Q&A: Colonel Stuart Harrison
GEOINT EDUCATOR:
Bringing an Academic Focus to Geospatial Training
Interview with
Colonel Stuart Harrison, Commandant
The School of Geospatial-Intelligence
National Geospatial-Intelligence College
Bringing an Academic Focus to Geospatial Training
Interview with
Colonel Stuart Harrison, Commandant
The School of Geospatial-Intelligence
National Geospatial-Intelligence College
Army Colonel Stuart G. Harrison is commandant of The School of Geospatial-Intelligence of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a DoD Joint Service School located on Fort Belvoir, Va.
Harrison attended the U.S. Military Academy and was commissioned in 1983 as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. After attending the Officer Basic Course and the Defense Language Institute, he was assigned to the 512th Artillery Group, which provided nuclear munitions support to II (German) Corps. He then served at Fort Campbell, Ky., from 1987-1990, as a staff officer and company commander in the 20th Engineer Battalion.
From 1992 to1995, Harrison was an assistant professor and the department executive officer in the department of chemistry at West Point. In 1996, he transferred to Fort Bragg, N.C., for assignment as the XVIII Airborne Corps staff engineer and as the executive officer for the 37th Engineer Battalion.
In 1998, he joined the Office of the Department of Defense Inspector General as a technical representative for environmental audits and base realignment and closure reviews, and then served as the military assistant to the inspector general. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he deployed to Kuwait for duties with Army Central Command-Kuwait, as the garrison commander of Camp Doha in support of the Combined Forces Land Component Command. In 2003, he transferred to the Office of the Chief of Legislative Liaison on the Army Staff and served as a legislative liaison to Congress.
Since 2004, he has been assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), serving as the associate military executive before assuming duties as commandant of The School of Geospatial-Intelligence (formerly the Defense Geospatial-Intelligence School).
Harrison holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Military Academy and a Master of Science in environmental engineering from Penn State.
Harrison was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What is the mission of The School of Geospatial-Intelligence [TSG] at the NGA College?
A: Our school is within the National Geospatial-Intelligence College. It’s one of two schools in the college, the other being the James R. Clapper Jr. School of Leadership and Professional Development. Our mission is to train and educate geospatial intelligence in all forms for the DoD, the intelligence community, other federal agencies—which is a huge and growing mission for us—and our international partners. Our perspective of training GEOINT is according to the National System for Geospatial Intelligence [NSG].
Q: What types of training does the school provide?
A: The training goes to both military and civilians, at the basic, intermediate and advanced levels. TSG provides technical training focused on geospatial intelligence, but may be as simple as order of battle, where we train our civilian analysts to recognize a tank or an artillery piece, or teach basic commercial GIS software programs to our military students. But regardless of our topic or student, what we focus on is our academic program. Our training has evolved over time. In the not-so-distant past, we were a customer-focused organization, with two schools of geospatial intelligence. One was focused on DoD—aptly named the Defense Geospatial Intelligence School—and the other was the School of Geospatial Intelligence and Systems Training, which focused on NGA.
Two years ago the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence College, Sandra Wilson, gave me the mission to combine the two geospatial schools, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my military career, including Ranger School and Sapper School. Just as NGA did, in bringing two cultures together, we brought two separate schools, with much different cultures, into one. My deputy, Dave Dougherty, came on board at that time as deputy dean of the school, and we focused on our academic program. So we took organizations that were responsive to customers, and very responsive to their needs, and instead examined our academic program. We asked, what do we want to be in terms of a functional manager for GEOINT training? We established the mission of being the center of excellence for geospatial intelligence training and developed an academic program around that goal.
We started asking, what do we really teach? We provide an analysis curriculum that we teach primarily for civilians—new NGA employees who are going into an analytic occupation. Another one is geospatial technology-based, as we are a software-focused organization, applying commercial GIS programs for the military training programs for the Army and Marines. We also have the curriculum for advanced geospatial intelligence [AGI]. AGI is a misnomer, as we see more sensor-based phenomenology. We formed a department around the full spectrum of remotely sensed data that analysts use today. Then there are also two other departments, which focus on systems training—how to gain the information you want—and source acquisition, or how to find the image and how to ask for it.
