Editor’s m

essag

e

Stay to the left on the timeline. That’s the goal. The 

best way to deal with a problem is to prevent it in the 

first place, right? And if it can’t be prevented, then try 

to keep the timeline of conflict as short as possible.

The three main feature articles in this issue 

of NGA Pathfinder explore how the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is working to 

shut down or at least manage certain risks before 

they expand into long timelines of conflict. In the 

process, the agency is forging alliances with several 

unexpected partners – World Wildlife Fund and U.S. 

Fish and Wildlife, for example. 

All three features show how we are working to ensure safety in the open 

environment – for wildlife, for people and for ourselves as NGA’s workforce 

in the untamed world of cyberspace.

The lead feature examines how NGA is supporting the intelligence 

community’s foray into the battle against illicit wildlife trafficking. With illegal 

trade estimated at between $15 billion to $20 billion annually, the black market 

in wildlife – products, parts and pelts, and live exotic animals – is decimating 

the world’s elephant, rhinoceros and wildcat populations, to name only a 

few. Of equal concern, especially to national security experts, is that animal 

trafficking is now considered the fourth-largest illegal industry in the world, 

behind narcotics, counterfeiting and human trafficking; its threats to humans 

stemming from violence and conflict, breakdown of law and order, loss of food 

and other resources, and negative economic impacts.

Our second feature in this issue tells a related but different story – how 

environmental conditions affect human behavior and by extension global 

security. With nearly 20 percent of the world’s population experiencing some 

form of chronic food, water or energy insecurity according to the United 

Nations, secondary challenges often arise in the form of disruptive migration 

and civil unrest. Understanding environmental security issues therefore can 

provide intelligence analysts with indicators and warnings of emerging or 

worsening national security challenges. 

In the third feature, our authors discuss the importance of monitoring and 

guarding against a different kind of threat – cybercrime. Despite the vastly 

different venue, information poachers are exactly like wildlife traffickers 

in that they brazenly extract and illegally use precious resources. Within 

the developed world, information is a resource as vital to livelihood as the 

natural resources. Data is the very lifeblood of the intelligence and defense 

communities. Yet we, the data handlers, are often the most overlooked 

partners in the battle against cybercrime and cyber espionage.

The other articles comprising this issue tell equally important stories about 

people and programs that enable NGA to stand strong in the nation’s defense. 

Every threat, incident and conflict in the world occurs within a context of time 

and space, thus making NGA and its geospatial intelligence vital to the fight 

against them. Our work is crucial to every phase of a conflict timeline; but our 

greatest pride comes when our tradecraft helps our partners on the frontlines 

of the conflict, whether they be in Africa or cyberspace, remain as far to the left 

on the timeline as possible.

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

Designer: Craig Thoburn

Photography: Anthony Boone, Erica Knight,

David Richards, and 

Kristina Randall

Contact us

Send letters to the editor to 

Pathfinder@nga.mil

Telephone: 571-557-5400

DSN 547-5400

Approved for Public Release, 17-141
FEATURES

10 Trouble under the trees: 

GEOINT helps fight a different kind 

 of battle in Africa

20 Fight or Flight: 

When environmental conditions Spark civil unrest, 

migration and other security threats

24 Standing guard: 

The most overlooked cybersecurity

partner is us

4 Know the Earth

6 Team NGA

14 Viewpoint

16 Show the Way

18 Special Farewell

19 Telling Our Story

27 Collaboration

30 Understand the World

DEPARTMENTS
4|NGA.MIL 

KNOW THE EARTH

and services. The blending of 

different tradecraft cultures continues 

today in order to provide the most 

comprehensive, multidimensional 

geospatial intelligence possible in 

support of national security.

Fully incorporated agencies

Defense

Mapping Agency

DMA emerged in 1972 and 

absorbed operations of the 

following organizations: U.S. Air 

Force Aeronautical Chart and 

Dissemination Program Office, the 

National Photographic Interpretation 

Center and the Defense Mapping 

Agency. It also incorporated 

parts of the Central Intelligence 

Agency, the Defense Airborne 

Reconnaissance Office, the Defense 

Intelligence Agency and the National 

Reconnaissance Office.

With the integration of several 

organizations pursuing similar 

missions, also came cultural 

differences. Overcoming this 

obstacle required collaboration and 

coordination among teammates in 

order to provide the best products 

Throughout 2016 National GeospatialIntelligence Agency commemorated the 

20th anniversary of its standup as the 

National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 

or NIMA. But the agency’s rich legacy 

extends much further back and was 

built on the shoulders of several strong 

and successful predecessors who laid 

the foundation for the emergence of 

geospatial intelligence. As the year-long 

recognition comes to a close, we salute 

the constituent organizations that formed 

NIMA, six of which had more than 20 

years of their own independent operation. 

NIMA consolidated the Central 

Imagery Office, the Defense 

Leading up to 20: 

NGA’s legacy before NIMA

By Victoria Piccoli, Ctr., Office of Corporate Communications
| Know the earth |

Pathfinder 2016|5

components supported the nation’s 

president, the National Security Council 

and national security policymakers by 

providing accurate, evidence-based, 

comprehensive and timely foreign 

intelligence related to national security; 

and by conducting counterintelligence 

activities and other functions related to 

foreign intelligence and national security 

as directed by the president.

Defense Airborne

Reconnaissance Office

DARO transferred two areas of 

responsibility to NIMA – technology 

development in imagery exploitation 

and the exploitation and dissemination 

elements of the Common Imagery 

Ground/Surface System. Prior to 

the transfer DARO was responsible 

for the management and oversight 

of development and acquisition of 

all defense-wide and joint airborne 

reconnaissance programs, including 

platforms, sensors, data links, data 

relays and ground stations.

Defense

Intelligence Agency

DIA transferred its imagery analysis 

capabilities to NIMA. As a combatsupport agency, DIA’s imagery-derived 

products blended with those of other 

NIMA-legacy agencies to enable 

the new agency to provide expertly 

exploited multi-layered imagery to 

customers such as the secretary of 

defense, the combatant commands and 

subordinate organizations.

National

Reconnaissance Office

NRO transferred 20 imagery-related 

programs and the individuals associated 

with them into NIMA. NRO ensures 

that the United States has the technology 

and space-borne assets to acquire 

intelligence worldwide through research, 

development, acquisition and operation 

of the intelligence satellites. NIMA, and 

now NGA, acquires much of its imagery 

from NRO’s satellites.

of Defense Dick Cheney, Director of 

Central Intelligence Robert Gates and 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 

Army Gen. Colin Powell. 

National Photographic 

Interpretation Center

President Dwight D. Eisenhower 

created NPIC on nearly his last day in 

office in 1961. It was a joint project of 

the CIA and DOD. 

NPIC was formed to consolidate 

the nation’s photoreconnaissance 

analysis assets. Its mission was to 

analyze imagery from classified satellite 

collection systems for reporting to the 

executive branch, Department of State, 

DOD and the U.S. military command, 

and civil agencies. The center was 

commended for its monitoring and 

reporting support to Operation Desert 

Shield and Operation Desert Storm.

Defense Dissemination

Program Office

The DDPO was formed in 1974 

as the main source of time-critical 

imagery for warfighters, national 

intelligence agencies, the scientific 

community and the civil sector. Its 

products supported analysis for 

intelligence, precision targeting 

and other activities that monitored 

indications and warnings. 

Among its many services to the nation, 

the DDPO provided critical support 

to Operation Just Cause in Panama in 

December 1989, to Operation Desert 

Shield and Operation Desert Storm 

from1990 to 1991, and to peacekeeping 

operations in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Contributory agencies 

Central

Intelligence Agency

CIA transferred to NIMA the Office 

of Imagery Analysis, management of 

foreign imagery-sharing arrangements, 

NPIC, and an element of research 

and development from its directorate 

for science and technology. These 

Information Center, Oceanographic 

and Charting Services of the U.S. 

Naval Hydrographic Office and the 

Army Map Service. DMA was the 

largest organization integrated into 

NIMA. During its 24-year history 

it supported military and civilian 

agencies with accurate, tailored 

and interoperable global geospatial 

information and services. 

DMA provided mapping, charting 

and geodesy support to the secretary 

of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and 

the Department of Defense. The agency 

also supported the Drug Enforcement 

Agency for counter-drug operations in 

the Western Hemisphere and extended 

cartographic support for humanitarian 

relief efforts in Africa, the Caribbean 

and other geographic regions. Just 

prior to integrating into NIMA, DMA 

gave superior and responsive support 

to warfighters during Desert Shield 

and Desert Storm operations, as well 

as to the peacemaking and negotiating 

efforts in Bosnia. 

In the 1980s DMA led a major effort 

to convert its map making from paper 

to digital format, adapting a variety of 

new geographic products, procedures 

and modernization programs. By 

harnessing the power of the computer 

to manipulate data, DMA built a strong 

foundation for the consolidation of 

analysis and generation of products 

into a single agency.

Central

Imagery Office

DOD established CIO in 1992 as 

a combat-support agency to meet 

mapping, charting, geodesy and 

other U.S. imagery intelligence 

needs. Disagreement over its 

organizational structure and 

authorities changed its course, 

however; for the four years prior to 

its integration into NIMA, the CIO 

set standards and policy for imagery 

quality, exploitation and dissemination 

in response to imagery shortfalls 

during Operation Desert Storm. 

Notables who influenced the structure 

of CIO in 1992 included Secretary 
Team NGA

6|NGA.MIL

NGA Salute: 

Chief Master Sgt. 

Troie Croft

By Nancy M. Rapavi,

Office of Corporate Communications
Know a service member worthy of an 

NGA Salute? Send your suggestion to 

Pathfinder@nga.mil.

| Team NGA |

Pathfinder 2016|7

For U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Troie 

Croft, it’s important to make a difference. 

As the new senior enlisted advisor at 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 

that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Croft is in a unique position in his 

new role to assist both NGA and the 600 

members of all branches of the military 

who work at the agency. He advises the 

NGA director on issues affecting the 

military, such as personnel development, 

utilization of skillsets and training. He 

advises NGA’s military staffers on career 

development, training and specific 

issues such as work-life balance.

NGA is a unique duty station for 

military personnel and provides 

opportunities as well as challenges, 

said Croft, who began his new post in 

early September.

“For our junior enlisted force — 

our youngest members — this is a 

phenomenal opportunity for them to 

become masters of their tradecraft,” 

he said.

Croft said the challenge comes for 

members who are more senior in 

their careers.

“When we place folks in here, we need 

to make sure we execute NGA’s mission, 

but we [also] need to make sure we 

fill in any potential gaps or give them 

leadership experiences that will keep 

them on track for promotion,” he said.

In addition to looking out for their 

careers, Croft also works to help service 

members find work-life balance.

“The military is very good at asking 

you for everything that it can get in 

order to meet its mission — and that’s 

what we signed up for. Especially if 

you’ve reenlisted, you understand what 

you are getting into,” he said. “But we 

understand that the family is part of 

the member. Without the family, the 

member often won’t stay.”

Croft said every individual has to 

find his or her unique balance.

“We don’t want our service members 

to retire after 20 years — after a 

successful career — but have lost their 

family along the way,” he said.

For an example of how times have 

changed, Croft said there was a 

common adage when he entered the Air 

Force 24 years ago: ‘If we wanted you 

to have a family, we would have issued 

you that family.’

Not so any more.

“Today there are a lot of programs in 

place that are designed to help,” Croft 

said. “The military has put a lot of 

emphasis on families.”

In addition to developing the 

military force at NGA, another of 

Croft’s priorities 

is the military’s 

internship 

program. The aim 

of the program, he 

says, is to train 

military personnel 

in advancedlevel geospatial 

intelligence, so 

that they can take 

expertise back to 

their respective 

services.

