Opening the GEOINT Door
DEFENSE BUSINESS GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE STANDS READY TO ASSIST THE NATIONAL SYSTEM FOR GEOSPATIAL-INTELLIGENCE ON NATIONAL SECURITY.
Today’s national intelligence community is rapidly transforming its tactics, techniques and procedures to ensure our country is best prepared to address the many new threats, both home and abroad. The GEOINT community could benefit by also re-examining how it can more effectively integrate the new GEOINT capabilities and resources that have stood up in the past few years from the Department of Defense business mission.
Emerging from outside the traditional IC, defense business GEOINT now stands at the GEOINT door ready to assist the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) on our national security.
The sheer size of the modern DoD spurred its partitioning into three general domains respectively addressing warfighting, business and national intelligence issues. U.S. Code Title 10 establishes the authority for the warfighting and business missions, while Title 50 addresses national intelligence. The business domain is further divided into accounting and finance, logistics, strategic planning and budget, acquisition, human resource management and installations and environment.
GEOINT is defined by law as “the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.” This broad definition accommodates GEOINT operations occurring beyond the traditional intelligence community as well as outside traditional battlespace.
Indeed, the business mission domain had witnessed rampant and often uncoordinated acquisition of spatial information resources, including geographic information system (GIS) software, airborne and spaceborne imagery, and Global Positioning System suites across the installations and environmental management sectors in the early 1990s. At the turn of the millennium, defense business leaders took steps to acquire “basingspace” situational awareness by employing unclassified imagery, imagery intelligence and geospatial information— all GEOINT core components.
In the fall of 2001, the Air Force Installations and Logistics Directorate established the Headquarters Air Force Geo Integration Office to guide implementation of the Air Force GeoBase program. The Army Installation Geospatial Information & Services program followed shortly thereafter, as well as the Navy’s GeoReadiness and the Marine Corps’ GEOFidelis programs.
All these programs today are delivering sustained, disciplined stewardship of highfidelity, current imagery and features spanning their services’ respective basingspace. In sum, they collectively comprise a powerful GEOINT capability now poised to be more effectively integrated into NSG operations.
As Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper (Ret.) said in the NSG Basic Doctrine released in June 2006, “It is important that all [National System for Geospatial- Intelligence] members and partners have an excellent understanding of what can be achieved with the power of GEOINT and a common frame of reference to maximize collaboration.”
DEFENSE BUSINESS GEOINT AND THE GIG
The intelligence culture is naturally oriented inward to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information that may compromise operations. So it was no surprise that early attempts from the business mission to team with their services’ respective intelligence communities made little headway, often due to security barriers.
Lacking any cultural precedent aligning them with the National Intelligence Domain, business GEOINT staffs turned to the DoD chief information officer staff. There they found supporting policy and partners that allowed them to further organize business GEOINT activities outside the formal IC, yet characterized by net-centric principles and implemented through the Global Information Grid (GIG), the departmentwide information infrastructure.
DoD policy defines the GIG as the “globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities, associated processes, and personnel for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating and managing information on demand to warfighters, policymakers and support personnel.” More importantly, “the GIG shall support all DoD missions with information technology for national security systems, [and] joint operations… that offers the most effective, efficient, and assured information handling capabilities available, consistent with national military strategy, operational requirements, and best-value enterpriselevel business practices.”
The new business GEOINT practice, to include practical visions such as “one installation…one map” and aspirations to “enter data once… share thereafter,” firmly echoed DoD CIO goals to derive increased mission effectiveness through new information processes.
The introduction of the business GEOINT efforts to the DoD CIO proved timely, as the DoD had just evolved the Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) to streamline both warfighter support and business operations. The BEA defines capabilities, strategic initiatives such as an exhaustive Real Property Inventory, and a new investment review process to best align IT investments with mission priorities and capabilities. (See www.dod.mil/dbt.)
Business GEOINT efforts proved a superb complement to the Real Property and Installation Lifecycle Management Core Business Mission. Today, the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) program in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the services’ business GEOINT programs are aligning both their efforts and their investments to help the DoD derive considerable decision insights through spatially enabling the business architecture.
While business GEOINT efforts are certainly adding value to the DoD business mission, the GEOINT door to the NSG has also begun to slowly open, presenting new opportunities to fuse GEOINT capabilities across the GIG. The three goals comprising the basis of the November 2005 NSG Statement of Strategic Intent offer an ideal framework to underscore partnering efforts already underway between business GEOINT and the NSG.
Goal 1: Establish an integrated, collaborative analysis and production environment that is responsive to and predictive of continuing and emerging global threats.
This goal was intended to broaden access to all GEOINT sources and data, ensuring their availability and validity, and ultimately enable the production of quality intelligence. Achieving this goal requires that all sources of qualified GEOINT data are discoverable and accessible. Subsequently, in late 2005, the OSD DISDI and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) staffs jointly facilitated an unprecedented faceto- face meeting between the respective services’ business GEOINT staffs and their traditional GEOINT peers. Over the course of three hours, numerous opportunities for shared GEOINT investments and more effective exploitation were identified.
