NGA site, 

became a fashionable destination for 

the mansions of wealthy, self-made 

businessmen and bankers, especially of 

Irish and German descent, in the 1870s, 

’80s and ’90s. 

As the mansions went up, quarries 

were filled in. More modest homes 

and apartments for middle-class and 

working-class immigrants and firstgeneration Americans were built on top 

of the clay pits. 

“There were a lot of Germans, but 

also Irish, Polish ... the north side was 

a melting pot,” said St. Louis historian 

Ruth Keenoy. “The neighborhood 

was mostly residential, with schools, 

churches. People with neighborhood 

businesses — such as cleaners, 

bakeries, markets — probably lived 

above their businesses.” 

As more and more people moved in, 

St. Louis Place became an intellectual 

and cultural center, especially for the 

area’s German community. 

The Homeopathic Medical College 

of Missouri, which was located on 

the west side of the NGA site, became 

one of the first American medical 

institutions to grant degrees to 

women in 1874. The German FreeThinkers Hall, located northeast of the 

NGA site, established a 3,000-book 

library in 1876, a time before public 

libraries. In 1893, German immigrant 

Clemens Strassberger opened a music 

conservatory, which expanded to 

multiple locations and eventually 

boasted 1,148 students. 

But the character of St. Louis Place, 

like much of the city, changed after 

World War II, Keenoy said. 

NGA to buil

new facilit

North St. L

Last spring, NGA announced i

would build a new facility in the 

St. Louis Place neighborhood i

North St. Louis. The new facility is

slated to open by 2023 and will 

replace the NGA campus in South

St. Louis at Second Street

NGA selected the St. Louis Pla

site because of its central location 

and close proximity to leading 

universities, technology hubs and 

businesses. NGA’s hope is that the

new campus will facilitate closer 

collaboration with colleagues in 

academia and industry.

St. Louis Place once supplied the 

community with limestone and clay 

for making bricks
Telling our s

32|NGA.MIL 

“People had access to cars,” she 

said. “Factories and manufacturing 

were changing, and St. Louis City 

didn’t have available land to build big, 

modern factories, so a lot of industry 

went out to the county. After the war, 

soldiers came back to jobs and new 

housing in the suburbs.” 

As the immigrant residents left, a 

new population moved in, also seeking 

opportunity — the chance to purchase 

their own homes. 

“St. Louis didn’t have 

fair housing laws 

until 

1968, and until then, deed restrictions 

often prevented houses in certain 

areas from being sold or rented 

to black families,” Keenoy said. 

She noted that St. Louis Place 

was attractive to these first-time 

homeowners, because it was close to 

several areas where they previously 

had been restricted to living.

Lois Laster’s family moved into the 

neighborhood just west of the NGA site 

in 1945, when 

she was 5-yearsold. She was 

among the 

first AfricanAmerican 

children to 

integrate 

the local 

Catholic 

school, 

St. Leo’s, which was located at the 

southern end of the NGA site. 

Laster remembers growing up in 

a lively, mixed neighborhood where 

neighbors looked out for one another. 

“The streets were safe,” she said. 

“People didn't have air conditioning, so 

we would leave the front door open 

and make a pallet and sleep by the front 

door. I did that all the time.”

Laster said the neighborhood 

had every convenience. For 

instance, she remembers four 

movie theatres within walking 

distance of her home.

“We walked everywhere,” 

Laster said. “All the stores and 

shops you needed were right 

there in the neighborhood: 

bakeries, cleaners, shoe shops, 

hardware stores.”

After three decades, 

however, conditions began 

to change. By the late 1970s, 

the community began to 
| Telling Our Story

Pathfinder

Do you know an interesting history of an NGA program or 

GEOINT-related topic? Share it for posterity by sending your 

write-up to: Pathfinder@nga.mil. All submissions subject to editing.

PASS IT ON!

lose access to health care, jobs and 

shopping, Keenoy said.

“According to some people we 

interviewed, crime began to go up; 

businesses would get robbed, and they 

either closed or moved out,” Keenoy said. 

“More factory jobs moved to the county. 

People began to move out, and nobody 

moved back in, leaving houses vacant.”

Gradually, houses and businesses in 

St. Louis Place were demolished, 

and few new ones were 

constructed, leaving blocks of 

grass lots. In some ways, the 

area had the appearance of 

going full-circle 

back to its 

beginning as 

open prairie.

Over the past 10 years, St. Louis 

Place has become a quiet area, 

according to Keenoy, with residents 

who are engaged in the neighborhood. 