“NGA is a 

good place for 

military members 

to develop and 

grow as GEOINT 

professionals,” Croft said. “This 

should be a place where you can 

come and grow and develop, and 

then take that experience back to 

your service.”

As Croft grows in his own role 

as the SEA, he said that NGA is the 

perfect fit for his background as a 

GEOINT analyst.

“If you are a signals analyst, you 

want to be at NSA [National Security 

Agency], and if you are a GEOINT 

analyst you want to come to NGA and 

have an impact,” he said. “NGA is 

touching everything. We are involved 

in so much. This is a place where you 

can make a difference — where you 

can come and be a part of something 

that has such broad reach and helps 

people on a daily basis.”

For our junior 

enlisted force — our 

youngest members — 

this is a phenomenal 

opportunity for them 

to become masters of 

their tradecraft

“

“
T

EAM NGA

8|NGA.MIL

I am NGA: 

Marvin Porter

By Dale Lehner, 

Office of Corporate Communications

Officer Marvin Porter is a man who enjoys what he does and always 

looks for the possibilities life has to offer – both on and off the job. 

A member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's police 

force, Porter is constantly on watch to protect NGA’s employees from all 

possible contingencies. After hours, he is always looking for new ways to 

create music. He believes the possibilities are infinite.

On the surface, one might not see any correlation between these 

two paths of his life, but both molded Porter into the whole 

man. Both vocation and avocation taught him discipline and 

how to interact and communicate with people. He 

believes this synergy enables him to connect with 

people on two levels — through his service to protect and 

through the emotions of his music. 

Porter’s mother, an opera singer, introduced him to music 

at an early age — playing show tunes on the record player at 

home and singing. But it was during a concert by the Baltimore 

Symphony that Porter fell in love with the trumpet as he 

watched and listened, knowing deep down it was his 

calling to play himself. He began in the fourth grade.
| Team NGA |

Pathfinder 2016|9

“Once you start learning music, the journey starts, and you 

will be a student for life,” said Porter, explaining that there’s 

just too much information about music to learn, as well as the 

never-ending development of skills to play the instrument.

“I know I will never learn it all; but it’s a lot of fun,” he said.

Porter learned the theory and fundamentals of 

performance during six years of studying at the Johns 

Hopkins Peabody Conservancy. He fell in love with the Big 

Band sound in his early performing years, but jazz is where 

he learned to feel the music.

“Events in life affect how you feel and play,” said Porter. The 

improvisation of the genre paired with a “good understanding 

of the instrument and knowledge of the movement of the 

chords” allows the musician to “play from feeling.” 

He has written 25 songs; ballads that “give me inspiration 

throughout the day.” 

Porter also finds inspiration from those he meets on 

his daily job as a police officer. A self-proclaimed ‘people 

watcher,’ he enjoys the interaction and getting to know 

agency employees on a personal basis. He is very confident 

in his ability to remember 85 percent of the names of those he 

meets. Both qualities help him from a “police point of view,” 

of needing to be observant. 

“I may see something, a change in a person that might 

affect my day; other people’s day; NGA’s day; and the next 

day,” he said. “I’m a very good reader of people, and I need 

to know what’s going on.” 

His ability to ‘read’ people was honed during Porter’s 23 

years as an officer in the Maryland Division of Corrections. He 

also learned early on to display and portray the same attitude 

every day when he put the uniform on; to not get angry or 

upset on the job -- a professionalism that instills confidence.

“Working in the prison was like going to college; you 

learn about people, which helped me in tough situations, 

then and now,” he said. “Policing is not just about force. If 

you show respect and talk to a person in a positive way, you 

get better results.”

Porter will retire from NGA in 2017 after seven years on the 

force and more than 30 years in law enforcement. He says his 

retirement will be full of music and interacting with people, as 

he continues in the role of music minister at his church. He will 

also continue giving trumpet and theory lessons to high school 

students working to take their music to the next level. 

Retirement will also give Porter more time to 

concentrate on his own skills with the trumpet. 

After all, he’s still on his own journey of 

learning about music and life, and the 

possibilities are infinite.
F

eatur

e

10|NGA.MIL 

Under the heavy canopies of Africa’s 

national forests an unprecedented 

alliance is combating one of today’s most 

serious global security threats. According 

to the United Nations, wildlife 

trafficking is now one of the largest 

illegal trades in the world, along with the 

trafficking of drugs, arms and humans. 

Nearly 180 nations, including the United 

States, have joined together in a battle that is 

about more than conservation. U.N. statistics 

indicate that 80 percent of major armed conflicts 

in the last 50 years have occurred in biodiversity 

hotspots and 40 percent of all intrastate conflicts 

in the last 60 years were linked to natural 

resources. Illegal poaching causes Africa to 

lose twice as much in illicit financial flows as 

it receives in international aid, and the illegal 

activity weakens government authority by 

compromising the rule of law and often putting 

local officials in physical jeopardy. (See box for a 

sampling of relevant statistics.)

“This is not a victimless crime . . . lives are at risk, 

both human and wildlife,” said outgoing Director 

of National Intelligence James Clapper at a June 

2016 symposium held at the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency. The event was the first presidential 

task force symposium with the IC at the helm. It was 

cosponsored by the U.S. Departments of State, Interior 

and Justice.

Trouble under the trees: 

GEOINT helps fight a different

kind of battle in Africa 

By Michelle L. Hankins, Office of Corporate Communications

Facts about illegal wildlife trade

The United Nations Environmental Programme is 

considered the leading authority for global statistics on 

illegal wildlife trade. Among the many figures available:

•	 Illegal trade in wildlife is estimated at $15 billion

to $20 billion annually; total environmental crime,

including illegal deforestation and unreported fishing,

is estimated at up to $213 billion annually – compared

with $120 billion of annual development assistance

•	More than 1,000 park rangers have been killed in

the line of duty in Africa

•	100,000 African elephants were killed between 2010

and 2012 alone, out of a population estimated at

less than 500,000; African Savannah elephants have

declined by 60 percent in Tanzania and 50 percent in

Mozambique since 2009

•	Illegal lumber trade is responsible for up to 90

percent of deforestation in major tropical countries 

and threatens the livelihoods of around one billion 

people dependent on forests

•	Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is

estimated at 11 million to 26 million tonnes of fish 

each year, worth between $10 billion and $23

billion, causing depletion of fish stocks, price increases

and loss of livelihood for countless fishermen
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2016|11

sharing initiative, are leveraging 

open-source data from international 

nongovernmental organizations whose 

grassroots efforts in Africa often yield 

vast amounts of previously untapped 

information. Team members believe 

that gaining access to this data and 

giving it geospatial context can help 

track illegal operations, the perpetrators 

of those operations and the patterns 

that exist between wildlife trafficking 

and other crimes related to human and 

national security.

Wildlife trafficking represents “a global 

criminal enterprise of epic proportions,” 

said Terrance Ford, national intelligence 

manager for Africa, Office of the DNI, at 

a congressional forum held on Capitol 

Hill in spring 2016.

The crime’s effects are most felt 

in sub-Saharan Africa, where the 

supply chain begins, according to 

Ford. Trafficking provides a source 

of revenue that undermines and 

destabilizes weak governments 

there, he says. Illicit activity spans 

the globe, however; Traffic, a WWF 

partner organization based in the 

United Kingdom, identifies numerous 

hotspots for illegal trade. Among 

them are China’s international 

borders; the eastern borders of the 

European Union; trade hubs in eastern 

and southern Africa; some markets 

in Mexico; parts of the Caribbean, 

Indonesia, New Guinea and the 

Solomon Islands; and even certain 

locations in the United States. 

The United States is also a 

powerful ally in the fight against 

illicit wildlife trafficking, according 

to Judi W. Wakhungu, cabinet 

secretary for environment, water and 

natural resources for the Republic of 

Kenya, who also attended the spring 

congressional forum. 

Left of Kill

For the IC’s nontraditional partners, 

such as conservation and animal 

welfare groups, bringing an end to 

wildlife trafficking is about stopping 

the poaching before it happens, or 

getting 'left of kill’ on the timeline.

The fight against wildlife trafficking 

has brought together strange 

bedfellows, including the intelligence 

community and the World Wildlife 

Fund, military strategists and 

endangered species experts, extreme 

liberals and staunch conservatives. The 

bipartisan Eliminate, Neutralize and 

Disrupt (END) Wildlife Trafficking Act, 

which became law in October 2016, 

was introduced in the Senate by Chris 

Coons (D-Del.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) 

and in the House by Congressmen 

Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Eliot Engel 

(D-N.Y.). END incorporates provisions 

of an earlier bill, the Wildlife Trafficking 

Enforcement Act of 2015, which was 

cosponsored in the Senate by unlikely 

partners Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) 

and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.). The new 

legislation elevates wildlife trafficking 

to a serious crime under U.S. law.

IC involvement in the effort stems 

from the whole-of-government approach 

outlined in the National Strategy for 

Combating Wildlife Trafficking adopted 

in 2014. To contribute to the IC’s role in 

implementing the strategy, NGA works 

with a large array of nontraditional 

partners, including nongovernmental 

organizations, industry and academia, 

to leverage relevant data and apply 

geospatial intelligence to better 

understand the connection between 

wildlife trafficking, other forms of 

illegal trafficking and the corresponding 

threats to national security.

Creating a community

NGA became part of the U.S. effort 

in January 2016, when DNI Clapper 

designated Odean Serrano, Ph.D., from 

NGA as the first IC lead to focus on 

IC contributions toward the issue, in 

support of Executive Order 13648. The 

agency created a Combating Wildlife 

Trafficking Community of Interest, which 

aims to create a common operating 

picture for decision-makers and law 

enforcement through cooperation and 

information sharing, and use of existing 

and emerging sources of data.

NGA and its IC partners, as 

part of the CWT COI information-

“How do we gather information ... to 

be able to move and respond, so we 

don’t have to count carcasses?” said 

Kelvin Alie, director of the wildlife 

trade program at the International 

Fund for Animal Welfare. Being able to 

characterize the networks responsible 

for poaching would help move the 

needle back, he says.

For national security experts there is 

an understanding that wildlife trafficking 

relates to more than animal welfare. 

“Wildlife trafficking contributes 

billions of dollars to the illegal economy, 

fuels instability and undermines human 

security,” said NGA Director Robert 

Cardillo at the summer symposium.

David Luna, the State Department’s 

senior director of national security and 

diplomacy, went a step further in his 

testimony at the congressional forum. 

He said, “More and more terrorists are 

turning to the illicit trades to finance 

their operations.” 

Other groups are more specific.

“We’re not talking about the kind 

of traffickers we’ve had before,” said 

Andrea Crosta, executive director and cofounder of the Elephant Action League, 

which released a report in 2013 linking 

illegal ivory trade to both al-Shabaab 

in Somalia and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s 

Resistance Army, known as the LRA, in 

the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

New synergies

Not all of the CWT COI participants 

entered the group because of direct 

wildlife trafficking concerns. Some, 

like Lisa Dougan, president and 

chief executive officer of Invisible 

Children, did so because their cause 

is related to the trafficking. Dougan 

and her colleagues have been fighting 

for human security in underserved 

regions in central Africa since 2005. 

The group’s primary goal is to end 

conflict related to the LRA, and the 

organization’s operations in Africa 

include human security reporting and 

analysis. Dougan says that the CWT 

COI represents an opportunity for new 

partners to find synergies. 
Feature

12|NGA.MIL 

NMB-BOT Chobe River Elephants WV3

Image Date: August 12, 2015

Copyright 2016, DigitalGlobe

Faye Cuevas, chief of staff at IFAW, is 

another member of the CWT COI with 

an eye for synergies. An experienced 

military veteran, she brings several 

lessons learned from the war on terror 

to the fight against wildlife trafficking. 

