Q&A: Lieutenant General William G. Boykin
Warfighter Advocate
Maintaining the Balance Between Winning the War and Supporting the Servicemember
Lieutenant General William G. Boykin
Deputy Under Secretary
of Defense for Intelligence
Lieutenant General William G. Boykin is the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Intelligence and Warfighting Support, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Boykin has been assigned to complex and challenging joint and service billets throughout his career, including after his appointment to brigadier general in July 1996 while serving as Deputy Director of Special Activities, United States Army Element, Joint Intelligence Coordination Staff, Central Intelligence Agency. After completing that tour of duty in June 1997, he served as Deputy Director for Operations, Readiness and Mobilization, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, U.S. Army, until March 1998.
He returned to the operational forces as Commanding General, U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), Fort Bragg, and completed that command assignment in March 2000.
Boykin remained at Fort Bragg and served as Commanding General, United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, through July 2003.
His numerous personal awards and decorations denote a leader, an operator and a warrior—noted by his Special Forces and Ranger Tabs and other warfare badges, and his receipt of the Purple Heart (with Oak Leaf Cluster), the Bronze Star and other U.S. personal decorations.
Boykin earned a bachelor’s degree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and was awarded a master’s degree at Shippensburg University.
Boykin was interviewed in his Pentagon office by MGT correspondent Marty Kauchak.
Q: Welcome and thank you for taking time to meet with Military Geospatial Technology. What are your roles and responsibilities as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Intelligence and Warfighting Support?
A: My directorate’s responsibility is warfighter support. Our task is to ensure that the requirements of the warfighter are met, that there is policy that supports the warfighters’ requirements and that the warfighters’ priorities—as they meld into the intelligence community’s priorities—are quickly justified and receive the attention that they need. On a day-to-day basis, we ensure that the resources and the interagency support for the warfighter are provided.
Q: How will geospatial intelligence [GEOINT] help meet the requirements for your community as stated in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review [QDR] and the 2005 National Intelligence Strategy [NIS] of the United States?
A: Part of what was in the 2006 QDR and the 2005 NIS, which was published by the Director of National Intelligence, talked about not only being focused on today’s warfighting requirements, but also focused on future requirements—anticipating what we would need in the future.
Our efforts and our focus today are to maintain the balance between helping to win the war and support the servicemembers who are engaged in that war today, and also having a vision of where technology and systems, including those for GEOINT, need to go in the future. That’s a real challenge to maintain the right balance. We are supporting today’s warfighters and we are also spending the energy, effort and money to provide for future capabilities.
Q: A follow-on question. Does Congress maintain a balanced perspective between future and current intelligence issues in its authorization and appropriations, and other processes?
A: Remember that Capitol Hill has a legitimate responsibility for oversight. The answer depends on the personalities on the Hill. Some individuals are really concerned about today’s fight, ensuring that we have everything that we need for today’s fight. Others have a more strategic and long-range perspective in their views. I think that Capitol Hill maintains a pretty good balance.
Q: From a warfighter’s perspective, describe the most urgent military intelligence gaps from Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and describe how geospatial technology is helping to close them.
A: There are three areas in which we really have gaps.
One is persistent surveillance. In today’s environment, when you are thinking in terms of targeting, and when you are thinking in terms of warning, persistent surveillance is a must. I can’t define persistent surveillance for you. I don’t know if persistent surveillance is a 24/7 capability, or if it’s something less than that. I think that at the tactical level it’s probably 24/7. At a more strategic level, it may not be 24/7, but you can still consider it to be persistent. It may even be when a change occurs—then there is dynamic tasking to look again at something. Regardless, persistent surveillance is a critical requirement in today’s fight.
Second, in today’s fight change detection is very critical. As you look at the task to defeat Improvised Explosive Devices [IED], change detection could make a world of difference. If you have a sophisticated change detection system, it could indicate that there is something there that wasn’t there hours ago, or even minutes ago—it could be an IED. Change detection, part of Measurements and Signature Intelligence, is a very critical capability. GEOINT is very much a part of this subject and will play a critical role.
The third area is the distribution of the information collected as geospatial intelligence and answering this question: How do we distribute that information in a meaningful and expeditious way, and in a timely fashion, so that the user has real time, or near-real time access to it? That is another area in which we are working very hard—to try and develop systems that will allow us to distribute this intelligence to the users. We would normally refer to that as a common operating picture. That’s a challenge because of a number of things, bandwidth for example. But we believe that we are making great progress with the bandwidth issue with the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion program and other initiatives.
Q: Summarize the Department of Defense’s operational and administrative relationships with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
A: NGA is part of DoD and is designated a Combat Support Agency [CSA]. The DoD is responsible for supporting NGA in its role as a CSA. NGA is embedded with our warfighters. It has support teams embedded with the combatant commands as well as the warfighting task forces—Multi-National Force-Iraq and others.
