Q&A: Brigadier General Brian A. Keller
Written by Harrison Donnelly
GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 5 (October)
Brigadier General Brian A. Keller
Director of Military Support
NGA
Keller has served in numerous leadership positions, most recently as deputy chief of staff for intelligence (C-2) Multi- National Force-Iraq. Previous senior leadership tours include service as director of Intelligence (J-2), U.S. European Command; director of intelligence (J-2), Joint Special Operations Command (operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom); commander, 513th Military Intelligence Brigade (Operation Enduring Freedom); and service with the 10th Mountain Division (Light), 25th Infantry Division (Light), 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment (Operation Just Cause), and 2nd Armored Division.
Keller’s professional military education includes the Postgraduate Intelligence College, Army War College, School of Advanced Military Studies, the Army Command and General Staff College, and the Military Intelligence Basic and Advanced courses. He holds a master’s degree in advanced military studies from the Army Command and General Staff College, as well as a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Connecticut.
Keller was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: As the director of the newly established Office of the Director of Military Support [ODMS], what, in your view, is the office’s overall mission?
A: That’s a good question, but first I’d like to address the fact that we’re talking today on the eighth anniversary of al-Qaida’s horrific attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001. As someone who has spent a little more than three years deployed since 2001, I appreciate what our service men and women and their civilian counterparts are doing to protect our nation and defeat our enemies. I appreciate that even more as my own son, an infantry officer now with his rifle battalion in Iraq, stands watch in a hotbed of al-Qaida in Iraq activity. And many other employees here have sons and daughters deployed in harm’s way; we’re in this fight to win it.
As the saying goes, it takes a network to defeat a network, and NGA is a very important part of the network that is taking the fight to the enemy. We are extraordinarily good at it. First, we have deployed ‘coffee breath close’ with warfighters who need us. We are integrated with General Petraeus’ staff in Tampa, Fla., and with General Odierno and General McChrystal’s teams in Baghdad and Kabul. Just as important, we are embedded with brigade combat teams at forward operating bases in remote areas, where our troops take the fight to the enemy and work with the civilian population.
Our deployers are the best in the GEOINT business. They are incredibly well trained in their tradecraft, from providing geospatial and imagery analysis to deploying systems and architectures from fixed remote sites. They are motivated—each of our deployed civilian and military teammates is a volunteer. They deploy for the right reasons: They want to help our nation win the war, and they understand how much better they will be as GEOINT professionals when they return from combat. Finally, this agency knows how to leverage reach. It matters little where you are on the battlespace, only that you are contributing to the reduction of the target. From NGA headquarters in Bethesda, Md., to the Navy Yard, to St. Louis, Mo., and around the globe, NGA analysts provide 24/7/365 coverage for our deployed teammates.
Within this context, you should know that we see no nearterm ‘peace dividends’ in Iraq, meaning that NGA will sustain its commitment to General Odierno and his leaders. At the same time, we have substantially increased our presence in Afghanistan to meet General McChrystal’s requirements and needs. In just this last year, we have more than doubled our deployed footprint in Afghanistan, and expanded to more locations, while actually increasing our number of deployed personnel in Iraq. We’re able to do this because of the dedication and motivation of our all-volunteer work force. Today we have more than 500 employees on our NGA Volunteer Deployment Team. This includes not just imagery and geospatial analysts, but also data managers, communicators, tech supporters, staff officers, senior leaders and source strategists. It takes an agency to deploy such a magnificent force, and this agency does it extraordinarily well.
Q: What was the thinking behind the reorganization that created the office?
A: The ODMS represents a strategic shift in our organization. It started back last October, because of the wisdom of our director, Admiral Murrett, who saw the changes in the operational environment and an opportunity to seize on better synchronizing and coordinating our agency’s efforts to support deployed forces, to focus military support where it was needed and to best balance all of our agency’s commitments to the national intelligence community and our deployed forces. NGA realigned its military support under one organization, which we’ve called the Office of the Director of Military Support.
This realignment of resources has streamlined, integrated and helped us focus NGA support to its military partners. It’s also consolidated NGA’s combat support activities, which used to reside in five different organizations. This new construct really simplifies the military’s interaction with NGA, and reinforces NGA’s role as the Department of Defense’s preeminent combat support agency for all geospatial matters. It helps us execute in many ways our Executive Order 12333 requirements as the GEOINT functional manager for DoD and the intelligence community.
Also, ODMS maximizes NGA’s responsiveness to the military by ensuring that all of our NGA officers are working in concert— synchronized and coordinated, with great unity of effort. As the director of military support, I’m tasked with providing the best military advice to our director, Admiral Murrett, to help synchronize and integrate agency support for expeditionary operations, future war fighting capabilities and deployed NGA personnel. This is to ensure that we can provide timely, relevant and accurate geointelligence to warfighters and other government agencies. We align much of the management of NGA’s active duty and reserve military manpower, including pay, performance awards, deployments and professional development, in accordance with our key directives.