One practice she carried forward is that 

of conducting community meetings. 

The IFAW calls these local community 

meetings in Africa “time under the trees.” 

Time under the trees, Cuevas 

says, provides a view into what is 

happening on the ground. While the 

IC and the Department of Defense 

often look at events literally from the 

top down, using overhead sensors and 

satellite imagery to perform geospatial 

intelligence, NGOs such as IFAW come 

at it from below the limitations of 

which are then sent to a team of 

analysts who assign verification ratings 

based on existing knowledge about 

LRA activity. They aggregate the data 

from all of the communities and send 

daily reports to key stakeholders.

That’s when GEOINT comes into 

play. Data with a high verification score 

is fed into an online mapping platform 

through which the organization is able 

to put geography to work to identify 

trends in the violence. 

“We were able to see a correlation 

between the LRA poaching activity and 

violence against civilians in the region,” 

Dougan says, after the organization 

overlaid information from the 

community into the mapping tool. 

“One elephant being killed means 

the triple-canopy forest to “inversely 

illuminate these networks from the 

ground up,” said Cuevas.

 Robert Dreher, associate director, 

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says this 

kind of community-based intelligence 

is vital. In Kenya, for example, he says 

a stranger cannot walk across the land 

without it being reported.

Invisible Child’s early warning 

network is another example 

of community action. Villages 

communicate via twice-daily 

conference calls to report incidents 

occurring in or around their 

communities. Trained Invisible Child 

staff members document the reports 

from each village. They perform the 

initial vetting on the incident reports, 

Visualizing the data

The International Fund for Animal Welfare 

leads a project in Kenya called tenBoma. 

The project takes its name from a community 

security philosophy called “Nyumba Kumi,” 

Swahili for “ten houses.” 

The goal of the project is to merge information at 

the local level with high-tech data analysis to create 

a counter-wildlife crime intelligence fusion center 

that helps the Kenya Wildlife Service best apply its 

resources to stop poaching before it occurs – in 

essence making the data operationally relevant.

For the KWS, visualizing the data has been revolutionary, says IFAW Chief of Staff Faye Cuevas, who leads the tenBoma 

initiative. KWS has been able to see hotspots of poaching activity and focus operations around those areas. In one instance, 

KWS has seen a complete cessation of poaching activity in an area it targeted in response to mapping out collected data. 

Paratrooper dogs help track animal poachers

Military dogs that parachute into a combat zone are nothing new. Now, a battalion of canine warriors has entered the 

battle against illegal wildlife trafficking.

Several dogs trained at the Anti-Poaching and Canine Training Academy in South Africa make up that country’s newest 

force in the fight against elephant and rhino poaching. The dogs parachute out of helicopters in tandem with their 

handlers, before tracking suspected poachers through the wildlife preserves. One dog has already helped its handlers 

catch 115 groups of poachers in just 18 months.

Watch the canine teams practice in a video taken at the academy by the BBC this past fall, available at

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37535873
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2016|13

there are a host of communities being 

attacked,” said Dougan.

Human Geography 

By all accounts most poaching 

occurs among poor and subsistence 

communities, and Cuevas says, “We 

need to view it amongst the tapestry 

in which these killings occur.”

Typically these communities are 

under-governed, usually with very 

few jobs. Often their economies 

are based in eco-tourism, and so 

the impact of poaching threatens 

their stability even further. A new 

study released in November by 

a consortium of scientists from 

the University of Cambridge, 

University of Vermont and WWF 

found that African nations lose 

approximately $25 million in 

tourism revenue each year due 

to current levels of elephant 

poaching. The researchers found 

that poachers kill between 20,000 

and 30,000 elephants each year for 

illegal ivory trade. In Tanzania’s 

Selous Game Reserve, the 

country’s largest protected area, 

poaching has reduced the elephant 

population by a whopping 90 percent.

Because wildlife poaching is 

intricately interconnected with security 

issues, members of the CWT COI 

believe it is crucial to have access 

to human geography foundation 

data and the ability to depict human 

interactions within the environment. 

In January 2016 Serrano worked with 

NGA experts to design and launch 

a public-facing website – the CWT 

Common Operating Picture – to 

provide stakeholders with foundation 

data. NGA provides data layers such 

as information about water sources, 

understand that leveraging the data 

analysis, technology, investigative tools 

and best practices from a variety of 

traditionally unrelated partners may be 

the solution to achieving both wildlife 

trafficking and national security missions. 

This new breed of shared 

intelligence gives Fish and 

Wildlife’s Dreher hope. 

“There are a limited 

number of kingpins that 

are involved in this,” said 

Dreher. He believes illegal 

wildlife trafficking can be 

overcome as a result of 

analyzing the behavior of 

those committing the crimes. 

Kenya’s Wakhungu 

agrees. She said she feels 

strongly that Kenya has 

seen illegal poaching 

decrease because the 

country has paid attention 

to the human networks 

rather than just to the 

animal slaughter.

Other countries have 

experienced success as 

well. In May 2016 Nepal 

announced it had gone 

two full years without a single rhino 

poaching. Among the tools in the 

country’s coordinated response to 

trafficking is a software system that 

helps rangers identify and monitor 

poaching hotspots. 

Innovative use of technology 

and collaboration – often among 

very unconventional partners – are 

increasingly common themes in the 

battle against wildlife trafficking. 

Director Luna of the State Department 

perhaps summed it best in his 

congressional testimony: “It takes a 

network to fight a network.” 

cellular telephone tower sites and 

roadways. Most other CWT COI 

members, whose primary jobs are not 

geospatial in nature, use the website 

to share service-enabled data that can 

be used to accomplish their disparate 

but related missions. Among the 

many organizations that share data 

on the site are the National Oceanic 

and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. 

Fish and Wildlife Service, C4ADS 

Environmental Crimes Fusion 

Cell, the University of Washington, 

JCIC International and a National 

Geographic special investigative unit.

It Takes a Network

Before creation of the CWT COI, 

the wildlife security world had been 

very insular, according to IFAW’s 

Alie. Participant organizations now 

action against the sale of illegal goods

New regulations in the United States and a declaration of intent in China are targeted at the last phase of the wildlife 

trafficking cycle — the sale of illegal goods. In June 2016 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completed a rulemaking 

process designed to shut down the commercial ivory trade within U.S. borders. New policy requires sellers of ivory to 

provide proof that their ivory is legal, a serious step in eliminating the market for illegal goods in this country. In December 

2016 China announced its intention to ban the sale and processing of ivory within its boarders by the end of 2017.

“We were able to 

see a correlation 

between the LRA 

poaching activity 

and violence 

against civilians 

in the region”
14|NGA.MIL 

Vi

ewpoint

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. 

The numbers on wildlife poaching and trafficking are 

almost too hard to comprehend: a 9,000 percent increase in 

the number of rhinos poached for their horn between 2007 

and 2015 in southern Africa; Tanzania’s elephant population 

plummeting over 60 percent in only five years. The rapid 

declines in these and other wildlife populations from illegal 

overexploitation by humans are compounded by effects 

from climate change, pollution, deforestation, disease and 

invasive species. 

Illegal overexploitation creates huge criminal profits. 

Control over limited wildlife resources can be a means of 

securing wealth and power.

The problem is global; no single country has been 

identified as the source of more than 15 percent of the total 

number of seized illegal wildlife shipments. The collateral 

effects of wildlife poaching and trafficking are not confined 

to wild spaces either. Wildlife declines can serve as both 

a cause and consequence of human insecurity. States with 

declining wildlife populations often experience increased 

criminality, social decay, corruption, border disputes and 

erosion of state control. Wildlife trafficking can converge 

with transnational organized crime, human trafficking and 

terrorist threat financing. 

Science-based solutions

Conservation criminology is the interdisciplinary scientific 

study of environmental crimes such as wildlife poaching 

Using conservation

criminology to prevent

wildlife crime

By Meredith L. Gore, Ph.D., Michigan State University
| VIEWPOINT |

Pathfinder 2016|15

Meredith L. Gore, Ph.D., is an associate professor 

in the Department of Fisheries & Wildlife and School of 

Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. She is also a 

U.S. Department of State Jefferson Science Fellow. Gore can 

be reached for comment at gorem@msu.edu or through her 

personal website, www.conservationcriminology.com.

Have an idea for a GEOINT or 

national security Viewpoint contribution? Send 

your query to Pathfinder@nga.mil. 

and trafficking or illegal trade in electronic waste. In short, 

the approach integrates conservation biology, risk and 

decision science, and criminology. Conservation criminology 

contributes to more secure human livelihoods, wildlife 

conservation and improved environmental resilience. 

The approach enables thinking about preventing and 

responding to wildlife poaching and trafficking. In locations 

including Namibia, Madagascar, Indonesia and the United 

States, conservation criminology has served as a force 

multiplier in global efforts to reduce risks associated with 

wildlife crime. 

Conservation criminology recognizes the role landscapes 

play in producing wildlife crime. From this perspective, 

wildlife poaching is the result of motivated offenders seizing 

criminal opportunities they encounter during their routine 

activities conducted across the landscape of their daily 

life, e.g., school, church, bank, house, market. Opportunity 

is a requirement for a crime to occur. Preventative action 

is informed by understanding how criminal opportunity 

structures for wildlife poaching and trafficking develop and 

can be exploited. 

Building on this idea, wildlife crime may be viewed as 

a criminal opportunity involving the spatial and temporal 

overlap of three groups: offenders, targets and guardians. 

Crime opportunities are highest when suitable targets – i.e., 

victims or elephants – and offenders – i.e., perpetrators or 

poachers – meet in the absence of capable guardians – i.e., 

authorities or park rangers.

Analyzing the opportunity structures that permit crime 

events to occur helps identify crime patterns. These crime 

patterns suggest where to focus efforts across a landscape in 

order to dismantle opportunity structures for wildlife crime. 

The 25 techniques of situational crime prevention prescribe 

tactics to increase the effort, increase the risks, reduce 

the rewards, reduce provocations and remove excuses 

associated with wildlife crime. Examples include assisting 

with natural surveillance, concealing targets, discouraging 

imitation and assisting compliance. 

Conservation criminology in practice

Intelligence mapping, or IM, is one way to measure 

and visualize the opportunity structures that can result 

in wildlife poaching. IM, among other outcomes, aids 

risk assessment across a geospatial threat landscape and 

identifies entry points for research, intervention, planning or 

evaluation. IM is currently used to provide strategic, tactical 

and operational advantages to policymakers, warfighters, 

intelligence professionals and first responders.

Key to IM is the notion of all-source intelligence, or 

incorporating multiple sources of information into a 

decision-aiding tool. One example might be a map that 

incorporates human resources intelligence, imagery 

intelligence and open-source data in the production of 

finished intelligence. Fusing such information for the benefit 

of decision-making provides a context-specific and holistic 

perspective of the problem, and thus the solution set.

In practice, fine-scale IM of the opportunity structures 

that enable wildlife poaching have been generated through 

a combination of land-cover data, local knowledge 

and law enforcement records. For example, in Namibia, 

georeferenced crime statistics were synthesized with 

technical wildlife population abundance estimates and 

public perceptions of poaching incidents. This analysis 

produced a heatmap of current and future potential criminal 

opportunities that was used by local decision-makers to 

plan law-enforcement investments and other preventative 

conservation activities.

Interdisciplinary IM can enable precision targeting of 

the opportunity structure underlying conservation crimes 

so that effort can be made to separate the overlap of 

motivated offender, suitable target and lack of guardianship. 

Identifying the geospatial intersection of these three groups 

promotes implementation of preventative techniques that 

target the crime situation and prevent crime from occurring 

in the first place. This means the focus of strategies and 

tactics can be the crime and not the criminal.