We went from a customer-focused to a curriculum-focused organization. Each of those academic departments feeds into our programs. So whether we have a military or civilian analyst training program, the curriculum is coming from the same place. That gives us a common base across the GEOINT community—they’re all learning the same thing, which makes it easier to maintain and update.
What we’re trying to find is the commonality between civilian and military GEOINT training. Some would find that rather obvious, but others say that makes a lot of sense, because they are learning the same discipline. It’s a little bit different with the services than the civilian applications that NGA analysts need, but they’re much closer than most people would imagine. We’re taking advantage of that, incorporating into one holistic curriculum, which is used not only by the military and civilians in NGA, but throughout the whole federal government.
Q: How is the school structured to provide this training, and how has it changed during your tenure?
A: As I mentioned, we have brought the two schools together into one academic program base. So while we defined ourselves before in terms of customers, with NGA and DoD, we now define ourselves in terms of the academic program. We believe that we are focused and structured to take advantage of our academic program and that we’re greater than the individual partners we have. We are the school of geospatial intelligence for the national system. We look to our international partners, who look to us to ask how are you organized, and where you see yourselves evolving in the future. We’ve talked to our Canadian peers, and we’re traveling to the United Kingdom soon.
Q: How are you using technology to provide instruction, both in the classroom and elsewhere?
A: That’s a two-part question, because we have to understand both the technology applications and the needs of the learners of today. Technology has definitely improved what we do. Just 10 years ago, our students were on light tables, and we had few digital labs in the school. We’ve evolved to the point now where we don’t have any manual tables—much to the chagrin of some of our more experienced analysts. The opportunity to use technology has greatly improved our instruction by enabling students to learn at a faster rate and for our curriculum to be updated more quickly.
But equally important is recognition of the capacity and thinking processes of the learner of today. The students we have coming in today grew up in a multi-tasking environment. They want to be challenged, and sometimes their attention span is not that of the past. We need to accommodate these learning differences as we update our curriculum. We also want to establish a blended distance-learning environment, as there are only two ways to provide instruction today—either I come to you or you come to me. We train about 9,000 people a year, both in resident training and through mobile training teams [MTT]. Last year we put about 250 MTTs on the road throughout the world, some into the CENTCOM area of responsibility, and some just across the street to other federal agencies in the local area. We take that mission very seriously.
The problem with putting people on the road is that it’s expensive and time consuming. The college is looking at a number of ways of bringing blended learning into GEOINT training. Blended learning encompasses the spectrum and is everything from simple computer-based training, going through a set of PowerPoint slides and maybe having a few questions at the end, all the way to the other end of the spectrum, where you’re in a video teleconference once or twice a week with an instructor and class of students, where you’re going through problem solving with a group, just as you might have done back in high school, except you’re doing it in a virtual environment. All that is good to talk about, but why haven’t we done it yet? One reason is that there is cost of the technology, and with our New Campus East facility being operational in three years, we’ve made a conscious decision to await that development.
There’s the learning environment, where technology is helping us, and there is also the new technology, coming from new sensor and software systems, which we have to teach. We try to stay on top of advances in technology, because it translates back to how well we can do our GEOINT mission.
Q: How are you adapting to and challenging the contemporary learner?
A: The contemporary learner is interesting because he or she challenges our instructors as much as our curriculum. Our instructors are finding that they can teach at a faster rate, because there is a greater ability to assimilate information. But we’ve also found that we have to go back and review the basics. Some of our students coming in may not have the math or other skills that we had anticipated, and part of that is important for the curriculum we’ve developed.