Q: What is the mission of the expeditionary operations component of your office and how do expeditionary operations enhance GEOINT delivery to NGA’s mission partners?
A: I’d start off with the fact that, in the ODMS, we have some of the most senior and experienced operators in the business. I appreciate what Admiral Murrett has done in building such a great team. The leaders who perform the role of expeditionary operations are the key. Our Expeditionary Operations (MD) team is responsible for synchronizing and integrating agency support for expeditionary operations, mostly focused on overseas combat zones. We’re also tasked with recruiting, preparing, training, deploying, sustaining and reintegrating our NGA Volunteer Deployment Team deployers. As required, they reinsert these deployers into the best places in the agency where they can continue to provide support. In short, the mission of the expeditionary operations component is to aggressively plan, deploy and sustain GEOINT capabilities for military and civilian expeditionary and crisis operations to support this vision. It’s really GEOINT support anywhere, any time.
Q: What role does the military readiness component play?
A: As the name implies, the Military Readiness Directorate ensures that our military services are ready from a geospatial intelligence perspective to deploy and accomplish their Title X missions. What we do here is synchronize and integrate GEOINT expertise and training, at appropriate times across the entire spectrum of activities, from initial systems development to final preparations for combat deployment. We have three offices that work this, as well as the Reserve NST support team, which taps into the great capabilities that our Reserve and National Guard forces provide. Within the directorate, we have an Office of Future Warfare systems, which provides GEOINT subject matter expertise to combat and materiel developers, to ensure that our future programs are using properly formatted NGA data and adhering to established data standards, which is very important for the out-years.
The military readiness office also contains our service NGA support teams, which focus on current operations, training brigade combat teams that are deploying to war to ensure that all of our military analysts are equipped with the same skill sets and technologies to assist their commanders. This office also coordinates input into all DoD readiness assessments, as well as NGA contributions to intelligence planning processes. We work through this office with the combatant commands to ensure GEOINT support is focused on their operational plans. There’s really a broad spectrum of activities that produce military units and systems that are GEOINT-ready for combat.
Q: What are you hearing first hand from the front lines/operating environment about the impact GEOINT is having in supporting the warfighter?
A: Our expeditionary operations director, Sammie Jackson, and I are deploying in a few days for Iraq, where we’ll be talking with General Odierno and his team. That’s how you get feedback. This will be my second trip to Iraq since I redeployed from that country in September 2008. I’ve also been to Afghanistan and many other places. It’s important to note that our director often travels to the CENTCOM AOR with his counterparts from DIA and NSA. Together, these three CSA directors get excellent snapshots of operational requirements, and this helps keep our focus and ensures integrated unity of effort.
The feedback comes first-hand from men and women who are deployed in harm’s way, and integrated, not only with General McChrystal’s and General Odierno’s staffs, but all the way down to brigade combat teams and out in remote sites. We’re at places like forward operating bases. We’re everywhere that we need to be to support our warfighters, so we get feedback every day. Our deployers get feedback on what I call every “cycle of darkness.” Every time they prepare a product and give it to a commander, and those men and women go out to execute missions, they come back that same night or the next morning, providing first-hand feedback to our GEOINT analysts. This is an incredible and immediate way for our deployers to directly learn about how their efforts contribute to winning the war.
The feedback is constantly and consistently outstanding, because what we are able to do is to provide commanders and those who go into harm’s way a very good understanding and ability to visualize the battlespace, both temporally and spatially. That enables them to make informed decisions. Together, this allows commanders not just to visualize the battlespace, but also to make informed decisions. What’s really wonderful is that this geospatial intelligence support provides the foundation for other disciplines, such as HUMINT, SIGINT and open source intelligence, to be leveraged to its fullest extent.
Q: You served as senior intelligence officer under General Petraeus in Iraq. How has your experience in that frontline position shaped what you hope to achieve at NGA?
A: As CENTCOM commander today, General Petraeus remains a brilliant leader in every way, tactically and strategically. When I returned to Baghdad in August 2007, many of my colleagues warned me that I faced an unenviable task as the Multi-National Force Iraq CJ2, providing intelligence to a commander who had more time in Iraq than any other soldier in our Army. But this worked to the intel team’s advantage, because General Petraeus was best postured to drive intelligence operations. He clearly articulated his requirements to best inform his strategic decisions and those of his subordinates. You couldn’t have had a better team in General Petraeus and General Odierno, who are very experienced combat leaders.
What I learned from that, and what I try to instill in our current NGA leadership, is the necessity of understanding the commander’s intent and the environment they must operate in. This is where GEOINT is key. We help those commanders visualize in time and space enemy patterns of life, bed-down locations, areas where there is insurgent activity and where there isn’t, and where we can expect IED attacks. Then we lay out the networks behind those IED attacks, both inside and outside Iraq and Afghanistan. This provides useful targeting information to our commanders but also helps people understand where the friendly forces can best operate, especially to best support the civilian population.