In 2002, Laster began organizing an 

annual reunion for people who lived 

in and near the new NGA site. The 

reunions have drawn 300 to 400 people, 

some from as far away as California, 

Ohio and Michigan. 

As NGA prepares to become the 

newest resident of St. Louis Place, the 

agency will seek to become a good 

neighbor and inject energy back into 

the once-bustling area.

"Our Next NGA West program team 

feels a great deal of responsibility 

to respect the neighborhood with 

our presence and to be a source of 

pride for the community,” said Susan 

Pollmann, director for the Next NGA 

West program.

“Director Cardillo decided on this 

location because it was best suited to 

our future mission, but we hope NGA's 

presence will give back to the area 

in terms of spurring development,” 

Pollmann said. “Our team looks 

forward to helping the people of 

St. Louis Place and surrounding 

neighborhoods get to know NGA 

better in the coming months and years 

through our outreach to local groups 

and schools."

As NGA, the future government 

resident of St. Louis Place, prepares 

to move in, the language of hope and 

opportunity rings loud and clear.
Telling our s

34|NGA.MIL 

They have helped archaeologists identify ancient ruins and 

anthropologists see how 20th-century urbanization has changed 

agriculture. The half-century-old satellite images were intended 

for a far different purpose, however; to capture insight into the 

Soviet Union’s strategic capabilities during the Cold War.

 “Following World War II, the United States became 

concerned about the goals and intentions of its former 

wartime ally, the Soviet Union,” said Jim Mohan, director 

of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s museum. 

“The Soviet Union proved a hard target to penetrate by 

conventional spying methods.” 

The United States grew particularly concerned after the 

Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and II, followed by the 

successful test launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“American leaders wanted specific information on Soviet 

military strength, especially the number of Soviet long-range 

bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles,” said Mohan. 

“While the West had plenty of spies operating in Moscow, 

the view from overhead provided the knowledge of Soviet 

strategic capabilities.”

Since then, the images have been declassified and have 

provided researchers with their first high-resolution 

look at many parts of the world. In addition to assisting 

archaeologists and anthropologists, the images have proved 

valuable to glaciologists, who have used them to track 

Antarctica’s melting ice sheets. Now maintained and available 

at the National Archives and Records Administration in 

College Park, Maryland, the original film and technical 

documents are enabling scientists of all types to study how 

the earth has changed due to urbanization, acts of war and 

changing climate conditions.

A 'stabilizing' fact

The first acknowledgement of the reconnaissance imagery 

was tucked into President Jimmy Carter’s Oct. 1, 1978 speech at 

the Kennedy Space Center, touting the American space program.

“Photoreconnaissance satellites have become an important 

stabilizing factor in world affairs in the monitoring of arms 

control agreements,” said Carter. “They make an immense 

contribution to the security of all nations. We shall continue 

to develop them.”

The United States had collected thousands of photos 

long before Carter openly recognized the secret satellite 

operations. President Dwight Eisenhower had approved 

the program’s development in 1958, under the guise of 

the initial Discoverer space missions. The first satellite 

Cold W

reveal

grou

By Victoria Piccoli, Ctr., Office of Corporate Communication
| Telling Our Story

Pathfinder 2017

was approved for 

launch in 1960, 

after the downing 

of Central 

Intelligence 

Agency pilot Gary 

Power’s U-2 plane. 

(See related story, 

page 4.)

From 1960 to 

1986, the top-secret 

Keyhole satellite 

program and its 

multiple satellites 

— Corona KH1-5, 

Gambit KH6-7 and 

Hexagon KH8-9 — captured overhead images that provided 

insight into the Soviet Union’s strategic capabilities. The 

development of reconnaissance satellites in space provided 

a different vantage point for the United States to gather 

intelligence on parts of the world that were once off-limits to 

traditional reconnaissance methods. 

“During the Cold War, the KH satellites revealed not only 

military strength but also Soviet supply reserves, status and 

condition of their industrial sites,” said Mohan. 

Through photo interpretation, U.S. intelligence analysts 

were able to count the numbers of Soviet troops, tanks, 

aircraft and missiles with a high degree of confidence, all 

while ensuring and monitoring current negotiations and 

arms control treaties. 

The confidence in what eventually became known as 

geospatial intelligence supported negotiations around 

the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Mutual 

and Balanced Force Reductions negotiations with the 

Soviet Union. These negotiations were driven by data and 

information U.S. policymakers gained from the Corona, 

Gambit and Hexagon satellites.