The other thing is that the contemporary student today thrives in a team environment. They like a collaborative learning environment and don’t want to learn in isolation. They also tend to perform as a team when they go out to the work force. So that’s been a change in our learning environment. We’ve established three new classrooms that mirror the work environment. So they’re training in a work environment, versus a row of computers on a table. They’re doing a lot more collaborative learning.
Q: What differences do you encounter between civilian and military students and associated GEOINT training?
A: There are two different cultures, but the people are the same. When we look at military and civilian training, they are distinct within the school. But they’re complementary. We see opportunities in the future to take advantage of this paradigm. Today, we train all imagery analysts [IAs] and geospatial analysts [GAs] civilians for NGA. They train together in our classrooms—IAs and GAs together in our Geospatial Intelligence Training Program [GITP]—and we take advantage of those complementary roles. I believe that IAs and GAs will always be distinct work roles as it’s too much to try to train and develop the “uber-analyst” who is an expert in both areas.
The NGA executive leadership has looked at combining the work roles, but we’ve stopped that development for the time being, because there are a lot of questions still to be answered. My perspective is that we would lose something if we combined those roles. IAs and GAs are very distinct, but the GA and IA occupations, both in the civilian and military work environments, are most effective when they work together instead of separately. So we train IAs and GAs for the civilians at NGA, and all the GAs for the Army and Marines—the Army’s are geospatial engineers [MOS 21Y] and the Marines are in MOS 0261, which is geographic intelligence specialist.
The interesting perspective is that the services still train their IAs at their service intel schools. So the imagery analysts are trained at Goodfellow AFB, Texas, for the Air Force, at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., for the Army, and at Dam Neck Training Support Center, Va., for the Navy. The services obviously are focused on providing imagery analysts focused on their specific service needs. One of our challenges in the future is helping the services do their imagery analysis education, as well as incorporating them into where we see the GEOINT training model going in the future.
At the basic level of knowledge for GEOINT programs, everyone is learning the same type of material. What NGA has done well is to recognize that, so that IAs and GAs are trained together at the basic level. It’s not until they get to their workplace and intermediate and advanced training that they focus on their specialty. That synergy of working together creates an analyst who’s able to thrive in today’s environment, where a lot of the products we’re asked to make are basic level. Then when you have some specialized analysis to do, the more experienced analyst can do that. The military currently trains those basic-level people separately. We see in the future a synergy from bringing them together and training them in much the same way that we train civilians. Then when they get to the intermediate and advanced level, they can get more specialized training for imagery or geospatial analysis.
Q: What do you see as the most critical needs for GEOINT training in the NSG?
A: I think we’ve done well in organizing ourselves for DoD and the intelligence community. We have focused on making sure we can meet the basic needs for instruction, including at advanced levels, for our work force there. What I don’t think we’ve done well is with the huge demand from other government agencies. Homeland security’s growth is indicative of an area that we want to move into, and they want us there as well. Equally important are state and local law enforcement agencies. We’ve worked with the FBI and done some train-the-trainer activities with law enforcement to give them knowledge and curriculum, so they can train their employees in how to use geospatial information as part of geo-profiling and other activities of interest to law enforcement.
So the most pressing needs for GEOINT training in the NSG are outside of what we have looked at as our more typical customers in NGA and DoD—other federal agencies and in the international community. At one time, a forerunner of my school had a strong topographic basis with many foreign countries. Our mission focus changed as we’ve focused on GEOINT consolidation and NIMA grew up into NGA. I think we’ve developed to the point where we’re going to fully assume our functional manager responsibilities outside of NGA by working with foreign partners, doing production agreements and training them in GEOINT.
Q: How have you modified or expanded training in response to the needs of forces operating in Southwest Asia?
A: I’ll go back to what we just talked about—greater collaboration between the military parts of GEOINT, between imagery analysts and geospatial analysts. NGA analysts are trained in a combined analytical environment, and they gain a lot from that synergy. But for military geospatial analysts, whether Marines or Army, the first time that they may train with their counterparts on the imagery analysis side may be when they deploy. That’s unfortunate, because we’re missing the opportunity for each to learn what the other does. We have an initiative where we’ve sent geospatial engineers to Fort Huachuca on a trial basis, to see how that could be worked into a training scenario there. The results were good, and we’re seeing how we can build on those in the future.