Most wildlife crime is irreversible. Once an elephant 

is dead, it is dead. This particularly important point has 

human dimensions as well, given the environmental 

injustice and moral issues associated with criminalizing the 

behavior of individuals on the supply side of the supply 

chain; low-level supply side actors are disproportionately 

trying to survive amongst the backdrop of poverty, 

geopolitical instability or food insecurity. It is also possible 

some individuals are coerced into illegal exploiting wildlife. 

Amongst the backdrop of evolving public-private 

partnerships, legislation, technological developments and 

demand-reduction activities working to combat wildlife 

trafficking, there is a clear role for interdisciplinary ways 

of thinking that promote wildlife crime prevention. 

Conservation criminology offers one such path for achieving 

forward movement.
16|NGA.MIL 

Show the way

“Imagine you’re on water. You’re looking 

out at the water and saying, ‘Where’s the 

oil?’ You can’t see it.” – Chris Heath, NGA 

onsite crisis response team lead

When moviegoers are immersed in the 

less-than-two-hour cinematic retelling 

of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the 

months that followed the real-life event 

are likely not foremost on their minds. 

But for Chris Heath, Matt Gamm, 

Brian Bates and the other NGA crisis 

response team members who deployed 

to assist the cleanup, the stories behind 

the real scenes were often full of drama. 

For starters, how do you fix 

a problem you can’t even see? 

Pinpointing the location and extent 

of oil spill damage was a major role 

played by the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency and its fellow 

GEOINT partners.

Worst in history

On April 20, 2010 an explosion on the 

Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible 

mobile offshore drilling rig, located 40 

miles off the coast of Louisiana, claimed 

the lives of nearly a dozen workers 

and resulted in an unprecedented 

environmental challenge. An estimated 

210 million gallons of oil poured into 

the Gulf of Mexico until the damaged 

wellhead, owned by British Petroleum, 

could be sealed nearly five months later. 

 “Already, this oil spill is the worst 

environmental disaster America has 

ever faced,” said President Obama 

when he outlined his ‘battle plan’ to the 

nation after the explosion. “And unlike 

an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a 

single event that does its damage in a 

matter of minutes or days. The millions 

of gallons of oil that have spilled into 

the Gulf of Mexico are more like an 

epidemic, one that we will be fighting 

for months and even years.” 

Nearly 30,000 people worked on 

cleanup efforts across four states, along 

with 17,000 National Guardsman and 

thousands of ships, according to the 

White House. One small but essential 

part of that recovery effort was a team 

of analysts, collection managers, and 

technological experts from NGA. The 

NGA crisis action team stood up soon 

after the explosion and delivered a full 

range of GEOINT services to the U.S. 

Coast Guard, the lead federal agency in 

the response to the spill.

24/7 shifts for months

NGA’s deployed team joined 

hundreds of federal government 

representatives, scientists, Guard 

units, BP officials, local fisherman 

and volunteers at the Unified Area 

Command, or UAC, in Robert, 

Louisiana. They convened at a Shell Oil 

Company training facility to focus on 

a single mission – finding a way to cap 

and contain the spewing oil well.

The NGA team worked 24/7 shifts for 

months following the sinking of the rig. 

 “A typical day at the UAC was like 

any other deployment crisis – the 12-

hour day usually stretched to 16 hours, 

with the demands from a presidential 

visit driving a 24-plus hour workday,” 

said Chris Heath, who served as NGA’s 

onsite lead for multiple rotations. 

“Not shocking to say, but no one ever 

complained about the hours; that’s just 

our workforce at its best.” 

The DMIGS, NGA’s Domestic Mobile 

Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence 

System, is a 44-foot long, self-contained 

mobile unit designed for multifaceted, 

on-demand GEOINT support to onsite 

first responders during a crisis. NGA's 

deployed team used the DMIGS to 

provide customers and partners with 

operational planning map atlases and 

graphics depicting the extent of the oil 

spill and providing predictive analysis 

of spill migration.

 “The DMIGS was deployed in 

early May and was there through 

August,” said Heath. “It couldn’t 

keep up with the blistering heat 

Louisiana’s summer brings, so the 

ingenuity of the DMIGS Operations 

staff, led by Hector Montalvo, 

kicked in, resulting in an external 

cooling unit attached to the DMIGS. 

The immediate benefit to work 

conditions and potential savings of 

IT equipment can’t be overstated.”

NGA analyst Matt Gamm worked 

with a team out of the mobile unit 

to support the Coast Guard and BP, 

focusing his efforts on analysis of boom, 

a temporary floating barrier used to 

contain an oil spill. 

“We used all imagery sources 

available to track and map out the 

boom, where that oil-absorbent boom 

was being placed,” said Gamm.

BP handed out boom to shrimp 

boats and other vessels, but had no 

way of tracking where the boom was 

being placed, if it was intact or if it was 

stopping the oil as intended. Rising 

and falling tides, especially in the 

bayou, were so massive that the boom 

would become tangled and out of place, 

according to Gamm.

A turning point came when Gamm 

briefed BP’s highest-ranking member 

at the UAC, Chief Operating Officer 

Doug Suttles. He took Suttles into the 

DMIGS and demonstrated how NGA 

was using commercial radar to map out 

the oil extent.

“I showed him some of the boom 

analysis using commercial imagery, 

and that was when he realized that 

the reporting that they were getting 

internally was incorrect and that 

we could provide more accurate 

information,” said Gamm. “They 

started to use our boom analysis to 

coordinate what boats they were 

going to use to go fix the boom, where 

it needed replacing and where they 

needed to lay more.”

Collaborative effort

International commercial partners also 

proved valuable in collecting unclassified 

imagery for damage extent products. 

The central orchestration of leveraging 

these collection platforms was born out 

of a pilot effort commissioned by Karyn 

Hayes-Ryan, then-director of commercial 

imagery, data and programs office, and 

led by Tom Ager, lead SAR engineer at 

the time, with Hans C. Graber, Ph.D., 

executive director of the Center for 

Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote 

Sensing, or CSTARS.

NGA shows the way: 

Deepwater Horizon

By Samuel Wilson, Office of Corporate Communications
Pathfinder 2016|17

| Show The Way |

WV-2

Image Date: June 15, 2010

Copyright 2016, DigitalGlobe

Building on the progress of the 

pilot, Heath and Brian Bates, an NGA 

collection manager who served multiple 

onsite rotations, conducted a tabletop 

exercise in early April 2010 with the 

CSTARS staff. Collaboratively, they 

identified the processes necessary 

to drive operations throughout the 

lifecycle, from collection through data 

dissemination. This effort led to the 

ability to fully leverage the commercial 

SAR collectors of Canada, Germany and 

Italy in an orchestrated and seamless 

fashion; they put that tasking to practice 

after the rig disaster.

 “What we provided was commercial 

SAR [synthetic aperture radar], which 

can do large swaths of sensing. We 

covered the entire Gulf region in 

collection, using all three of those 

different providers [Canadians, Germans, 

Italians] and European Space Agency 

government systems,” said Bates.

The work was unprecedented.

 “This is the first time NGA leveraged 

international commercial partners in 

real-time operations,” said Bates. “We 

were tasking everything, and all the 

sensors we had were contributing 

something...these wide-area 

unclassified commercial collectors were 

invaluable to supporting the mission.”

Predictive analysis

One of the UAC’s biggest challenges, 

according to Heath, was helping the fleet 

of response ships know where to go. The 

fleet comprised fisherman and shrimpers 

who had converted their vessels into 

oil-containment devices. There was no 

way to easily direct them to the most 

severely affected areas on a consistent 

basis. Daily shifts in tides, wind 

direction and the oil dispersant were all 

factors that made oil containment and 

recovery operations challenging. 

 “We created a process that allowed 

for our analysts to identify and produce 

a graphic that made it down to the 

affected areas. The Coast Guard folks 

directing the vessels would use our 

analysis to say, ‘Here’s where you 

need to go.’ Without that, the ships 

would’ve remained idle; they couldn’t 

do anything,” he said.

The UAC later relocated to New 

Orleans, where it served as the overall 

command for containment and 

cleanup efforts and focused on the big 

picture, while the Incident Command 

Post run by the Coast Guard and the 

Louisiana National Guard in Houma, 

Louisiana, focused on environmentally 

protected areas.

NGA analysts worked with U.S. 

Fish and Wildlife, which provided 

data identifying the national 

environmentally protected areas in the 

bayou and species of fish and plants 

unique to the region. 

“The boom analysis was the most 

important thing at Houma because 

that was their key to make sure the 

boom was protecting as much of the 

environment as possible,” said Gamm, 

who deployed to Houma following his 

time at the UAC. 

In the other three states directly 

affected by the spill – Alabama, 

Florida and Mississippi – the focus 

was on preventing the oil from 

reaching the beaches. It was difficult 

to determine through imagery which 

areas had substantial oil in the water 

and which had just an oily sheen, 

according to Gamm. 

“Once we found the oil...we used the 

latest trends in currents in oceans and 

rivers, based on the weather forecast 

and the wind, and [our analytic tools] 

would simulate where the oil would be 

the next day,” said Gamm.

This predictive analysis would prove 

invaluable to the Coast Guard, which 

used skimmers – large, repurposed 

ships – to remove oil from the surface 

of the water in concentrated areas.

“The skimmers could only work when 

there was sunlight, so if they were 

almost done cleaning up the oil for the 

day, we would let them know where 

the oil would be at sunup, so they could 

reposition the boat – which moved at a 

snail’s pace – so they were in position 

in the morning,” said Gamm.

By July, a few months after the 

spill began, NGA and the Naval 

Oceanographic Office were able to 

identify bands of thick, recoverable 

oil, based on algorithms run against 

commercial radar. 

“We would process the data and 

release a color map we produced as 

unclassified that was measuring the 

height of the surface of the water, 

and it was projecting that where the 

surface of the water was depressed by 

millimeters...it was being depressed 

by oil,” said Bates. “We did a lot of 

directing of recovery vehicles with 

these maps. We’d identify these bands 

of thick recoverable oil that were hard 

to spot with the naked eye, even in a 

plane,” he said. 

Single focus, many hands

Together, NGA personnel were 

deployed more than 100 days to 

multiple locations, but they didn’t do 

it alone.

”Reachback to our teams at [NGA] 

headquarters and St. Louis [NGA 

Campus West] was key to our success,” 

said Heath. “It wasn’t just us working 

extended hours on the ground; our 

colleagues back home were working 

24/7 too. Our analysis, map atlas 

products and collection activities from 

the home offices were robust and 

critical to the effort.” 

NGA analysts called on existing 

contacts and commercial partners, but 

they also had to improvise and learn 

how to interact with new stakeholders 

and customers, and develop new 

relationships to accomplish this 

distinctive mission, according to Heath. 

“GEOINT played a key role in the 

cleanup,” said Heath. "[T]he lasting 

memory for me was the incredible 

team effort NGA brought to bear on 

this crisis.” 
SPECIAL FAREWELL

18|NGA.MIL 

Etched artwork displaying the various locations of 

NGA over the years was presented to Clapper and 

O'Sullivan during a farewell event hosted by NGA.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency recognizes the outstanding 

dedication of outgoing Director of 

National Intelligence James Clapper and 

Principal Deputy Director Stephanie 

O’Sullivan. Clapper, a former NGA 

director, and O’Sullivan officially leave 

their posts at the end of the current 

presidential administration.

Farewell salute:

Clapper, O’Sullivan

“Our future is brighter; the country will be safer – 

all due to the efforts you have started.” 