“It’s amazing what we got out of the imagery back then,” said 

Kemp Lear, a former government analyst who used KH-8 and 

KH-9 imagery to monitor the Soviet Union. “It was important 

to see what they were doing with missiles and submarines, and 

if they had the capability to launch ballistic missiles.”

The satellite programs also informed the 1961 National 

Intelligence Estimate, which reduced the U.S. estimate of 

the number of current and future intercontinental ballistic 

missile launchers the Soviets had and would possibility 

build. Seven years later, the new data from satellite 

photoreconnaissance allowed the estimate in 1968 to reflect 

an increase in confidence of U.S. satellites, the intelligence 

community’s imagery analysis and national security. 

“It was interesting. It was a time of a lot of concern. But, it was 

also a great time for imagery as an intelligence source,” said Lear. 

A different kind of intelligen

As years passed and technology advanced, the once 

invaluable Corona, Gambit, and Hexagon satellites systems 

were deemed technologically irrelevant for military 

intelligence. In 1970 an NGA predecessor agency, the 

National Photographic Interpretation Center — a joint project 

of the Department of Defense and the CIA — recognized 

the potential usefulness of the satellite imagery for mineral 

resources exploration. Used to create photographic maps, 

the satellite imagery enabled geologists to search for various 

deposits, the most prominent of which was petroleum.

In 1995, 

President Bill 

Clinton ordered 

the release 

of certain 

scientifically or 

environmentally 

useful imagery 

acquired by spacebased national 

intelligence 

reconnaissance 

systems. Vice 

President Albert 

Gore was a 

key proponent, 

recognizing that 

satellite imagery 

“recorded...much 

more than the 

landscape of the 

Cold War.”

“In the process of acquiring this priceless data, we 

recorded for future generations the environmental history of 

the earth,” said Gore.

The last images from the Cold War program yet to be 

declassified are those from the KH-8, which are expected to 

be released soon.

See actual Corona and Gambit satellites that were used for this work on 

display at the National Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

First Imagery Taken By CORONA - Mys 

Shmidta Air Field, USSR August 18, 1960

Dolon Air Field, USSR - Selected heavy 

bombers compared with selected transport 

aircraft August 20, 1966
INSIGHT

36|NGA.MIL 

Assessment and evaluation functions are hardly new to 

government. In the early 20th century, the United States 

began to dedicate more effort to understanding its resources 

and using them wisely.

Enterprise-level assessments were seen during World 

War I and the Great Depression, and were formalized by the 

military during World War II. They are what made it possible 

for the nation’s leaders to determine what was needed, where 

to send it and how much effort and time it would take to 

create it — an overarching decision process that would inform 

war efforts in every theater as well as at home.

That perspective is intertwined with the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency’s duty to know the earth and to do so by 

effectively balancing needs and resources all across the globe. 

The same thinking led NGA to form the Office of Corporate 

Assessment and Program Evaluation earlier this year.

NGA’s CAPE reports directly to the agency’s deputy 

director, Sue Gordon, giving the team access across 

organizations and creating a greater sense of alignment.

“By collaborating across the enterprise, CAPE can 

conduct business across boundaries, build networks to 

better understand customer sentiment, integrate best 

practices, and ultimately, answer NGA’s hardest questions,” 

Gordon said. “In every interaction, CAPE will champion a 

culture of commitment to and investment in NGA’s future, 

making sure that the intentions of yesterday are reflected in 

the choices of tomorrow.”

It is precisely that clarity CAPE looks to provide when it 

conducts independent assessments and evaluations. These 

can take different forms: cost estimates for a new program, 

resource analysis for a current project or identification of 

new areas for exploration. By using these studies to make 

better decisions, NGA can address areas of concern head-on 

and deliver better value to its customers. 

To make that happen, CAPE’s director, Christy Monaco, 

plans to expand support into a number of areas, including 

the program evaluation community across the Department 

of Defense, the intelligence community and industry. 

“...[W]e see opportunity not only in conducting datacentric and independent analysis of NGA programs, but also 

in looking at how the broader GEOINT enterprise is poised 

to meet customer needs,” Monaco said. 

Andrew Vance, one of CAPE’s business analytics 

officers, believes that by integrating enterprise analytics, 

CAPE can help NGA content owners understand how 

GEOINT customers use and feel about NGA products.

This understanding, he believes, creates the foundation for a 

relationship that can endure as well as evolve. 