We sent some students, instructors and subject matter experts out to Fort Huachuca to see how the students would work together. It was successful, and they all got something out of it. We want to get people working together so they understand each other before they deploy. So that’s one way that we have tried to help deploying forces, by encouraging them to work GEOINT together before they deploy. That’s an initiative of [NGA Director] Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, whose perspective is that he always had the same team as they trained for deployment. But we don’t always see that with our deploying forces currently. It would be good for GEOINT to encourage that anyway we can, and we’ve taken some initiative to enable that at the Army level. The Marines already do that as part of their new training program, and we’re encouraging that.
We’ve also modified and expanded training in other ways. Our MTTs have gone from about 100 per year four years ago to last year’s 250—two-and-a-half times growth. Most of that growth is for deploying units or those that are preparing to deploy, prepping their soldiers who work in GEOINT to be able perform in the combat environment. We’ve also developed a deployment technical preparation course [DTPC], which is a two-week internal NGA course designed to refresh analysts on software programs and analytical needs that they will encounter in CENTCOM. So every person who’s going to deploy will go through this two-week course, to refresh them on skills they will need downrange, introduce new concepts or software packages, and also acclimatize them to the intense type of work they will be doing. No training regime can ever mirror what goes on in theater, but we can at least prepare them for what they will face.
I’d like to highlight some other efforts in the global war on terrorism environment as well. We have a wonderful diversity in terms of our faculty and staff here at the school. We get people who are coming straight out of an operational environment. So they can bring their own examples to help reinforce the GEOINT training concept. We’re constantly refreshing our curriculum with fresh experiences from the front line. Our civilian cadres are also part of NGA deployment, and they come back with that as well.
My perspective is that we have different sets of graduates from the school each year. Obviously there are the students, both civilian and military, who go through our courses, graduate and then go to their workplace. We also have our instructors, primarily military but some civilians as well, who leave us for their next assignment, where they are the geospatial-intelligence experts. As the subject matter experts, they are tapped when in the field. One of our former instructors is now responsible for training the new Iraqi geospatial agency. He’s in Baghdad now helping to stand that up. We’ve expanded training by making sure that our instructors don’t just know their little slice of GEOINT, but understand the broader perspective, so that when they leave here they are truly subject matter experts in all things GEOINT.
We’ve also expanded our activities with NATO. One of our staff recently attended the inaugural NATO imagery orientation course, which was organized to meet NATO’s needs because of its expanded role in Afghanistan. The goal of the course was to familiarize students with the processes that NATO uses, the cutting-edge technology that NATO has developed and buys off the shelf. NATO is facing many of the same issues we do, in managing the plethora of information, disseminating it and gaining access for the guy on the ground all the way up to the national level.
Q: Does the training of geospatial analysts and imagery analysts require different approaches? Can these two work roles be combined into one occupation?
A: That’s a very topical question, and one that’s important for the agency. Discussions are still going on about combining both. We’ve seen how the DMA and the National Photographic Interpretation Center can be combined into NGA, and NGA has achieved outstanding success in providing support to DoD and the intel community as a unitary operation. However, IAs and GAs are much different occupations and work roles. They have different ways of processing information. Although we don’t teach tradecraft here, we train the original subjects, and we’ve seen that the learning patterns of these two sets of students are different. The geospatial engineer/analyst is very graphically focused. They’re mapmakers, and they are very precise in the ways they do things.
The IAs are also precise, but they’re much more spatially aware. They look at patterns, and we’ve tried to develop their critical thinking skills so that they think “out of the box.” Both occupations need to do that in their own ways, but it’s very interesting to watch the two sets of students go through a course together. The GAs and IAs will break out separately, and when they come back together, they bring a whole new context to the problem they are solving. It’s fascinating to watch them work together. At the basic level, the GEOINT analyst can provide those kinds of products. It’s when you get into the more advanced things that they really start to specialize.