 — NGA Director Robert Cardillo 
Telling our story

| Telling Our Story |

Pathfinder 2016|19

Tell us your personal, unclassified version of the work you or your office does for 

NGA for possible inclusion in the next Pathfinder. Send your 600 word or less 

account to Pathfinder@nga.mil. Submissions may be edited for clarity and length.

What’s your story?

One of the goals Director Robert 

Cardillo has set for the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is 

to create a culture of innovation. In 

a speech delivered at the GEOINT 

Symposium, he said the agency will 

"do it in an environment that rewards 

people that take risk, and do their best 

to collaborate."

Risk is very often necessary for 

opportunity. Certain issues, however, 

remain enterprise-wide concerns, 

embedded in day-to-day functional 

activities and operations at every level.

Enterprise risk management, or 

ERM, is an important business practice 

that contributes to mission success. It 

is an effective agency-wide approach 

to address the full spectrum of the 

organization’s external and internal 

risks by understanding the combined 

impact of risks as an interrelated 

portfolio, rather than addressing risks 

only within silos. ERM provides the 

big-picture view of organizational 

challenges that provides better 

insight into how to prioritize resource 

allocations to maximize mission 

delivery success. Through adequate risk 

management, agencies can concentrate 

efforts on key points of failure and 

reduce or eliminate the potential for 

disruptive events. 

From the lowest levels of any 

organization, including NGA, risks 

may percolate up, affecting one office, 

many or the entire enterprise as a 

whole, depending on the criticality and 

severity of potential impacts and/or 

benefits – a.k.a., opportunities – that 

may be derived. Regardless of the 

level at which risks are handled, it is 

imperative that decision-makers are 

provided knowledge of their existence 

as early as is feasible. This will foster 

timely decisions to avoid or reduce 

the potential for negative outcomes or 

to take advantage of and exploit the 

potential for positive outcomes. 

The 2016 Office of Management 

and Budget Circular No. A-123 was 

issued under the authority of the 

Federal Managers’ Financial Integrity 

Act and the Government Performance 

Results Act Modernization Act. The 

circular emphasizes the need for all 

agencies to integrate and coordinate 

risk management and strong internal 

control into existing business activities, 

as an integral part of their overall 

management. The circular also requires 

risk identification at all levels of the 

agency, development of 'risk profiles’ 

that identify risks arising from mission 

and operations, specific consideration 

of an Anti-deficiency Act violation, and 

considering risks as part of the annual 

strategic review process. Commencing 

Fiscal Year 2017, the Department of 

Defense also requires NGA to identify 

and report the most significant risks 

that impact the agency.

NGA is currently identifying, 

mitigating, and monitoring risks across 

the agency. Each NGA component 

is already acting as a risk center that 

accounts for risks in decision-making 

in some way. The NGA Office of 

Strategic Operations-Performance 

is tasked to build on the agency's 

existing methodologies and unify 

these under an ERM framework. The 

agency is adopting an approach that 

uses existing offices, functions and 

resources currently monitoring risk, 

and coordinating risk-management 

capabilities with strategic-planning 

processes and internal controls. The 

responsibility of managing risks is 

shared throughout the agency, from the 

highest level of executive leadership 

to managers executing functional 

activities. 

NGA components will build 

risk identification and recording 

capabilities to identify new and 

emerging risks and changes in existing 

risk from both internal and external 

sources. They will measure the 

extent to which they are threatened 

by a potential circumstance or event. 

This is typically a function of the 

likelihood of the circumstance or event 

occurring and of the resulting adverse 

consequence. Common lexicons and 

templates are being developed by 

OSO-P to provide consistency across 

the organization. Decision authority 

will be aligned to the level of risk – the 

higher the risk, the more senior the 

decision-maker will be. 

Together, this work will create 

an integrated ERM framework to 

accumulate different types of risks 

across the agency and implement 

criteria for elevating risk. The 

objective is to make smart, riskinformed decisions, backed by formal 

risk assessment processes, so that 

appropriate decision-makers are 

informed, involved and armed with 

facts they need to ensure NGA’s 

mission success.

Managing enterprise risk:

Integrated Framework Aids Decision Making

By Shal Malhotra, Office of Strategic Operations–Performance
F

eatur

e

20|NGA.MIL 

It can be easy to forget that sometimes 

the biggest threat to national security 

is nature. Environmental conditions 

can be unpredictable, and unexpected 

changes can cause secondary 

consequences. When a change of a 

river’s course destroys a key local food 

source, for example, food shortages 

can lead to price spikes that in turn can 

contribute to civil unrest. A famine can 

trigger mass migration, which can lead 

to any number of unanticipated and 

potentially very serious consequences.

 Environmental security analysis 

means understanding national 

security threats that stem from human 

interaction with the environment. 

This topic encompasses short-term 

disasters such as hurricanes and 

tsunamis to slower phenomena such 

as desertification; it includes possible 

conflict over shared natural resources 

and examines multifaceted issues such 

as the warming of the Arctic region. 

In addition to its breadth, 

environmental security is also complex. 

Environmental security questions cross 

operational, tactical and strategic scales, 

as well as spatial and temporal ones, 

and they frequently ignore manmade 

boundaries. Accordingly, the National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and 

its mission partners take several 

approaches to monitoring issues related 

to environmental security.

Threat multipliers

NGA analysts study intrinsically 

spatiotemporal aspects of 

environmental security issues. 

Challenges arising from environmental 

security typically act as threat 

multipliers, aggravating existing 

problems such as political instability 

and regional tensions. They also tend 

to indirectly threaten U.S. national 

security by consuming finite security 

resources – military, economic, political, 

etc. – that might otherwise be available 

to cope with other threats. 

Understanding environmental 

security can provide intelligence 

analysts with indicators and warnings 

of emerging or worsening problems, 

however; as when the water supply 

Fight or Flight: 

When environmental 

conditions Spark civil unrest,

migration and other 

Security threats

By Kea U. Duckenfield, Ph.D., Analysis
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2016|21

landslides to droughts, to mining and 

other land-cover-disrupting activities. It 

gives analysts access to a huge volume 

of open-source imagery.

In all of its analytic activities NGA 

emphasizes continuous innovation and 

planning for future GEOINT needs, 

and much of this effort will benefit 

environmental security analysis. The 

agency’s directorate responsible for 

research recently reorganized into 

seven focus areas, one of which is 

devoted to environment and culture. 

The environment and culture 'pod,’ as 

it is called, will perform research to 

improve our understanding of how the 

complex interaction between humans 

and their environment can be modeled 

to address problems of relevance to the 

intelligence and defense communities, 

and other U.S. government agencies. 

Other researchers within the agency are 

identifying and pursuing innovative 

new tools to advance environmental 

security-related GEOINT tradecraft and 

technology, and management supports 

future GEOINT needs analysis relevant 

to environmental security.

Partnerships

Collaboration with multiple 

partners – both inside and outside of 

NGA – is critical for effective GEOINT 

assessments, because environmental 

security touches other intelligence 

issues. During one targeted effort, an 

Army chief warrant officer teamed 

with an NGA spectral scientist to 

analyze agricultural and climatological 

elements contributing to food security, 

in order to estimate the severity of a 

potential hunger crisis. 

Groups across all organizational 

levels and disciplines within NGA 

coordinate and collaborate to support 

and make use of environmental 

security analysis. For instance, 

regional and functional analysts might 

join forces with a human geographer 

and a data scientist to examine 

environmental factors affecting the 

selection of a site for a military or 

humanitarian endeavor. Experts 

from multiple analytic specialties 

work together to understand how 

the area have caused some to ask what 

consequences a major oil spill in this 

fragile and dangerous setting might bring.

NGA’s senior Arctic analyst 

coordinates and conducts analysis 

and production on these and similarly 

intricate topics.

Resources, methods and tools

NGA intelligence officers work to 

identify, produce, acquire and improve 

a wealth of relevant geospatial 

datasets to support analysis of 

environmental security issues. Some of 

these datasets are created within NGA, 

such as environmental data used 

by the agency’s human geography 

effort, and a suite of geotechnical 

datasets for soil, water, seismic 

activity and other phenomena. NGA 

also hosts the National System for 

Geospatial Intelligence meteorology 

and oceanography team, known as 

METOC, and representatives from 

the Pentagon Air Staff that help 

NGA analysts find, understand and 

use valuable meteorological and 

oceanographic datasets. In addition, 

the agency commits resources to 

commissioning commercial vendors 

to create key environment-related 

geospatial data for analysts’ use.

Elsewhere in the agency image 

scientists created and continue to 

improve on the Time Series Analysis 

Toolkit, a suite of time series tools 

for visualizing images. Using TSAT, 

analysts can determine changes over 

time in water, vegetation and other 

environmental parameters. Changes 

can be measured remotely by applying 

these tools to a broad range of 

multispectral imagery and other kinds 

of remotely sensed information. 

NGA also worked in partnership 

with the Australian GeospatialIntelligence Organization to create a 

tool that harnesses the Google Earth 

Engine to identify areas that have 

undergone abrupt change in vegetation 

at some point. This tool, called the 

Worldwide Activity Locator through 

Disruption of Organics, or WALDO, 

can be applied to environmental 

security questions ranging from 

begins to decline in a basin shared 

by two countries with a history of 

tense relations. NGA analysts study 

the dynamics of shared natural 

resources – especially water resources, 

which are particularly well-suited for 

use as diplomatic leverage or even 

as a weapon against a downstream 

neighbor. They measure food security 

and monitor critical infrastructure – 

such as water control features – in 

conflict zones in order to assess how 

civilians and military personnel 

in different areas of influence may 

be vulnerable. They evaluate the 

extent and impact of events such as 

major floods, contaminant spills and 

humanitarian disasters. Analysts also 

consider broader security implications, 

such as impacts to economic security or 

our global defense posture. 

Complex Issues

The Arctic region represents a 

prime example of a complex security 

issue. Two key characteristics of 

environmental security issues are their 

tendency to interact with other security 

issues and the power that perceptions 

hold. Nowhere is this more true than 

in the Arctic, where environmental, 

economic, diplomatic and military 

concerns collide. 

As one example a cruise ship carrying 

more than 1,000 passengers traversed 

the tortuous Northwest Passage last 

summer, anxiously escorted by a 

chartered ice-breaking logistics vessel. 

Given the scarcity of search and rescue 

infrastructure in the Arctic, the success 

of the cruise is raising concerns among 

thought-leaders that future years will 

bring other risky trips along with the 

potential for an emergency event in an 

area where there is little ability to respond. 

On another note warming appears to 

be driving fish habitats northward. This 

may lead to clashes between fishing 

fleets in the Arctic, as the fish move 

between different countries’ economic 

exclusion zones.

Similarly, while only two countries 

currently have oil-producing platforms 

in the Arctic – Russia and Norway – 

prospects for future oil exploitation in 
Feature

22|NGA.MIL 

environmental hazards might play 

into a critical political event such as 

a national election in a strategically 

important country, or how 

counterinsurgency operations altering 

access to natural resources might be 

affecting a region’s economic health. 

Even the most senior intelligence 

officers nurture collaboration and 

communication; in one case a naval 

officer detailed to NGA coordinates and 

aligns disparate groups contributing to 

environmental GEOINT, with a view to 

optimizing the use of their resources.

NGA analysts also team with 

other national and international 

counterparts in the intelligence 

community. In addition to the NSG 

METOC team, military partners such 

as the 557th Weather Wing and the 

Naval Oceanographic Office provide 

support to GEOINT analysts in the 

forms of data, expertise and specialized 

products. NGA personnel coauthor 

National Intelligence Council-published 

community-level assessments relevant 

to environmental security, and the 

agency’s senior Arctic analyst has 

fostered a vibrant community using 

social media tools. 

