Q&A: Donald M. Kerr
Recon Leader
Focusing Full Time on Overhead Reconnaissance
Donald M. Kerr
Director
National Reconnaissance Office
Donald M. Kerr became the 15th NRO director in July 2005. In October 2005, he was appointed as the assistant to the secretary of the Air Force (intelligence space technology).
Kerr was appointed deputy director for science and technology at CIA in August 2001. From October 1997 until August 2001, he was an assistant director of the FBI, where he was responsible for the Laboratory Division. His prior government service was with the Department of Energy from 1976 to 1979, where he served as deputy manager of Nevada operations, deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary for defense programs and later for energy technology.
In private industry, Kerr was executive vice president and director at Information Systems Laboratories in 1996-1997, corporate executive vice president and director at SAIC from 1993 to 1996, and president and director of EG&G from 1989 to 1992. He also served as EG&G’s senior vice president, and executive vice president, from 1985 to 1989.
From 1979 to 1985, Kerr served as the fourth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was also employed at Los Alamos from 1966 until 1976, conducting and leading research in high-altitude weapons effects, nuclear test detection and analysis, weapons diagnostics, ionospheric physics, and alternative energy programs.
Kerr received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, a master’s degree in microwave electronics and a doctorate in plasma physics and microwave electronics from Cornell University. He has published frequently on nuclear weapons efforts, national security and arms control, energy technology, and ionospheric research.
Kerr was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What is your role as director of NRO?
A: I’m the first full-time director of NRO. In the past, the director of NRO has also served, often in a politically appointed role, as an assistant secretary or undersecretary of the Air Force, and on three occasions as Secretary of the Air Force. It was decided more than a year ago that NRO was big and important enough that it needed someone to be engaged full time, rather than part time, as senior officer. I’m responsible for the operation of this joint venture between the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, and the programs that comprise the National Reconnaissance Program. Simply put, we’re responsible for developing, acquiring, launching and operating overhead “recon” systems to support the needs of both the intelligence community and DoD.
Q: Since becoming director in August 2005, what do you see as your chief accomplishments?
A: In terms of some of the things we’ve done on the operational side, we had the very successful launch of the last Titan IV on October 19, 2005. That was 49 years into the Titan program, and 200 launches, and it went perfectly, from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Subsequently, we launched the first Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle [EELV], which was the first to go from Vandenberg, and the first to go with an NRO payload. That too went perfectly. We’re proud of that, because we’ve had both ends of the spectrum on the heavy launch.
More importantly, we provide information every day to support troops and others engaged in the war on terrorism. So that, plus the emphasis on Iraq, is part of our mission. But it’s not the whole thing, because we really have two things we do. One is to support global situational awareness, because we have access globally from space—there’s no area denied to us. We provide policymakers as well as warfighters with the information they need imaging the whole earth.
The second thing that we’re doing as we evolve is to move from providing miracles once in a while, to aiding people who expect support in real time every day. Learning how to support the real-time fight or engagement is a challenge, because it implies automating a lot of the initial processing of the data that comes from our overhead systems, so that we can pass it either to our mission partners or directly to users in timeframes that fit their scenarios. We want an end-state where they would not have to wait for us.
Q: What are some of the key technological challenges facing your agency?
A: One way to think about this is that acquiring spacecraft that do the kinds of things that ours do is very different from acquiring an airplane. The profile in terms of the work and expenditures is different. The reason is that, at launch, you’ve lost forever the ability to fix it or change it. So for mission assurance, you have to invest a lot of engineering and be very certain about the quality of the parts that you are using—that they in fact are qualified for use in space, and can endure in that environment. You want to be very sure about your engineering, and you need to have great confidence in the teams that are doing the engineering and manufacturing of these vehicles. It can be everything from non-destructive testing, to the actual technologies being built into our systems. Some of the things are seemingly mundane, but very important. For example, if you have things that move in space, that means that you have bearings and surfaces. You have to think about whether this joint or bearing will survive for years on end in space with no one around to lubricate it.