The other thing is that the concept of GEOINT analysis covers a broad spectrum. The learning environment for IAs and GAs at the basic level should be about the same. Keeping them together at the basic level helps with cross-pollination. When I go out to the field to talk to people who have been through our course, I ask what kinds of advanced training they want. Nine times out of 10, the IAs say they want to learn more about the GA stuff, and the GAs say they want to learn more imagery analysis. They want to know more about the other’s field, not to be a specialist but to solve broader problems that require products from both areas.
Q: What do you see as the obstacles and challenges to effective GEOINT education?
A: I see opportunities for GEOINT education to grow into the perspective of where the NSG needs us. The obstacles there are resource-based—we never have enough for what we would like to do. However, there are also obstacles that are not GEOINT education, but the education of GEOINT—here’s what geospatial intelligence is and what it can do for you. Combining imagery intelligence and geographic information into that fused nexus known as GEOINT is so powerful in demonstrating why the different areas work so well together. We think we need to go out and help advance what GEOINT is, training the power that is equally important as the technical training of the individual aspects of GEOINT. For us, the most important focus is to positively reinforce why collaboration is important, both within the military services and the federal government, and reinforce that through a demonstration of where GEOINT is today, and where it can be in the future. We have a role not just in training GEOINT, but in promoting it as well.
Q: What are some of the initiatives and new programs that you have launched or sponsored during your tenure?
A: The most fundamental approach that we’ve taken is a holistic review of our curriculum. We’ve made sure from a developmental standpoint that our curriculum supports other departments. The growth of new curriculum has been along the lines of the growth of new technology. If we have an emerging sensor package that we need to have training on, we make sure that we have training that is incorporated into the curriculum not as a stovepipe, but also into our programs, including our Geospatial Intelligence Training Program for civilian analysts, or our Community Geospatial-Intelligence Analyst Course [CGAC], which is for mid-level NCOs from all four services. We incorporate those training packages into those courses to make sure those topics are introduced. The integrated approach is very important in how we’re doing things.
We also see an explosion of requirements using secure communications networks. We have not trained with secure communications before, but now we are doing so for our analysts, especially military analysts, because that’s the environment they’re going to be working on in the future. We’ve worked hard to bring secure e-mail into our classrooms, and that’s going to progress in the future. Interestingly, we’ve also looked at some areas that we talked about in the past, but were not sure how to train, such as full-motion video, or how to use an airborne platform. Even commercial, such as the opportunity presented by the NextView contract satellites, is a different way of approaching GEOINT that we need to address in our curriculum.
Another challenge is that GEOINT is still a relatively new term, the real power of which comes from the fusion of imagery intelligence and geospatial information. Getting the community to recognize and believe in that is a challenge. You’ve got to constantly tell them what the definition is and what it means, and how that applies back to the warfighter. There’s no power in maintaining separate entities. The other piece is mission planning using GEOINT. We have to teach folks how to incorporate GEOINT into their mission planning. Certainly they’re used to it from a geospatial environment, in terms of a map of where they’re going, but they also need to understand the power of the full spectrum of analysis gained from analyzing different types of data.
Then there is the technology piece. In the past, and even today, technology is delivered, and then we have to figure out how to teach it. We’ve got to partner more closely with the acquisition community to ensure that training is being developed in parallel with technology, so that we’re able to take advantage of it as soon as it is available, rather than spending time to catch up. You’ve got to get engaged in the acquisition process.
Another initiative that we’re proud of is taking our CGAC course on the road. We’ve challenged ourselves to think of our program as not being just at Fort Belvoir, but as open to the entire community. To do that, we’re taking the CGAC program to the Navy’s intelligence training school in Virginia, where Commonwealth personnel will be able to participate. For the first time, we’ll have foreign partners attending an analysis course at an NGA facility. It’s a 59-day course, and the Commonwealth has eagerly accepted the invitation.