NGA also fosters collaboration by 

bringing together environmental security 

experts from across the public and 

private sectors. In the last three years the 

agency has held interagency symposiums 

on water security, climate change and 

national security, and wildlife trafficking. 

These and other efforts involve building 

partnerships with colleagues in academia 

and industry. 

Notable among NGA’s interagency 

activities is the civil applications 

Food insecurity 

The Intelligence Community Assessment on Global 

Food Security, published by the Office of the Director

of National Intelligence, defines food security as the

“perceived and actual physical access to food supplies 

sufficient to meet basic needs and preferences at every 

level – individual, community, state and global.”

A key premise of the report is that global food insecurity

cannot be solved by simply growing more food; the real

issue is having access to food. Millions of people worldwide 

either lack purchasing power to buy food or lack access

to land on which to grow their own. Extreme weather,

conflict, political corruption, diseases and environmental

degradation compound these problems and often lead to 

civil unrest.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United 

Nations estimates that 870 million people suffer from 

chronic hunger worldwide; of that number 852 million

people live in developing nations. By mapping and 

monitoring geographic regions experiencing chronic food 

insecurity, geospatial intelligence analysts can support the

missions of both humanitarian assistance organizations and 

national security agencies.

According to the ICA on Global Food Security, insurgents

often take advantage of weaknesses stemming from

food shortages, especially in countries where the central

government has little control over large areas and land 

ownership is not well defined or protected. Common 

tactics include exploiting international aid and fomenting 

unrest against governments that are unable or unwilling to 

assist their struggling citizens. Other disputes may arise 

when depleted fish stocks force fishermen into contested

waters in search of catch, a situation particularly common

in the South China Sea.

Impacts of climate change

Regardless of their causes, changes to the climate can have

devastating effects on local communities. Extreme weather 

events can have significant impact on social, economic,

political and national security conditions.

Severe heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfalls and floods all

disrupt natural and human systems. Such events can trigger 

crop failures and wildfires, and disrupt critical infrastructure,

among other consequences. Cyclones can damage or destroy 

water treatment facilities, leading to the potential spread of

waterborne diseases. All of these stressful impacts can threaten 

regional economies and the overall stability of communities.

According to the Intelligence Community Assessment on 

Global Food Security, published by the Office of the Director

of National Intelligence, weather and climate conditions are

key to determining local crop production, which can contribute

to volatility of local food prices and possible civil unrest. The 

ICA report identifies Africa and Asia as regions where food 

security is most affected by weather and climate pressures. 

A September 2016 memorandum prepared by the National 

Intelligence Council projects more frequent and intense 

weather conditions over the coming years. It claims 

that changing climate conditions could have significant 

implications for where and how people live. Examples of 

climatological stresses are sea-level rise, ocean acidification

and permafrost and glacial melt. Other stresses are 

changes in cloud cover, sustained shifts in temperature and

precipitation, and degradation of air quality.

Climate stress compounds when several extreme weather events 

occur within a short time or in a small region, according to the

council. Effects will be especially pronounced as populations 

continue to concentrate in climate-vulnerable locales, such as

coastal areas, fast-growing cities and water-stressed regions.
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2016|23

committee, which was initiated to 

foster collaboration with scientists 

and program managers at civil 

agencies, such as the U.S. Geologic 

Survey and the National Science 

Foundation. NGA’s visiting scientist 

program also brings state-of-the-art 

expertise on environmental issues 

in house; cooperative research and 

development agreements and other 

outreach programs make it possible for 

external partners to offer their research 

and technical solutions to solving 

environmental security challenges.

Multilayered support

NGA’s contribution to 

environmental security analysis 

operates in almost every level of effort 

at the agency, from data production 

to intelligence analysis, to tool and 

tradecraft development. It extends 

to NGA programs that innovate and 

shape future GEOINT capabilities, and 

includes expert support to national 

policy development. 

NGA representatives participate in 

community-wide groups dealing with 

environmental security, including all 

four subcommittees of the climate 

and national security working 

group. In September of this year, 

NGA contributed to language for a 

presidential memorandum on climate 

change and national security. 

It is this kind of collaboration that 

is key to the successful mastery of 

the complex and extensive field of 

environmental security. Ultimately, 

it is through interaction with each 

other that we can best understand 

the intricate dynamics of human 

interaction with the environment.

Impacts of energy use on

water and food supplies 

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates global 

demand for energy will increase significantly by 2040. Basing 

its projection on 2012 statistics – the most recent available –

the agency’s 2016 International Energy Outlook predicts 48

percent growth over the period from 2012 to 2040. 

The vast majority of that growth is expected to occur in 

developing nations. The EIA report estimates that energy 

demand in countries outside the Organization of Economic 

Cooperation and Development will increase by 71 percent 

over the examined timeframe. In contrast, growth in the more

developed nations of the OECD is estimated at 18 percent.

Energy security is an extensive topic in itself; the intelligence

community is primarily concerned with how energy demand 

influences international relations. The energy, water and food

sectors are inextricably linked, and actions in one sector affect one

or both of the others. The Intelligence Community Assessment on 

Global Food Security, published by the Office of the Director of

National Intelligence, cites these and other examples of negative

impacts stemming from growing energy use and production:

•	 Large amounts of water are required for every phase of 

energy production – extraction of resources, processing

electric power generation, storage and transport

•	 Pollution stemming from energy production sometimes 

renders water unusable; culprits include process and

extraction waste, and spills

•	 Reservoirs and rivers are often reserved for hydroelectric 

generation, diverting necessary resources away from

agriculture and other types of human consumption

•	 Oil production consumes between 1 to 14 gallons of 

water per gallon of oil; coal-washing requires between

20 gallons to 40 gallons of water per ton of coal washed

•	 Depleted clean water supplies adversely affect food production;

energy-realted pollution can render water unusable for 

agriculture or fishing

Water insecurity

The world has no shortage of water in absolute terms; however,

it is a different story when it comes to the amount of freshwater 

available for human, animal and plant consumption.

According to UN-Water, the United Nations organization

devoted to monitoring and reporting on global water security,

less than 1 percent of the world’s freshwater supply is suitable 

for consumption. Demand for that water is growing too – the

U.N. organization claims water use has increased at more 

than twice the rate of population growth in the last century.

The World Bank estimates that more than 1 billion people

currently live in areas without adequate water resources; the

number is expected to more than triple by 2025. Reasons for

water scarcity range from natural changes, such as drought

or erosion, to flooding and other impacts from catastrophic

weather events, to manmade disasters such as oil spills and

contamination. Scarcity also stems from overuse to support a 

growing population, including effects from urbanization and

increased agricultural and energy needs.

The Intelligence Community Assessment on Global Food Security,

published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

includes considerable mention of water security because of its 

effects on food supplies. According to the report, world agriculture

consumes more than 70 percent of the world’s freshwater.

Growing use of water for agriculture, energy, building and

human consumption is particularly problematic in certain parts 

of the world, according to the ICA. Several countries in Asia

and nearly all of the Middle East and North Africa have overpumped their groundwater. 

Numerous studies conducted since 2010 have found that water 

insecurity is nearly always accompanied by poverty, war and

conflict. By monitoring and mapping where water availablity 

might create national secuirty threats, geospatial analysts

can help national security experts predict where unplanned 

migration and its resulting conflicts may occur.
Feature

24|NGA.MIL

Standing 

guard: 

The most

overlooked 

cybersecurity 

partner is us

By Cliff Shelton and Evan Frank, Ctrs.

CIO-T Communications
| Feature |

Pathfinder 2016|25

CSOC’s sustainment team lead, U.S. 

Air Force Capt. Nicholas Gronlund, has 

for months led the charge in improving 

cybersecurity communication with 

the workforce. Gronlund works in 

close coordination with an IT-focused 

strategic communications team to deliver 

informative features and news updates to 

assist workforce cybersecurity both at the 

job and at home. His stance is one that 

treats NGA users as customers who can 

benefit from his team’s guidance.

“There are several ways employees 

can be big assets to cybersecurity 

defense,” said Gronlund. “One way is by 

being situationally aware so they don’t 

click on emails or websites that they 

shouldn’t. Another way is by being an 

additional set of eyes on NGA networks; 

security filters can’t catch everything, 

and we need employees to tell us when 

things don’t look right.”

A number of NGA personnel have 

done just that, forwarding to CSOC 

— in September 2016 alone — more 

than 100 emails suspected of carrying 

payloads for suspicious malware for 

quarantine and forensics.

“A phishing email can be a 

tremendously valuable forensic 

artifact,” said Gronlund, “because 

security might not have seen it, and it 

might not have [otherwise] triggered an 

alert [in our defenses].”

The desire to capitalize on such 

success stories is the reason that 

Gronlund and his fellow team members 

are developing a cybersecurity 

communications working group to 

engage personnel more directly, show 

the workforce what the CSOC can offer 

and remove the image of cybersecurity 

as a roadblock to mission functionality. 

“We are revamping the entire 

way that the CSOC communicates, 

including current communications 

distribution, frequency and content,” 

said Brown.

A difficulty cybersecurity experts may 

have in reaching a broader audience 

is that the concept is deemed too 

technically complex or, worse, boring. 

Cybersecurity, more than information 

technology, is about people. 

“There is a general lack of understanding about how much digital 

dust people are leaving around,” 

Andrew Howard, director of the Cyber 

Technology & Information Security 

Laboratory at George Tech Research 

Institute, was quoted as saying in the 

institute’s 2016 report on emerging 

cyber threats. “There is a drastic 

need for two things: education and 

technology to focus on the problem.”

There is no software or architectural 

solution that in itself removes the 

risk that an enterprise like National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency falls 

victim to cyber-attacks or cyberespionage – especially as the agency 

integrates more open-source data and 

collaborates with partners outside of the 

intelligence and defense communities.

Criminals and spies act on that notion, 

cleverly using social engineering tactics 

to take advantage of cases of human 

honesty, integrity and sense of safety.

“Cyber threats continue to be an area of 

growing concern,” stated outgoing Director 

of National Intelligence James Clapper in 

testimony before the House Permanent 

Select Committee on Intelligence in 

November. “In the next few years, the effect 

of innovation and increased reliance on 

information technology on our society’s 

way of life and our mission in support of 

DOD [Department of Defense] probably 

will be far greater in scope and impact 

than ever.”

At the frontlines combating the 

threat at NGA is not only the certified 

cybersecurity expert but all employees, 

each a strong or weak combination in 

the fight to lock out malicious code 

and criminals seeking access to the 

agency’s networks, data and sensitive 

personnel information. 

The partnership between NGA’s 

greater workforce and its cybersecurity 

component is critical to securing the 

geospatial intelligence mission. Vigilant 

and well-informed users greatly reduce 

the surface of attack, thereby reducing 

the risk of a successful breach or attack.

“Today, cyber threats are all around us, 

and, as intelligence professionals, we are 

unfortunately juicy targets,” said Logan 

Schwartz, an NGA emerging technology 

specialist. “Staying vigilant inside 

and outside the workplace is key to 

safeguarding our information, whether 

developing a [secure] piece of code, 

connecting devices to our networks at 

home, or being suspicious of that email 

asking for personal information.”

A team approach

NGA, by direction of its 

cybersecurity strategy, contains a 

collective of teams responsible for 

all facets of the agency’s network 

protection: risk management, 

compliance, vulnerability assessment, 

incident response and cyber forensics. 

Those tasked with upholding these 

forms of network protection are 

knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated 

enterprise network and data protection 

specialists, but they are a relatively small 

fraction within NGA’s workforce of 

several thousand employees. So how 

do the few empower the many, who 

represent the largest footprint of risk?

This is a question that the director of 

the NGA cybersecurity operations cell, 

or CSOC, wrestles with. 

