SIDE BY SIDE SUPPORT
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Support Teams (NSTs) project the power of geospatial intelligence to more than 100 locations at home and abroad. NSTs serve diverse mission partners—intelligence professionals, military professionals and first responders in time of natural and manmade disaster.
“NSTs provide ongoing service as the agency’s first-line representatives,” said NGA Director Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett. “It is the talent, expertise and dedication of our NST professionals around the world that give geoint users the responsive service and tailored support they need to solve intelligence and defense problems.”
NST professionals—aeronautical analysts, geospatial analysts, geodetic scientists and imagery analysts—are the public face of NGA’s geoint expertise. NST professionals represent the full range of disciplines, skills and talent developed within NGA, and they work side by side with NGA’s mission partners in the military services, combatant commands and federal agencies in the intelligence community (IC).
As early as 1987, the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), one of NGA’s predecessor organizations, forward-deployed liaison officers to coordinate the delivery of mapping and charting services to the joint commands and military services.
DMA soon formalized this arrangement by creating service teams and command teams, with the command teams functioning under DMA’s Operations Directorate and the service teams under the Acquisition and Technology Directorate. Back at DMA headquarters, military plans officers worked with the commands to define and document requirements, while civilian technical experts worked with the service and command teams to convert the requirements into executable production plans. This is how DMA supported the warfighter during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Desert Storm demonstrated for DMA and the warfighters the effectiveness of combining geospatial and imagery intelligence in precision warfare. This led to the next major change in the delivery of geoint: centralizing the separate geospatial disciplines in one agency. In October 1996, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) was created.
The new agency consolidated the work of DMA and the Central Imagery Office, Defense Dissemination Program Office and CIA National Photographic Interpretation Center. NIMA also assumed the duties for imagery exploitation, dissemination and processing that the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office had formerly held.
Moreover, the customer-service structure was realigned to support the new organizational structure. NIMA developed its own customer support teams (CSTs) based on the DMA service and command team model, but with greater reach. In addition to working with the military services and joint commands, as the DMA service and command teams had, NIMA CSTs also supported national customers such as the State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. Under NIMA, CST liaison officers worked on policy and planning issues with major customers, while technical representatives provided direct support to geospatial information systems at the lower echelons.
Even with this broader mandate, however, the teams differed from today’s NSTs in at least two significant ways. The NIMA CST of the late 1990s served primarily as a liaison between the customer and NIMA headquarters, and the forward-deployed structure did not include imagery analysts, who at that time worked from headquarters.
PROCESS REASSESSMENT
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks forced the entire IC to confront the reality that its methods of developing intelligence and delivering it to customers must change. Within days of the attacks, Air Force Lieutenant General James R. Clapper Jr. (Ret.) officially took command of NIMA.
What the new director found was that NIMA had already begun to reassess its business processes to determine how it could more effectively leverage technology to meet emerging, post-Cold War threats, including asymmetric terrorism. In 1999, because some in the policymaking community perceived that the three-year-old agency was still struggling toward defining its role within the IC, Congress had instructed the director of central intelligence and the secretary of defense to form a commission to review NIMA’s operations. One issue that the commission addressed in its report, delivered in December 2000, was the allocation—and location—of imagery resources.
As the commission reported, “From all accounts, the placement of NIMA imagery analysts at the military commands is highly productive: proximity to the allsource analyst, cognizance of the specific problem set, and collocation with other relevant sources of information all contributed to the heightened ability of the imagery analyst stationed at the commands. Yet [other members of the IC] … are bereft of such dedicated, on-site support.”
In the wake of September 11, the NIMA director moved what might have been evolutionary change into fast-forward mode. Along with DMA’s Customer Support Teams, NSA’s Cryptologic Support Groups (CSGs) served as a model for restructuring NGA’s customer-support operations. CSGs deployed teams of signals intelligence professionals side by side with their customers, not just to develop sigint products, but also to educate those customers about the range of sigint operations available for solving intelligence problems. The goal was to give them what they needed, which was often more than and different from what they said they wanted. Just as CSGs were the access point into sigint, NSTs became the access point for geoint.
Clapper consolidated imagery analysts, technical representatives (now called geospatial analysts) and all other deployed personnel under the customer-support organization. To clarify NIMA’s interface with its mission partners and emphasize the agency’s transformation as the locus of all geoint products and services, he gave the CSTs a new name—NIMA Support Teams (NSTs). Each NST had a designated chief who, along with his or her team, represented all of NIMA, not just an individual directorate. Customer service was no longer just a liaison function, with the actual production occurring back at headquarters. A team of deployed NIMA geospatial professionals now worked on site, collaborating with and educating the customer about geoint products and services.
NIMA became NGA in 2003 and NIMA Support Teams became NGA Support Teams. The creation of NSTs and the promotion of geoint as a separate intelligence discipline, as well as the promotion of NGA as the locus of geoint knowledge, expertise and resources, are the hallmarks of Clapper’s tenure.
NGA assigns its geoint specialists to the mission partner’s footprint for three to five years. These externally assigned personnel work on agency NSTs, command NSTs, international NSTs, service NSTs, service intelligence center NSTs and military-test-range NSTs, all of which provide tailored geoint support to meet their mission partner’s specific needs. They, along with NGA’s forwarddeployed personnel, also provide critical intelligence back to NGA.
What makes NSTs unique is that they are embedded within the mission partner’s organization and dedicated to working as a fully integrated member of that organization, while at the same time they are fully connected to the NGA mother ship. The reach back to NGA ensures that the necessary geoint resources are available for the specific geoint needs of the NGA partner.
Among its other findings, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9-11 Commission) concluded in its 2004 report that the intelligence community needed to be reconfigured, citing what it called “structural barriers to performing joint intelligence work.
“National intelligence is still organized around the collection disciplines of the home agency, not the joint mission,” the report said. “The importance of integrated, allcourse analysis cannot be overstated. Without it, it is not possible to ‘connect the dots.’ No one component holds all the relevant information.”
Today, NSTs are leading the way in IC collaboration, working alongside NGA’s mission partners every day to “connect the dots.” ♦