Q: How do you see GEOINT training and the NSG changing in the future?
A: I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities in New Campus East facility, of which the college will be an integral part. That presents many opportunities and challenges. The opportunity to be collocated with the production floor is one of the critical advantages that we will have. At our St. Louis, Mo., facility, we see the school collocated with our production facilities, so we can have subject matter experts come off the production floor, teach as an adjunct instructor, and then go back to the workplace. Here at Fort Belvoir, that’s more difficult because of time and distance factors. Admiral Murrett has talked about how another organization has been broken into seven locations, and the challenge of making that work. We’ve done well at NGA at making it work, but the opportunity at the new facility will be outstanding.
The technology and improved communications that the new facility will bring us will be even better for learners. Right now, we are working with an adequate IT infrastructure that works for us. But to get to the next level would take investment that we’re not going to do in our current facilities. By moving into the New Campus East, we’re going to skip one or two generations of IT infrastructure, and take it to the highest level possible. What a great opportunity! At the same time, we’re going to be adopting a distributed-learning environment. We’ve already made the programs and plans within New Campus East to allow this to occur. We’re going to have classrooms dedicated to blended learning, which can be distributed through video teleconferencing to classes around the world.
Also in the future is our continuing focus on accreditation. The college recently was re-accredited by the Council of Occupational Education. It was a large milestone for us, because it shows that we have the right standards in place as a learning institution. Our next level in the future is taking our accreditation role and going out to other schools to help them achieve the same. It’s an expansion of our functional management role, to be able to help other programs out there in the NSG to have a common standard, and therefore a common program, so we can have more interaction across disciplines. Someone who is trained in the Air Force can go work in an Army environment and will have the same background and set of standards. That will give us a tremendous amount of flexibility and power. We certainly can’t train every GEOINT analyst within the confines of our agency. But if we take our curriculum, make sure that it is SCORM- [Sharable Content Reference Model] compliant and has the sharable content that we can promote and export, and give it to all and let them train. So we become a center of excellence not just for content, but also for how to train.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I’ve had the privilege of being in charge of this school for the past three years, and it’s been the most rewarding and outstanding assignment I’ve had in my 25-year military career. If I have any finishing thoughts, it’s that I only see positive growth in the future. NGA has grown from its roots to become a much greater organization, as has The School of Geospatial Intelligence, which has grown from its roots as a customer-based organization to an academic-focused institution. ♦
Harrison attended the U.S. Military Academy and was commissioned in 1983 as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. After attending the Officer Basic Course and the Defense Language Institute, he was assigned to the 512th Artillery Group, which provided nuclear munitions support to II (German) Corps. He then served at Fort Campbell, Ky., from 1987-1990, as a staff officer and company commander in the 20th Engineer Battalion.
From 1992 to1995, Harrison was an assistant professor and the department executive officer in the department of chemistry at West Point. In 1996, he transferred to Fort Bragg, N.C., for assignment as the XVIII Airborne Corps staff engineer and as the executive officer for the 37th Engineer Battalion.
In 1998, he joined the Office of the Department of Defense Inspector General as a technical representative for environmental audits and base realignment and closure reviews, and then served as the military assistant to the inspector general. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he deployed to Kuwait for duties with Army Central Command-Kuwait, as the garrison commander of Camp Doha in support of the Combined Forces Land Component Command. In 2003, he transferred to the Office of the Chief of Legislative Liaison on the Army Staff and served as a legislative liaison to Congress.
Since 2004, he has been assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), serving as the associate military executive before assuming duties as commandant of The School of Geospatial-Intelligence (formerly the Defense Geospatial-Intelligence School).
Harrison holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Military Academy and a Master of Science in environmental engineering from Penn State.
Harrison was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What is the mission of The School of Geospatial-Intelligence [TSG] at the NGA College?