“Cyber defense has to be right 100 

percent of the time; [cyber] attackers 

only need to be right once,” said CSOC 

Director Mike Ryan. “As NGA expands 

its unclassified mission, the surface of 

attack expands.”

Chris Brown, deputy director of 

the CSOC, added that it is incumbent 

upon his team to form a trustworthy 

partnership with the workforce and 

reduce that attack surface.

“We need to focus on more valuable 

information and communicating it 

wisely,” said Brown. “It’s like crying 

wolf — we could send spearphishing 

warnings weekly, but then folks won’t 

read them. We want to build trust with 

the workforce to get beyond complaints; 

get to the real questions.”
Feature

26|NGA.MIL

cybersecurity technology, or lack thereof 

(e.g., out-of-date hardware and software), 

and the ways in which cutting-edge 

solutions and automation detect, 

prevent and respond to cybercrime and 

cyber-espionage. Yet many breaches, 

whether transgressed by nation-state 

or independent 'hacktivist’ group, only 

require the right default password left 

unchanged or a link clicked within a 

maliciously based email. 

“These are the cyber equivalents 

of an unattended backpack at a bus 

station,” said Conner. “At some point, 

something bad is bound to happen, 

and we can prevent it.”

Studies consistently show that 

the human element poses the most 

challenging obstacle to cybersecurity 

and the impact of employee behavior 

on cybersecurity does not receive 

its due attention. A 2015 report by 

Intermedia found that 93 percent of 

the IT users it surveyed admitted to 

engaging in at least one form of a risky 

data security practice, from sharing 

account credentials, i.e. user names and 

passwords, to installing unapproved 

applications on company networks.

NGA’s own trend has been more 

positive, in that users are reporting risks 

rather than becoming risks. The agency’s 

cyber-specific groups like the CSOC 

are seeking to build on that budding 

collaboration and offer an alternative to 

the idea that mission continuity at times 

negates sound cybersecurity.

“Our developers, administrators and 

users form an important layer in our 

defenses,” said Conner. “Cybersecurity 

is a team sport, and there’s simply no 

way we can achieve our shared goals of 

protecting and extending the GEOINT 

mission without an educated and 

engaged user population.”

This 'team sport’ goes beyond 

framework, policy and procedure; it is 

driven by culture, by everyone taking 

an openly understood and agreedupon level of responsibility to protect 

the GEOINT mission—and one’s own 

livelihood—in cyberspace. 

the mission-critical GEOINT that we 

provide to our partners, warfighters, 

allies and first responders. And 

that’s the whole point [of NCSAM], 

to highlight the importance of 

cybersecurity and come together to 

follow best practices.”

Gordon highlighted recent 

employee preemptive actions that 

helped identify adversarial activity on 

several NGA external websites — acts 

of employee-led cybersecurity that 

assisted the agency’s efforts to secure 

the GEOINT mission. 

“As NGA continues to succeed in 

the open and drive new technology 

integrations into IC processes, it’s critical 

that we keep security in the forefront of 

our minds and ensure that we deliver a 

secure product that is simple for users to 

engage with,” said CSOC’s Gronlund. 

CSOC Director Ryan, placing himself 

in the shoes of the general user, said 

that his team’s challenge is to clearly 

relate security to a real, proven and 

persistent threat. 

“One of the messages communicated 

to us during [NCSAM] was, ’Show us 

that there really is a threat,’” said Ryan. 

“As we communicate more, we need 

to tie in events like the [Democratic 

National Committee] hacks; show that 

these threats happens every day. We’re 

geeks and techies, so it’s hard to describe 

it so people can understand. How did 

general users feel about the OPM [Office 

of Personnel Management] breach? Are 

they still concerned that everything they 

put on their [Standard Form 86] is in 

someone else’s hands?”

The human element

According to the 2016 Verizon Data 

Breach Report, the number of large 

breaches, those exposing more than 

10 million identities, increased 125 

percent between 2014 and 2015; 429 

million identities were exposed in 

breaches last year alone.

These statistics, when conflated 

with the media’s highly publicized 

data breaches, often attract focus to 

NGA Deputy Chief Information 

Security Officer, Matt Conner, someone 

who considers cyber journalist Brian 

Krebs’ blog – Krebs on Security – easy 

reading, wants to change that perception. 

“I want to emphasize our customer 

service mindset,” said Conner. “Our intent 

is to find a way to say ‘yes, here’s how.’”

A larger community

This past October Conner used the 

annually celebrated National Cyber 

Security Awareness Month, or NCSAM, 

as a vehicle not just to raise awareness 

about the dangers lurking online, but 

to raise the perceived stakes for all 

supporting the GEOINT mission. 

NCSAM, created by the 

Department of Homeland Security to 

collaboratively increase national-level 

cybersecurity, has grown exponentially 

since its inception, reaching consumers, 

small- and medium-sized businesses, 

corporations, educational institutions 

and young people across the nation 

and internationally.

Honoring NCSAM’s 13th consecutive 

year, always celebrated during October, 

Conner oversaw a series of events 

executed by NGA’s Chief Information 

Security Office to expand the outreach, 

education and engagement of the 

workforce – games of Cybersecurity 

Jeopardy, for instance.

“The purpose of celebrating [NCSAM] 

at NGA is to provide an insightful mix 

of both technical- and consumer-level 

information to make cybersecurity 

relevant to users in both their professional 

and personal lives,” said Conner. 

Conner wants to make cybersecurity 

awareness and good cyber hygiene a 

commonality shared by every link in 

NGA’s chain, and it’s a sentiment that 

the agency’s deputy director shares. 

“It’s vital that we think about 

cybersecurity as an enterprise, as a 

workforce and as individuals,” said 

NGA Deputy Director Sue Gordon 

during the commencement of this 

year’s NGA NCSAM activities. 

“Cybersecurity is essential to protect 
Collaboration

| Collaboration |

Pathfinder 2016|27

During the GEOINT Symposium last 

year, National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency Director Robert Cardillo 

highlighted that “...we must reject 

outdated ideas about the value of 

open-source data. We must embrace 

the imperative to release appropriate 

information on our unclassified network. 

We must do all of this – and we must do 

it smartly. We’ll go wherever necessary 

to create the service the world demands 

and our customers deserve.”

Supporting this challenge, NGA has 

been actively investing operations and 

manpower within what the IT industry 

has dubbed the Silicon Prairie.

Much like our operations in Silicon 

Valley, the Silicon Prairie describes 

innovation occurring in cities such as 

St. Louis, Dallas, Denver, Sioux City 

and Chicago. St. Louis in particular, is 

quickly becoming a mini Palo Alto, 

where once-abandoned buildings near 

Washington University are now home to 

the most advanced coworking spaces. 

One such building is the Cortex, 

home to the Innovation Center, or the 

CiC, a vibrant 200-acre innovation hub 

and technology district integrated into 

St. Louis’ historic Central West End 

and Forest Park Southeast residential 

neighborhoods. Founded in 2002, Cortex 

is the Midwest’s premier innovation hub 

of bioscience and technology research, 

development and commercialization, 

serving as the anchor of St. Louis’ 

growing ecosystem for innovative 

startup programs and established 

companies such as DuPont, Boeing 

Ventures, Centene, Express-Scripts, 

Nestle-Purina and MasterCard.

Across the Midwest -- even during 

winter months -- the new cash crop is 

high tech, and NGA’s presence in St. 

Louis has never been more important 

than it is now. As can be expected, larger, 

more established development firms are 

taking notice. Some of the city’s notable 

startups, such as Lockerdome, a social 

network, and Hatchbuck, a sales and 

marketing software as a service (SaaS) 

platform, also participate at the CiC. More 

recently, San Francisco-based mobilepayments company Square said it will hire 

200 people at its new office in the Cortex 

innovation district in the Central West End.

Creating new business models

But NGA isn’t a venture capitalist 

with the ability to immediately invest 

millions of dollars like they do on 

an episode of TV’s “Shark Tank.” 

Instead, NGA leaders had to navigate 

developmental roadblocks, policies and 

security concerns in an effort to make 

Director Cardillo’s request a reality, “... 

we need to bring ideas to optimize our 

contract and acquisition processes."

Despite the obstacles NGA wanted to 

strike while the iron was hot. St. Louis 

has seen growth in its tech start-up 

scene and has the venture capital dollars 

to prove it. The city was the fastestgrowing area for total funding for 

tech start-ups in 2014, according to CB 

Insights. From November 2013 through 

October 2014, funding in St. Louisbased tech start-ups increased 1,221 

percent year over year. In 2014 venture 

capitalists invested about $71.3 million 

in 21 deals, according to data from 

Pitchbook, a firm that tracks private 

equity and venture capital investments. 

 “We are thrilled to see the innovation 

agenda defined by our founding partners 

continue to thrive and flourish,” said 

Dennis Lower, president and CEO of 

Cortex. “C2N, Orion, aisle411, Uber, OG 

Systems, CIC, Quiet Signal, Capital 

Innovators, iSelect, the Women’s Bakery, 

Sprouthood and many others – an 

entrepreneurial renaissance is happening 

in St. Louis, and Cortex is at ground zero.”

As a result, NGA has created solutions 

that are quite unusual when compared 

with our typical business model. 

NGA created a program called 

The Innovative GEOINT Application 

Provider Program, or IGAPP, a 

revolutionary business model providing 

an open-source environment for the 

government to engage directly with 

startups, academia and midsized 

software firms. By simplifying the 

federal government acquisition 

requirements, IGAPP removes the 

barriers that have historically stymied 

most private-sector firms or businesses. 

Through vendor opportunity packages, 

IGAPP delivers the needs of the 

intelligence and defense communities 

directly to the developers, and removes 

the guesswork – ensuring developers 

are creating meaningful apps.

Since the launch of IGAPP more than 

two years ago, NGA has coordinated 

with more than 40 IGAPP-approved 

vendors that distributed more than 

50 GEOINT-tailored products in the 

GEOINT AppStore. This revolutionary 

program not only provided applications 

NGA’s partners and customers actually 

need, but reduced the acquisition time 

from 18 months to less than four weeks.

Extending the realm of the possible

NGA isn’t alone in this endeavor; 

Arch Grants, a nonprofit organization, 

accelerates economic development by 

providing $50,000 equity-free grants 

and pro bono support services to 

entrepreneurs who locate their businesses 

in St. Louis. Through its competitive 

Global Startup Competition, Arch Grants 

retains and attracts the most innovative 

entrepreneurs to the St. Louis region. 

These programs, and the continued 

efforts of NGA, are an aggressive 

effort to inspire the next generation 

of employers, civic leaders and 

philanthropists for St. Louis. As 

the agency continues to create the 

infrastructure that supports its 

development in the open environment, 

it will be exciting to see what new and 

unusual developments these new-found 

relationships with the private sector will 

deliver to users in the IC, NSG and ASG 

– and forever change our perspective 

regarding the realm of the possible.

At the center of innovation: 

NGA on the ‘prairie’

By David Geiger, Ctr., Xperience Communications
Collaboration

28|NGA.MIL

Customer service is at the very heart 

of the National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency strategy. A key goal for 

the agency’s workforce is to 'drive 

relentlessly for our customers’ success.’

The core of this leadership-driven 

effort is to improve customer 

engagement, champion a better 

experience and bolster effectiveness. 

To ensure top-quality service to the 

Department of Defense, NGA’s most 

important ‘customer’ behind the 

president, the agency has a robust, 

interconnected system of teams. 

NGA and DOD have a cadre of 

representatives and liaisons embedded 

not only throughout the agency, but 

worldwide. The concept of NGA support 

teams, or NSTs, is fairly well known 

both inside and outside of the agency, 

but what is less familiar are the service 

GEOINT offices, or SGOs, at NGA. There 

are also multiple types of NSTs, and even 

NGA insiders sometimes don’t really 

know the differences between them.