How the CAPE team accomplishes that is another matter.

“We are working to develop a consistent set of business 

insights that drive efficiencies, support fulfillment of 

customer demand and prioritize resources,” Vance said. 

“By being above the fray, we can help bring a global 

understanding to strategic decision-makers as well as to 

each stakeholder.”

That sense of independence, of being nonbiased and 

without an agenda, makes CAPE an important resource 

for NGA. It also provides the agency’s employees with a 

potential career-broadening opportunity — the chance to 

serve on an enterprise-level team.

Diane Rice, the CAPE deputy director, believes that 

everyone should have the chance to do a rotation in CAPE, 

especially if they are going to be an agency leader.

“I was very lucky to have the opportunity to move from 

SI [the Security & Installations directorate] to CAPE,” Rice 

said. “It was enlightening to get the broader agency strategic 

perspective and the experience of working closely with the 

agency front office. My goal is to make CAPE a place where 

any employee can have that experience.”

While the CAPE team is not involved in the day-to-day 

workings of any of the NGA key components, its members 

are nevertheless taking care of business on a daily basis. The 

goal is to prioritize NGA’s budgetary resources and align the 

agency’s work with congressional direction.

That’s an ongoing task, according to Claire Ayhan, 

a policy officer in CAPE’s planning and programming 

assessment division. 

“The utility of CAPE is the ability to use an outsider 

perspective to find efficiencies, optimizations and things that 

may have been overlooked. These are the kinds of things 

that seem simple but have big impact,” Ayhan said. 

Most projects are never really finished. Once the planning 

phase ends, the program itself has to be assessed as it is 

executed to make sure it stays on track. Then, just when it 

seems like the program is wrapping up, Ayhan says, the next 

year’s activities begin. She says the goal in the continuousimprovement cycle is to use lessons learned to ensure that 

everything is ready for the next year. 

 “If we do our job correctly, we can lift the agency to its 

greatest possible achievements,” Ayhan said.

Stewardship 

Taking care of business at the ent

By Amelia Cohen-Levy, Office of Corporate Assessment and Program Evaluation
| INSIGHT |

Pathfinder 2017

Cross-agey

modernizin

By Paul Kieschnick, NGA Senior Classification Manager

A new classification guide for 

geospatial intelligence product 

development is being hailed by 

the office of the director of national 

intelligence as “a possible model for 

how to achieve transformation, for the 

IC and nationally.”

The Consolidated NGA Security 

Classification Guide, referred to here 

as SCG for the sake of simplicity, 

reduces the redundancy of previous 

classification guidelines in response 

to the Fundamental Classification 

Guide Review and Reduction of OverClassification Act enacted in 2010. It 

consolidates 65 individual National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency 

classification guides into a single 

source, while validating classification 

content with the agency’s current 

mission and functions. A new security 

management resource tool, known as 

SMaRT, provides an online, searchable 

version of the SCG that provides 

users greater access and availability of 

classified guidance.

A team of 30 active participants from 

across NGA developed the SCG to 

comply with the Department of Defense 

and director of national intelligence 

requirements to eliminate redundancy 

and support ease of use. Within the 

team, four smaller integrated product 

teams — focused on the validation of 

content, second-level vetting for quality, 

management concurrence, and software 

coding and implementation — used an 

agile process to develop the updated 

guide in less than six months.

The SCG will modernize the content 

of NGA’s protected information to 

reflect 21st-century, dynamic military 

operations and the proliferation of 

open sources and methods. The SCG 

includes an 82 percent reduction 

in secrecy due to the removal 

of redundant line items. It also 

includes more than 40 classification 

downgrades, more than 360 revised 

line items and completely eliminates 

the use of 'for official use only' and 

'confidential' classification terminology.

Another innovative feature of the 

new SCG is that three ‘enhancement 

statements’ are included for each 

classified line item. These three 

statements are: value, damage and 

unclassified. The value statement 

explains why the information 

is being protected. The damage 

statement describes the potential 

impact to national security should an 

unauthorized disclosure occur. The 

unclassified statement outlines how a 

user can address a classified line item in 

an unclassified manner.

 SMaRT provides an agile online 

resource for information classification. It 

features multiple search, sort and filter 

parameters, and a rapid change process 

to provide current GEOINT classification 

to users of GEOINT. It also provides 

quick access to a glossary of common 

GEOINT acronyms and definitions. 