A: Our school is within the National Geospatial-Intelligence College. It’s one of two schools in the college, the other being the James R. Clapper Jr. School of Leadership and Professional Development. Our mission is to train and educate geospatial intelligence in all forms for the DoD, the intelligence community, other federal agencies—which is a huge and growing mission for us—and our international partners. Our perspective of training GEOINT is according to the National System for Geospatial Intelligence [NSG].
Q: What types of training does the school provide?
A: The training goes to both military and civilians, at the basic, intermediate and advanced levels. TSG provides technical training focused on geospatial intelligence, but may be as simple as order of battle, where we train our civilian analysts to recognize a tank or an artillery piece, or teach basic commercial GIS software programs to our military students. But regardless of our topic or student, what we focus on is our academic program. Our training has evolved over time. In the not-so-distant past, we were a customer-focused organization, with two schools of geospatial intelligence. One was focused on DoD—aptly named the Defense Geospatial Intelligence School—and the other was the School of Geospatial Intelligence and Systems Training, which focused on NGA.
Two years ago the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence College, Sandra Wilson, gave me the mission to combine the two geospatial schools, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my military career, including Ranger School and Sapper School. Just as NGA did, in bringing two cultures together, we brought two separate schools, with much different cultures, into one. My deputy, Dave Dougherty, came on board at that time as deputy dean of the school, and we focused on our academic program. So we took organizations that were responsive to customers, and very responsive to their needs, and instead examined our academic program. We asked, what do we want to be in terms of a functional manager for GEOINT training? We established the mission of being the center of excellence for geospatial intelligence training and developed an academic program around that goal.
We started asking, what do we really teach? We provide an analysis curriculum that we teach primarily for civilians—new NGA employees who are going into an analytic occupation. Another one is geospatial technology-based, as we are a software-focused organization, applying commercial GIS programs for the military training programs for the Army and Marines. We also have the curriculum for advanced geospatial intelligence [AGI]. AGI is a misnomer, as we see more sensor-based phenomenology. We formed a department around the full spectrum of remotely sensed data that analysts use today. Then there are also two other departments, which focus on systems training—how to gain the information you want—and source acquisition, or how to find the image and how to ask for it.
We went from a customer-focused to a curriculum-focused organization. Each of those academic departments feeds into our programs. So whether we have a military or civilian analyst training program, the curriculum is coming from the same place. That gives us a common base across the GEOINT community—they’re all learning the same thing, which makes it easier to maintain and update.
What we’re trying to find is the commonality between civilian and military GEOINT training. Some would find that rather obvious, but others say that makes a lot of sense, because they are learning the same discipline. It’s a little bit different with the services than the civilian applications that NGA analysts need, but they’re much closer than most people would imagine. We’re taking advantage of that, incorporating into one holistic curriculum, which is used not only by the military and civilians in NGA, but throughout the whole federal government.
Q: How is the school structured to provide this training, and how has it changed during your tenure?
A: As I mentioned, we have brought the two schools together into one academic program base. So while we defined ourselves before in terms of customers, with NGA and DoD, we now define ourselves in terms of the academic program. We believe that we are focused and structured to take advantage of our academic program and that we’re greater than the individual partners we have. We are the school of geospatial intelligence for the national system. We look to our international partners, who look to us to ask how are you organized, and where you see yourselves evolving in the future. We’ve talked to our Canadian peers, and we’re traveling to the United Kingdom soon.
Q: How are you using technology to provide instruction, both in the classroom and elsewhere?
A: That’s a two-part question, because we have to understand both the technology applications and the needs of the learners of today. Technology has definitely improved what we do. Just 10 years ago, our students were on light tables, and we had few digital labs in the school. We’ve evolved to the point now where we don’t have any manual tables—much to the chagrin of some of our more experienced analysts. The opportunity to use technology has greatly improved our instruction by enabling students to learn at a faster rate and for our curriculum to be updated more quickly.