Understanding who these customerservice enablers are, their missions and 

who they support is the first step to 

achieving a greater customer experience. 

The most important distinction is that 

SGOs serve as representatives of the 

military services to NGA; NSTs serve 

as NGA liaisons to the services. The 

physical co-location and personal 

engagement between these offices are 

key to fostering the strong relationships 

necessary for effective customer service 

to DOD agencies.

SGOs: The voice of the services to NGA

SGOs are the principal service 

GEOINT element representatives 

to NGA. As such they are the senior 

service GEOINT leaders’ representatives 

to NGA. Per DOD directive 5101.60, 

they are the formal point of contact 

for all National System for Geospatial 

Intelligence — NSG — planning, 

programming, budgeting, policy, 

requirements and execution functions 

appropriate to their branches of service. 

They are responsible for coordinating 

service GEOINT plans, programs and 

budgets with NGA. 

The SGOs share common command 

relationships and missions, and have a 

physical presence at NGA Campus East 

to promote broad engagement across a 

spectrum of GEOINT topics. They are 

particularly important for coordinating 

senior service leadership visits to NGA. 

All SGOs participate in the National 

GEOINT Committee, or GEOCOM, 

through forums, committees, 

subcommittees and working groups that 

support the NSG. They also serve as 

GEOINT advisors to the headquarters’ 

service-staff leadership. (See below for 

descriptions of each SGO.)

NSTs: The voice of NGA to the customer

There are various types of NSTs. 

Based on regional or functional mission, 

they are organizationally tailored, 

consist of both military and civilian 

Mutual support: 

Teams collaborate to serve DOD

By Maj. Nicole Bell, U.S. Army

Primary responsibilities: SGOs

U.S. Navy SGO – Advocates on behalf of the director of naval intelligence. Provides visibility of Navy capabilities to the

agency, including safety of navigation; works with NGA to develop GEOINT capabilities or identify commercial capabilities for

performing broad-area open ocean surveillance. 

U.S. Marine Corps SGO – Advocates on behalf of the Corps’ director of the intelligence department. Articulates Corps

requirements and priorities for collection, production and accessibility of GEOINT; provides NGA with insight into all fullspectrum GEOINT products and services created by the Marine Corps.

U.S. Air Force SGO – Advocates on behalf of the Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and

reconnaissance [A2], with a dual focus on GEOINT and targeting. Focuses on the development of the Air Force GEOINT

enterprise in support of the Air Force’s core missions.

U.S. Army SGO – Advocates on behalf of both the Army deputy chief of staff, G-2 [Intelligence] and the chief of engineers,

due to the partnership between GEOINT imagery analysts and geospatial engineers representing separate branches of the 

Army. Focuses on aligning Army GEOINT requirements with NGA capabilities, promoting Army GEOINT professionalization

and monitoring Army contributions to the NSG. 
| Collaboration |

Pathfinder 2016|29

employees, and are aligned under 

different NGA key components and 

physically co-located with the supported 

customer or integrated partner. All share 

a common mission of serving as the 

agency’s forward representative and as 

such, are the primary means to support 

routine and crisis GEOINT operations 

worldwide. (See below for descriptions 

of the NSTs.)

The Office of NGA Defense, 

headquartered at the Pentagon, also 

has an entire staff dedicated to 

serving as NGA’s liaisons to Pentagon 

leadership, including the Joint Chiefs 

of Staff, the undersecretary of defense 

for intelligence and senior service 

intelligence officers’ staffs. OND 

coordinates NGA senior leadership visits 

to the Pentagon and fosters partnerships 

between NGA and Pentagon customers.

Collaboration: Joint benefits

Continuous open dialogue 

between NGA and the SGOs is vital 

for communicating with the Service 

GEOINT Leaders on matters of mutual 

interest. Service officers serve as 

ambassadors of a primary customer 

and are able to speak on their behalf; 

therefore, they can help resolve issues 

and offer valuable suggestions for 

increased collaboration. Routine key 

leader engagements are beneficial to 

the overall mission of NGA.

Likewise, continuous open dialogue 

with various customers — combatant 

commands; intelligence, coalition 

and key governmental partners; 

Service GEOINT centers; and other 

DOD leadership — provides NGA 

the opportunity to raise customer 

awareness of its emerging capabilities 

and services. In effect, the decisionmakers of the nation, whether civilian 

or military — as well as the tactical 

operators — will glean the benefits of 

improved communication through the 

most accurate and relevant GEOINT 

products and services available.

Primary responsibilities: NSTs

Combatant command NSTs – Provide GEOINT direct support and services

at the regional or functional combatant commands headquarters, and focus on

GEOINT production support and analytical collaboration. The Pentagon NST serves 

in a similar capacity in support of the Joint Staff and senior DOD policymakers.

Service NSTs – Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps – Support major

continental United States operational headquarters and some service GEOINT 

training facilities. This is a coach/teach/mentor relationship to enhance GEOINT 

readiness within the services. 

 

Intelligence agency, international and service intelligence center NSTs 

– Globally dispersed to conduct analysis and increase GEOINT collaboration and

coordination with their respective key partners.

Non-DOD agency NSTs – Provide GEOINT direct support and services to other

senior policymakers. 

Did you

know?

Geographic synthetic aperture 

radar, or GeoSAR, is a dualfrequency radar capable of 

mapping the earth underneath 

foliage and other vegetation. 

It was created by NASA’s Jet 

Propulsion Lab and Fugro Earth 

Data under the sponsorship of 

the Defense Advanced Research 

Agency – DARPA – and National

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

GeoSAR is designed to map both 

top vegetation canopies and 

the terrain beneath them. The 

technology enables the creation of 

three-dimensional models for use 

in mission planning, environmental

protection and other geographic 

applications. It is often used for 

mapping slopes, elevations, roads,

fences and obscured power lines,

and for analyzing terrain obscured 

by clouds and foliage.
Understand the world

30|NGA.MIL 

Previous issues of NGA Pathfinder 

have focused on the nature of the 

work done by each of the nine 

United States Combatant Commands; 

this issue highlights specific ways 

GEOINT and the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency currently support 

them. NGA supports the COCOM 

response to specific global threats 

Editor’s note: USSTRATCOM created United States Cyber Command in 2009 as an armed forces sub-unified command subordinate. It exists 

to centralize command of U.S. cyberspace operations, organize existing cyber resources and synchronize defense of U.S. military networks. 

CYBERCOM has been headed by the director of the National Security Agency since its inception. On December 23, 2016 President Obama 

signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which contains a section elevating CYBERCOM to a full unified 

combatant command. 

through a system of NGA support 

teams and liaisons, and by forwarddeploying top agency talent alongside 

mission partners under each COCOM 

area of responsibility. Robust 

reach-back and technical solutions 

ensure that analysts, technicians, 

onsite support teams and other key 

personnel are equipped to harness 

geospatial intelligence, even in the 

most challenging conditions.

Three functional and six geographical 

combatant commands provide the 

U.S. president and secretary of defense 

with unified resources for an improved 

understanding of international threats 

and the means to respond to them as 

rapidly as possible.

USNORTHCOM

North American Aerospace Defense 

Command and USNORTHCOM rely 

on NGA contributions to maintain the 

safety and integrity of U.S. airspace. 

Backed by GEOINT, the command 

ensures our missile defense forces 

are postured to identify and counter 

potential threats by air in order to 

safeguard homeland security.

USSOUTHCOM

NGA’s physical and virtual presence 

in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew 

reinforced international rescue efforts. 

Nearly 300 GEOINT products and 

15,000 damage assessment points 

shared via a public web portal were 

instrumental to aiding 1.4 million 

affected people.

USEUCOM

Through customized GEOINT 

workshops, NGA and USEUCOM are 

driving international engagement and 

improving the GEOINT proficiencies of 

our European partners.

Combating global threats

Information provided by NGA Expeditionary Operations Office
| Understand the World |

Pathfinder 2016|31

USSOCOM

Advanced GEOINT technologies 

and innovations enable Trident 

Spectre, USSOCOM’s annual joint 

tactical intelligence and operational 

demonstration. The largest of its 

kind, the event integrates nearly more 

than 900 participants from nearly 300 

organizations including the military 

and all 17 intelligence community 

members, to experiment and develop 

vital new tradecraft capabilities. 

USSTRATCOM

The United States maintains more 

than 1,300 satellite systems, which 

provide communication, GPS, 

weather, national security and other 

essential information and services that 

guarantee our way of life. GEOINT 

makes it possible to track and monitor 

adversarial, counter-space activities, 

underpinning the USSTRATCOM 

mandate to protect U.S. space-based 

assets. (Also see the Editor's message 

regarding USCYBERCOM.)

USTRANSCOM

As the United States increases 

diplomatic engagement with Cuba, 

NGA products detailing the island’s 

current port and airfield capabilities 

are informing the planning of 

strategic air operations for official 

travel and expanding platforms for 

future humanitarian assistance and 

disaster relief.

USAFRICOM

GEOINT is crucial to AFRICOM’s 

strategy to strengthen relationships and 

build the military intelligence capacity 

of African mission partners. In the 

past two years, NGA conducted more 

than a dozen courses that increased 

the tradecraft of more than 250 African 

geospatial professionals. These new 

capabilities help prepare them to 

combat violent extremism and promote 

regional stability across 53 countries 

and an expanse three times that of the 

continental United States.

USCENTCOM

With almost 70 personnel at multiple 

locations and installations, NGA’s Task 

Force Afghanistan has been a force 

multiplier for global counterterrorism 

operations for more than eight years 

and delivers direct support in theater 

for Operations Resolute Support and 

Inherent Resolve.

USPACOM

The PACOM area of responsibility 

comprises the most geologically 

dynamic region on the planet. As a 

result of regular seismic, volcanic 

and weather activity, the coastline 

and seafloor of the Pacific Rim 'Ring 

of Fire’ are continually redefined. 

NGA’s documentation and analysis of 

resulting changes is critical to the safe 

navigation of thousands of U.S. and 

foreign vessels annually, as well as for 

effective humanitarian assistance and 

disaster response.
Copyright 2016, DigitalGlobe

Imagery helps free hundreds of captive workers

According to Gisa Komangin from Papua New 

Guinea’s National Fisheries Authority, “When 

you are talking about illegal fishing, you are 

also talking about human smuggling.”

Lack of regulation, blurry lines of authority 

and fluid boundaries across ocean waters have 

emboldened a brutal Southeast Asian trafficking 

ring believed to have enslaved hundreds of 

fishermen — some as young as nine years old — 

from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, according 

to the Associated Press. The AP reports claim 

slave-caught fish reaches U.S. stores via suppliers 

based in Thailand and Indonesia.

During its investigation, AP requested help from 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency partner 

DigitalGlobe. The resulting commercial imagery 

was able to provide visual evidence within a day 

of the request that led to the release of hundreds 

of captive fishermen. To date more than 800 

forced laborers have been located and freed; 

former slaves claim there are hundreds more 

unaccounted for.

This image of the Silver Sea 2, loaded with 

captive workers transferring illegally caught fish 

into a refrigerated trawler, was captured by a 

DigitalGlobe satellite 380 miles up and traveling 

at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour. The highresolution shot even captured minute details 

such as docking ropes and open cargo holds.

Commercial satellite imagery is just one of the 

tools being used in the fight against human 

trafficking for illegal fishing purposes. Others 

include signals analysis, remote sensing, digital 

mapping and human intelligence — all provided 

by private industry. To date, Interpol, the 

United Nations and the U.S. State and Defense 

departments do not have authority to intervene.

To learn more about NGA's commercial 

partner relationships, visit 

http://www.nga.mil