SCG has been designed to be agile, 

based on the evolution of information 

and mission needs; empower analysts 

to develop GEOINT products at 

the appropriate classification level 

for consumers; build a security 

classification operating framework 

that enables agile and adaptive 

GEOINT; and a focus on classifying 

GEOINT products at the lowest 

appropriate classification for the 

greatest distribution.

The SCG is setting the scene to 

enable greater analytical and general 

user risk management, by delivering 

clear and concise classification 

guidance to GEOINT producers and 

users, making the complex task of 

accurate derivative classification 

simpler and easier to do.

Functi

manage

authori

NGA is leading the defense

and intelligence communities 

in classification management 

transformation by fully embracing 

the principles of fewer, simpler 

classification guides and better 

derivative classification decisions 

across the National System for 

Geospatial Intelligence. B

authority, NGA Director Robe

Cardillo exercises functional 

management authority over 

geospatial intelligence, including 

general classification guidance. 

Individual ‘original classification

authorities’ retain cognizant add/

change/delete authority over 

specific line items. The NSG 

community can access the new 

SCG via the C2S cloud.
Understand the world

38|NGA.MIL 

A document signed Aug. 14, 1941 off 

the coast of Newfoundland by President 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill 

outlined mutual aims to counter Axis 

aggression and articulated a joint vision 

for post-war solidarity.

That document, the Atlantic 

Charter, presented a set of common 

principles to sustain the special 

relationship between the United States 

and United Kingdom long after the 

war. The charter and its principles 

provided a foundation for security 

agreements between the two nations, 

extending to the other principal U.K. 

commonwealth nations, that remain as 

important today as they were then.

An especially close intelligencesharing alliance evolved with the 

U.K., Canada, Australia and New 

Zealand, who, along with the United 

States, are often referred to as the 

FVEYs — “Five Eyes” — partners. 

The FVEYs are committed to 

providing their respective defense 

forces, national decision-makers, and 

each other with responsive and timely 

intelligence to meet individual and 

collective national security needs. The 

members strive to enhance collective 

national security through an 

enduring, integrated and optimized 

allied defense intelligence enterprise.

The geospatial intelligence discipline 

plays a critical role in defense 

intelligence. GEOINT provides means 

to safely navigate the planet’s waters, 

airspace and terrain, and precisely 

reference objects on the earth and in 

space. It assists in better anticipating 

future activities and discovering new 

relationships. It enables us to uncover 

unknowns about our environment and 

threats to national security.

Recognizing that sharing and coproducing GEOINT are necessary to 

convey anticipatory intelligence with 

By Elizabeth Short, Ctr., Office of Corporate Communications
| Understand the World |

Pathfinder

high confidence, the FVEYs created 

the Allied System for GeospatialIntelligence — ASG — in 2009 to 

enhance coordination and integration of 

their respective GEOINT enterprises. 

“NGA works to drive the ASG to 

leverage capabilities for the common 

good of the enterprise,” said Charles 

Meyer, who leads ASG community 

governance as a member of the NGA 

GEOINT Enterprise Office. “Resources 

are shared amongst the partners to find 

solutions to the challenges each country 

might be facing.”

Functional and mission management 

are the building blocks of the ASG. The 

structure, guidelines, initiatives and 

plans set out by the ASG have become 

examples for other governing bodies 

within the larger GEOINT enterprise. 

Working together, the FVEY partners 

provide each other global, regional and 

civil GEOINT support through shared 

resources. The arrangement enables 

the partners to collectively overcome 

challenges relating to professional 

talent, data overload, technical 

requirements and complex threats. 

Working for the common go

Mission management involves 

learning through trust, showing progress 

and conducting pilot projects that 

produce results for the common good of 

all partners. It also involves sharing each 

other’s resources when in need, not only 

for combat support but also to respond 

to global crises.

The ASG Operations Coordination 

Cell is one way that ASG members 

find efficiencies through missionsharing and collaboration. Manned 

by representatives from NGA, the 

Australian Geospatial-Intelligence 

Organisation, Canadian Forces Joint 

Imagery Centre, GEOINT New Zealand 

and the U.K. National Centre for 

Geospatial Intelligence, the AOCC 

synchs operational activity with 

mission managers and team leads 

across the ASG. Its members conduct 

full foundation GEOINT assessments 

of products and services, develop 

repeatable processes to discover content 

and format reports for common use.

The Ebola crisis in Africa demonstrated 

how well the FVEYs work together 

toward a common cause. AOCC 

products applied in-depth knowledge of 

the earth and its features to analyze travel 

times from capital cities to neighboring 

countries, while factoring in the resilience 

of the affected communities. Senior 

decision-makers received easy-tounderstand, unclassified graphics tailored 

to their needs.