This is even more important in Afghanistan, where the key terrain is the HUMINT terrain. GEOINT, with many different foundational aspects of data, helps commanders understand who are the friendly tribal leaders, who might be more inclined to support the Taliban, who might be looking for more assistance from provincial reconstruction teams, and how we can best negotiate. With geospatial intelligence support, we can help commanders understand that framework. But it’s not just about the kinetic aspects. Today, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, geospatial intelligence support provides the full gamut of analysis in ways that many people might not recognize.
For example, we help the government of Afghanistan best understand where crops can be grown, and the effects of melting snow on rivers and valleys. We help State Department and USAID understand how best to employ their capabilities in support of local farmers and the tribes. We have helped Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq understand where to best place opportunities to grow economically and develop infrastructure, and where the threats are to that infrastructure—not just pipelines, but electricity producing capabilities as well. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we helped understand how best to secure polling sites for elections, so they would be fair and unfettered, and helped commanders reduce the threats to those sites, so the elections could go as well as they did.
Q: What steps are you taking to make NGA’s GEOINT combatsupport operations more effective and efficient? What key issues and challenges do you face?
A: It’s all about leading change, and that’s what our agency does best. We’re working very hard to identify additional areas where GEOINT can further the likelihood that missions can be accomplished more successfully. Unlike some other areas of intelligence collection, the utility of GEOINT products can cross from the special operations community all the way to USAID and UN support. We’re constantly looking for better ways to share our data across an ever-expanding customer base. This is critically important with all our allies. How do we give them data to empower them, both in an interagency and a coalition format?
Much of what we are able to bring to bear with geospatial intelligence can come from commercial imagery. Since we at NGA are the experts at exploiting and using commercial imagery and other forms of imagery, those products, already unclassified, become of great value to our customers who don’t necessarily have the opportunity to review secret intelligence. So commercial imagery becomes a very important method for us to inform our customers, both interagency and especially coalition, with geospatial intelligence support.
Also, we’re effectively improving our ability to effectively distribute this GEOINT to the last tactical mile. This is for bandwidth- challenged customers. We really want to partner with and encourage industry to ensure data standardization, joint sensor development, and improving the end to end processing, exploitation and dissemination of full motion video data. Those are some of the greatest challenges we face today.
Q: What would you like to see coming from industry for supporting warfighters in this area, both now and in the future?
A: We must partner not only with industry, but with academia as well. It’s key that we tap into their resources, not just in industry, but in the universities, with fellowships and other programs. I think there are three key areas for supporting the warfighter where GEOINT plays a critical role. These are safety of navigation, battlespace awareness and targeting. We’re working with the services, other intelligence partners and industry to improve capabilities in all three areas, as new weapons systems and ISR assets are developed for future advantage against our enemies. As the next generation of weapons systems and ISR capabilities are moving through DoD acquisition cycles, GEOINT is becoming more critical for the overall effectiveness of the system, and is being brought into program development at earlier stages than ever before.
Some of these key technologies that I would hope industry leaders would look at are designed to improve weapons precision, elevation detail, and knowledge of the surrounding environment. These are all very important for the future advancements in munitions design, navigation of air, sea and littoral landscapes, and the quality of the imagery products produced by a multitude of ISR sensors. This technology, for example in light detection and ranging [LiDAR], will also allow much more accurate understanding of the depth in the littoral regions needed by future weapons systems, such as the Marine Corps’ expeditionary fighting vehicle, which is a high speed, armed amphibious vehicle capable of transporting Marines from ships beyond the horizon.
Q: How does the operational environment in Afghanistan and other combat areas shape the geospatial needs and products provided to the warfighter, and the support you can provide?
A: The greatest challenges we face in Afghanistan are the tyranny of distance and time. This is impacted by the terrain and the weather. In a country the size of Texas, and without Interstate 10, our forces face many different challenges, from the deserts of Kandahar to the high mountains of the Hindu Kush. To support General McChrystal in securing the population, we have to be present—alongside the military forces and the great capabilities of our coalition and the interagency partners, who bring support to the local population. Presence remains key. Informing leaders out in those remote sites, at forward operating bases in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Kandahar becomes a great challenge for us in this operational environment, which is much different from Iraq.
Iraq is a much more modern, industrial age society with a modern infrastructure, for the most part, that doesn’t need to be built so much as repaired. In Afghanistan, however, the challenges are different—an infrastructure that needs to be built for the first time. This causes challenges for our personnel as they travel to bring support to remote sites. I saw a fascinating story recently about special forces soldiers who went to a remote site in the Hindu Kush mountains, at about 6,000 feet, to rescue an Afghan boy, who was taken to a military hospital and treated for a traumatic brain injury. In short order, our doctors were able not only to stabilize the boy, but also to return him to his village. Those kinds of constraints make it challenging for our teams to operate, but we’re able for the most part to get the right bandwidth to our leaders. We’re able to get that kind of support because of the dedication of our team here at NGA. ♦