Our spacecraft pass in and out of sunlight as they orbit the earth, so they’re in eclipse part of the time. We generate power using solar cells, but a very important thing is energy storage, because we have to have batteries aboard so they continue to operate when they are not sunlit. Fundamental battery technology, in terms of developing cells that will take many thousands of charge and discharge cycles, is important. In some cases, that’s an area of battery technology for which there is no civilian counterpart, other than civil spacecraft, which have the same problem. Often, NRO has led in investing in advances in these enabling technologies.
We also have to have ways to communicate data that we bring down, so wideband communications is part of what we do and need. I mentioned earlier the need to do the initial processing of the data, and in order to gain speed in delivering it to our mission partners and other users, that has to be done quickly and accurately, and disseminated as best we can. While some of what we do in terms of specific performance levels is classified, there are obvious things—if you do imaging, you’ve got to know how to do optics. If you collect electromagnetic signals, you have to know about antennas, amplifiers and all of the other equipment that has to be there, but it has to be space-qualified.
Q: What is the current status of the Space Radar program, and how should it be funded?
A: It’s a very important program, which is intended to serve both national intelligence needs, as well as specific DoD needs for the combatant commanders. Because it serves the broader community, it is appropriate for the funding support over time to come from both communities that will benefit from it. At the present time, it’s funded in the Air Force budget. Over time, I expect that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will be picking up a share of the support, to reflect the fact that it supports national intelligence as well as DoD missions. People other than me will no doubt negotiate the fair share.
Q: You responded recently in the press to a report that the Chinese had beamed a laser at one of our satellites. What actually happened, and how are you addressing the long-term issue of protecting our space resources?
A: I’d like to correct the record on that. There has been press coverage of alleged Chinese anti-satellite capabilities. I was responding hypothetically, because the question was asked in the context of whether we need to think about the vulnerability and survivability of our systems. My point was that if there had been such a test, it would raise our sensitivity in terms of thinking about this. We already do. After all, our systems started out during the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union had a co-orbital anti-satellite capability. We had to think about it a long time ago, and it’s no surprise that we still think about it. If in fact the Chinese or others are developing such capabilities, we need to be ready to figure out how to avoid it or defeat it.
Q: What is the Battlespace Visualization Initiative?
A: The Battlespace Visualization Initiative System is not so much to help our mission, as to help others get the most out of what we do. This software application allows, for example, a combatant commander to know what the national systems are covering, so that if he has regional assets, such as manned aircraft or UAVs, he can send them against the targets the national systems are not covering. Therefore, he gets more out of the total than he would if they were doubling up on the same targets. BVI is used in Iraq and Afghanistan. It enables people responsible for ISR assets to employ them more effectively in conjunction with the support they get from the national systems.
Q: What are you doing to enhance NRO’s key ground-based systems?
A: You control space systems from the ground. While I said earlier that we can’t go and change the satellite, we can in fact change the ground-based component. That’s where we can most quickly be responsive to new needs and develop new capabilities. Even though what NRO is capable of doing started in a different era, our ability to adapt our systems to today’s needs has all been done on the ground. It’s by linking different kinds of sensors together, for example, that you get the idea that one might collaboratively task rather than task system by system. You might want part of the whole constellation focused on a particular problem.
Another part of that is how we bring the benefits of modern information technology to our problem set. The starkest way to put it is that we’re moving from a time when we had a collector-dominated world, and the collectors would “push” out what they thought was important data, to a future that will be a user-dominated world, where they will “pull” the information they want. Well, there’s a lot of mischief in between those two statements. Where do you store the data? How do you tag it? How do you associate the meta-data that explains what it is and what to do with it? How do you allow access to people who need to add value in terms of analysis and further dissemination? We’re looking at different architectures in terms of the IT part of that space system to move into the future.
It’s worth adding that our closest mission partners for dealing with high volumes of information are NGA for imagery and NSA for the SIGINT world. So, we’re very bound together as partners.
Q: How do you view your agency’s relationship with the commercial space, IT and geospatial industries?
A: The NRO is only about 3,000 government people, so the majority of the work we do is done by our contractors and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. About 95 percent of our total resources go outside. Our mission support from industry is a key to our success. We deal with some of the very large prime contractors, and with smaller and specialty firms for certain areas of technology development. We fund R&D activities, both in industry and laboratories around the country. The one area we don’t do a lot with is the geospatial industry, and that’s because our mission partner, NGA, is the one that buys from them.