 “This type of commonsense 

collaboration needs to become our 

norm,” said Jane Dickerson, chief of 

NGA’s International NGA Support 

Team in Europe.

Mission management also helps 

ensure shared situational awareness 

among allies when coordinating 

efforts on the ground, as is required 

during significant events, not just 

during times of crisis. For instance, 

the world comes together every two 

years to watch its greatest athletes 

strive to take home gold medals for 

their countries at the Olympics. It is 

not an easy endeavor for the athletes, 

nor is it for the host country or the 

governments responsible for the 

welfare of their athletes. To meet 

the myriad challenges and increase 

efficiency, the AOCC created a joint 

Olympics support team to serve the 

FVEY community. Each of the five 

organizations contributes manpower 

and shares access to analytic products 

across the ASG. 

Building toward interoperabilit

The AOCC exemplifies a new 

type of FVEY partnership. Typical 

collaboration in the past involved two 

or three ASG members who agreed to 

jointly address an issue of common 

concern or develop a shared capability. 

These transactional agreements were 

beneficial to the individual parties but 

made only incremental steps toward an 

interoperable ASG enterprise. 

“We want to move away from being 

stovepipe and have more flexibility 

in our governance and solutions,” 

said Col. Anthony Crook, Senior U.K. 

liaison to NGA. 

Strategically collaborating allows 

individual partners to leverage 

their unique contributions of the 

enterprise, leading the way in 

developing capabilities for the benefit 

of all. Partners are encouraged to 

define problems in the same way 

and develop common approaches to 

problem-solving. Solutions are more 

easily replicated to fit the needs of all 

partners as a result.

At an ASG meeting in May 2016, 

NGA Director Robert Cardillo, who 

serves as the functional manager for 

the GEOINT enterprise, encouraged 

his counterparts to accelerate 

progress toward an interoperable 

GEOINT enterprise. ASG members 

ran with the challenge, and they are 

now working through their official 

forums and associated working 

groups to achieve three priorities: 

enhance the GEOINT profession; 

create a common allied GEOINT 

environment; and enhance mission 

sharing — that is to integrate tasking, 

collection and production of GEOINT. 

ASG members have since adopted a 

five-year strategy and are developing 

implementation plans with 

milestones, allowing the leadership 

group to measure the ASG’s progress 

as a holistic enterprise. 

“The ASG’s strategy advances an 

overarching aim of the enterprise, to 

expand the sphere of GEOINT,” said 

Dustin Gard-Weiss, associate functional 

manager and director of the NGA 

GEOINT Enterprise Office.

Expanding GEOINT means 

working with nontraditional 

sources of information, welcoming 

new contributors and giving 

GEOINT professionals greater 

mobility and a broader perspective, 

Gard-Weiss explained. 

“The ASG is doing its part to 

keep GEOINT at the forefront of the 

intelligence and warfighting missions,” 

he said.
Small-sa

in

shar

Technological advances, the increased 

availability of commercial satellite 

imagery and broad sharing agreements 

make it easier and more efficient than ever 

for international partners to collaborate, 

especially during times of disaster 

response or humanitarian crisis.

One commercial imagery provider, 

Planet, designs, builds and operates the 

world's largest constellation of Earthimaging nano-satellites that deliver 

multispectral imagery at 3.5 meter 

resolution. In July 2015 Planet acquired 

the five satellite, 6.7 meter resolution 

RapidEye constellation from BlackBridge 

Corp. Planet's products include unrectified 

and orthorectified images and orthomosaic 

single-pass tiles. Through an introductory 

contract with the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency signed in early fall 

2016, the Planet Feed is utilized across the 

National System for Geospatial Intelligence 

— NSG — and by select members of the 

civil federal community.

In fall 2016 the worst flooding in 

over two decades devastated farming 

communities in New South Wales, 

Australia. Approximately 1,000 people had 

to evacuate, crops were severely flooded 

and thousands of cattle had to be relocated 

to safer areas until floodwaters receded. In 

accordance with the International Charter 

for Space and Major Disasters, Planet 

provided RapidEye imagery of observed 

flooding within 18 hours of Australia’s 

request for imagery, shown here. The 

imagery was used to quickly create flood 

maps that assisted with relief efforts.

To learn more about NGA’s numerous 

commercial partner relationships, visit 

http://www.nga.mil