DoD is also responsible to provide policy to underpin and support the NGA.
NGA has a responsibility to Ambassador John Negroponte [Director of National Intelligence] to collect national-level intelligence at the direction of the DNI. It’s a cooperative arrangement that is codified in both Title 10 and Title 50 [U.S. Code].
There is a NGA liaison here in this office [Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence] so I have just about daily interface with NGA on a variety of different issues.
Q: DoD is moving beyond traditional jointness [with the services] towards integrated operations—which more fully include multinational, interagency and intergovernmental partners. Describe how geospatial intelligence is helping your community meet the challenges of this evolving operational environment.
A: As we look historically at geospatial intelligence, it’s important to realize that in the late 1970s that geospatial intelligence, because of the way it was collected, was something that relatively few people had access to. The security requirements for them to have access to geospatial intelligence were very stringent.
We’ve come along way since then. Now the individual warfighter can have that information and use that information and, in fact, we have a mechanism to ensure that at the tactical level their requirements can be met either through collection or through archived information—databases searches. This didn’t exist in the 1970s, and really not until the 1980s.
When we look at the asymmetric nature of our enemy, we recognize that what would have been national-level intelligence at one time, now has utility at the tactical and operational levels. The individual soldier or marine fighting in the streets of Fallujah now has a need for, and can use, intelligence that previously would have been valuable primarily to the analytical community here inside the Washington, DC, Beltway.
This integration is not unique to geospatial intelligence. This integration of all of the government agencies is common with all other forms of intelligence because, in reality, it’s how we are fighting the war. And integration is also not unique to intelligence. On the operational side, we have the integration of several government agencies. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in Iraq, helping to look at crime scenes—post-strike areas of suicide bombings, car bombings and those types of events—to see what information can be gleaned from the area that will be valuable to determine how our adversary is operating.
Q: As a follow-on question, when we talk about the multinational component—U.S. friends and allies—are there additional issues?
A: There are and the first one is the security level of the information. We are making a very sincere effort to work to resolve that problem.
The second one is commonality and standards for the transfer and distribution of data. We have some systems that were developed to share information with our allies. But we have to improve those systems, and we are improving those systems, particularly as we look at NATO taking over the warfighting responsibilities in Afghanistan [International Security Assistance Force]. We know that we have to be able to provide NATO with not only geospatial data, but all other forms of intelligence. Developing the architectures that will allow them to share that data is a major challenge and one that we are taking seriously.
Q: Message for industry: What are DoD’s leading geospatial technology requirements that need solutions.
A: My view is that there are three: a need for greater fidelity in geospatial intelligence, all weather-all terrain capabilities and an enhanced capability for urban environments.
Our geospatial capabilities were not necessarily designed for urban environments. So, we need to look to new ways to collect intelligence in the urban environment.
Q: Discuss DoD’s efforts to provide a data-rich environment and supporting infrastructure in which increasingly capable geospatial technology and complimentary systems will operate.
A: We first need deployable systems that will allow us to move support teams and, consequently, geospatial data to the user, wherever he or she might be. I think Jim Clapper [former Director, NGA] has done a lot of work to develop those capabilities so that we can say: “Task Force X over here needs support and I can put a package together and send it to them—both the people and the communications equipment that will enable them to succeed.”
Second, the combination of the geospatial technicians and the communications technicians have to work together to ensure that they understand the requirements, that they understand where the distribution of geospatial intelligence needs to go, and that they come up with a solution. Neither group can do that in isolation. You can’t, for example, have NII in DoD [Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)], working bandwidth extension or expansion issues without understanding what kind of data it is. You just can’t have NGA working the issue unless it understands where the intelligence needs to go. There needs to be a combination—and then all of that needs to be underpinned by national and the warfighters’ requirements.
Q: DoD continues to make substantial investments in geospatial and other intelligence-related technologies. Discuss the role of the individual warfighter in future intelligence systems and processes—might the individual be replaced?
A: There will always be a role, and that role may change. That role may become more of one of all-source analysis, for example.
What we are failing to do now is including all-source analysis in our analytical community. We are getting better at it, but we are not there yet.
Where we enhance geospatial intelligence with signals intelligence and human intelligence, and even open-source intelligence, it is exponentially more useable and more powerful.
So, the role of the individual in this process will increase significantly in the analytical area, but the analysis will not be singlesource geospatial analysis, it will be all-source analysis, so that the geospatial data has far more meaning when combined with the human reports, the signals reports, and what we are getting out of our open sources.
Q: Any concluding thoughts?
A: Geospatial intelligence has been hugely beneficial to the war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. NGA has rushed to the front with the right kind of people and the right kind of communications to be able to put usable products into the hands of the warfighters. Big “kudos” are due for Jim Clapper and the other people at NGA who have enabled our warfighters. ♦