Q: What is the EELV, and what role do you see for it?
A: The EELV program is led by the Air Force, which is our partner in that. We buy all our launch vehicles through the Air Force, so we don’t have separate contracts with the companies that build Atlas and Delta. Those are the only heavy-lift vehicles being built in the United States. Our access to space is absolutely dependent on the success of the EELV program. We’ve launched on Atlas and Delta, and will continue to use both. As you may know, they are two different families of launchers that have two different booster technologies. That’s part of maintaining a certainty that we’ll have access to space. We will also benefit from the recently approved United Launch Alliance—a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture—that will combine the EELV capabilities of the two companies while still preserving both the Delta IV and Atlas V EELV lines necessary to maintain launch schedules and reduce risk as the program matures.
Q: What are you doing to support forces in Southwest Asia?
A: We are very engaged along with our mission partners in supporting the activities in Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pakistan border area, and have assisted with the tsunami relief efforts in Indonesia. We try to provide as close to real-time support for the troops that are engaged in that theater, and have made a significant contribution to the fight. NRO capabilities are fundamental elements used across the entire spectrum of conflict.
Q: What lessons have you learned about the role of space-based reconnaissance in tactical operations?
A: I think everyone now is aware that the U.S. military is dependent on space systems for its operations. It’s everything from situational awareness to mission planning, communications, and positioning, navigation and timing. There is no way that the U.S. government can go into a conflict without support from space systems, including those that the NRO is responsible for.
Q: You mentioned that you are the first person to hold the position of NRO director exclusively, rather than also holding a senior Air Force position as well. In the absence of that connection, what are you doing to maintain coordination with the military?
A: We’ve worked hard on that, and there are two pieces to it. First of all, I do have a connection to the Air Force, since I serve as an assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force. Perhaps more importantly, the chief of staff of the Air Force and I recently put out a statement of intent to deal with a problem, which we didn’t create. When, on the defense side, they stood up the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the line from the Secretary of Defense to me began flowing through that office, rather than the Air Force. But about half the NRO workforce is Air Force, and 10 percent is Navy. So we agreed on a number of things. I have a second deputy, Air Force Major General John T. “Tom” Sheridan, who is the senior Air Force officer at NRO, and as such is in charge of the Air Force element here. I’m providing the deputy director of operations at Air Force Space Command, who is an NRO civilian.
interdependent, to improve what we’re doing there and invest jointly in the things needed to get better mission assurance of the launch. We’re linking operations centers between the Air Force and NRO to ensure continuity of operations, in case one or the other goes out of action due to a power failure or other cause. Because we draw on a common pool of people, we’re doing career management of Air Force space professionals jointly. I have a parallel problem on the other side, which is that about 40 percent of the people here are CIA. When the DNI was created, he was no longer also director of CIA. So in a similar way, working with CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden, we’re fixing the disenfranchisement of the CIA component of NRO as well.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: One of the noteworthy things about NRO that is different from a lot of other agencies of the government that are involved in developing technology-based capabilities is that we’re involved from birth to death. Not only do we develop, acquire and launch, but we also operate, which means that we get constant feedback informing us for future development or improving ground capabilities. That’s a very important aspect. We’re not building something and saying, “It’s yours—go make the best of it.” That’s a very special attribute of NRO. A second thing is the makeup of the personnel here, who are all volunteers. They come from the military services and the intelligence community, and the fact that they are here for the mission is a very important thing to recognize.
I mentioned mission partners, which are a growing set. As modern technology allows new ways to sense phenomenology, we’ll add mission partners, not subtract, because we’ll be working with people whom we haven’t traditionally worked with before. So there are lots of imperatives there. The other thing is that we’re exquisitely wellpositioned to deal with transnational issues. Terrorism is one, and proliferation of nuclear and other weapons is another. Countering narcotics trafficking and certain kinds of criminal activity—these are all things that don’t recognize borders. We have the ability to observe in denied areas—the ungoverned areas of the world, such as Afghanistan was in a way. We’re the kind of capability that policymakers can call on first, because they know that we’re only one pass away from giving them information about what’s going on now. ♦