Achieving the goal of a more integrated, collaborative GEOINT activity is enabled by building a knowledge environment that allows confident, multi-source, and crossdisciplinary analyses. Through the auspices of the Project Homeland effort led by the Office of the Americas, NGA and DISDI staffs have been teaming for almost two years to allow the NGA knowledge base and architectures to quickly access the highfidelity imagery and features of defense installations.
Goal 2: Institute and expand an interoperable, strategically aligned NSG.
The second NSG goal will require developing policy, doctrine, directives and concepts of operation to guide coordinated execution across both the NSG as well as the federal government. The new federal Geospatial Line of Business activities driven by the Office of Management and Budget required the defense sector to present a unified position on proposed federal geospatial policies. The DoD CIO delegated these responsibilities to NGA, which has aggressively incorporated business GEOINT concerns into today’s DoD position.
Delivering an interoperable and collaborative NSG will also require common GEOINT standards and metadata. Since the early 1990s, the business GEOINT community had collectively developed and employed the Spatial Data Standards for Facilities, Infrastructure and Environment (SDSFIE) as a content standard for installation mapping. It was the alignment of the business GEOINT efforts to the new BEA that highlighted the need to modify the SDSFIE so the data elements matched the business process taxonomies.
At the same time, though, the NGA Feature Attribute Coding Catalog was being retired and replaced by the emerging Defense Feature Data Dictionary (DFDD). Both the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards team at NGA and the OSD DISDI staffs realized the timing was right to pursue a blended data content standard that could interoperate across the GIG mission areas.
Subsequently, today the DISDI and DoD CIO staffs share a voting seat on the NGAled Geospatial Intelligence Standards Working Group, and collaborating toward fusing the best of the BEA-aligned, high-fidelity SDSFIE components into the high-fidelity Mission Specific Data layers of the DFDD.
Goal 3: Attract, develop, sustain and engage a workforce with the skills and competencies required to meet current and future threats and challenges.
The final NSG goal looks to the sustainment of a skilled GEOINT workforce with the appropriate competencies necessary to fulfill the defense mission as well as the need to prepare future NSG leaders. The business GEOINT community faces similar educational challenges. Accordingly, the Defense Geospatial Intelligence College at Fort Belvoir, Va., has been one of the oldest teaming partners to the business GEOINT staffs.
Since 2002, the DGI College faculty has been collaborating with the Headquarters Air Force GeoIntegration Office and the OSD DISDI office to expose soldiers, airmen, sailors and civil service GEOINT personnel to more effective ways and means for employing business GEOINT resources against basingspace requirements. Likewise, the DISDI staff routinely provides a guest speaker to the GEOINT staff officer course offered by the DGI College to ensure best use us made of business GEOINT capabilities to support mission needs across the NSG.
TOWARDS A FUSED GEOINT CAPABILITY
While the past few years have shown evidence of the GEOINT door beginning to open to defense business GEOINT, more aggressive steps can still be taken to ensure full advantage of a fused GEOINT capability. Since a fused GEOINT would, by definition, meet the five goals of net-centricity, these same five goals offer an agenda for opening the GEOINT door wide to integrate business GEOINT efforts.
Visibility and Awareness: Are geospatial information resources discoverable? The availability of a DISDI portal and respective service portals would provide searchable catalogues of available geospatial features, imagery and associated descriptive metadata. In addition, it would be valuable for the DISDI office to “register” business GEOINT capabilities on the DoD Metadata Registry and DoD Service Registries, supporting both “known” and “unknown” users across the NSG.
Accessibility: Are business GEOINT resources and appropriate tools available to users on the GIG network? Again, this criterion requires that an unclassified DISDI and service portals be available that can always be consumed by more sensitive network enclaves.
Understandability: Can users from across all the domains make intelligent use from the geospatial information through shared semantics? Satisfying this criterion will require long-term close coordination and collaboration through the GEOINT Standards Working Group.
Interoperability: Can the geospatial information from across the domains be combined or compared with other information? Shared interoperability standards, such as those offered by the Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Standards Organization must be established within the Defense Information Standards Repository and implemented in a disciplined manner across the business, intelligence and warfighter domains.
Jointness: Are the semantics of geospatial information oriented to the joint warfighter or a specific group? Regardless of whether the “Blue Force” basingspace is in Alabama or Afghanistan, provisional joint force base commanders should benefit the most from the new situational awareness gained by extending business GEOINT efforts from garrison to the forward basing environment.
The GEOINT capabilities of the NSG are certainly second to no one. However, just as the threats to our nation continue to expand both abroad and at home, so too must our GEOINT capabilities more effectively expand to encompass the business GEOINT capabilities of basingspace with the existing GEOINT capabilities of the battlespace. ♦