But equally important is recognition of the capacity and thinking processes of the learner of today. The students we have coming in today grew up in a multi-tasking environment. They want to be challenged, and sometimes their attention span is not that of the past. We need to accommodate these learning differences as we update our curriculum. We also want to establish a blended distance-learning environment, as there are only two ways to provide instruction today—either I come to you or you come to me. We train about 9,000 people a year, both in resident training and through mobile training teams [MTT]. Last year we put about 250 MTTs on the road throughout the world, some into the CENTCOM area of responsibility, and some just across the street to other federal agencies in the local area. We take that mission very seriously.
The problem with putting people on the road is that it’s expensive and time consuming. The college is looking at a number of ways of bringing blended learning into GEOINT training. Blended learning encompasses the spectrum and is everything from simple computer-based training, going through a set of PowerPoint slides and maybe having a few questions at the end, all the way to the other end of the spectrum, where you’re in a video teleconference once or twice a week with an instructor and class of students, where you’re going through problem solving with a group, just as you might have done back in high school, except you’re doing it in a virtual environment. All that is good to talk about, but why haven’t we done it yet? One reason is that there is cost of the technology, and with our New Campus East facility being operational in three years, we’ve made a conscious decision to await that development.
There’s the learning environment, where technology is helping us, and there is also the new technology, coming from new sensor and software systems, which we have to teach. We try to stay on top of advances in technology, because it translates back to how well we can do our GEOINT mission.
Q: How are you adapting to and challenging the contemporary learner?
A: The contemporary learner is interesting because he or she challenges our instructors as much as our curriculum. Our instructors are finding that they can teach at a faster rate, because there is a greater ability to assimilate information. But we’ve also found that we have to go back and review the basics. Some of our students coming in may not have the math or other skills that we had anticipated, and part of that is important for the curriculum we’ve developed.
The other thing is that the contemporary student today thrives in a team environment. They like a collaborative learning environment and don’t want to learn in isolation. They also tend to perform as a team when they go out to the work force. So that’s been a change in our learning environment. We’ve established three new classrooms that mirror the work environment. So they’re training in a work environment, versus a row of computers on a table. They’re doing a lot more collaborative learning.
Q: What differences do you encounter between civilian and military students and associated GEOINT training?
A: There are two different cultures, but the people are the same. When we look at military and civilian training, they are distinct within the school. But they’re complementary. We see opportunities in the future to take advantage of this paradigm. Today, we train all imagery analysts [IAs] and geospatial analysts [GAs] civilians for NGA. They train together in our classrooms—IAs and GAs together in our Geospatial Intelligence Training Program [GITP]—and we take advantage of those complementary roles. I believe that IAs and GAs will always be distinct work roles as it’s too much to try to train and develop the “uber-analyst” who is an expert in both areas.
The NGA executive leadership has looked at combining the work roles, but we’ve stopped that development for the time being, because there are a lot of questions still to be answered. My perspective is that we would lose something if we combined those roles. IAs and GAs are very distinct, but the GA and IA occupations, both in the civilian and military work environments, are most effective when they work together instead of separately. So we train IAs and GAs for the civilians at NGA, and all the GAs for the Army and Marines—the Army’s are geospatial engineers [MOS 21Y] and the Marines are in MOS 0261, which is geographic intelligence specialist.
The interesting perspective is that the services still train their IAs at their service intel schools. So the imagery analysts are trained at Goodfellow AFB, Texas, for the Air Force, at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., for the Army, and at Dam Neck Training Support Center, Va., for the Navy. The services obviously are focused on providing imagery analysts focused on their specific service needs. One of our challenges in the future is helping the services do their imagery analysis education, as well as incorporating them into where we see the GEOINT training model going in the future.
At the basic level of knowledge for GEOINT programs, everyone is learning the same type of material. What NGA has done well is to recognize that, so that IAs and GAs are trained together at the basic level. It’s not until they get to their workplace and intermediate and advanced training that they focus on their specialty. That synergy of working together creates an analyst who’s able to thrive in today’s environment, where a lot of the products we’re asked to make are basic level. Then when you have some specialized analysis to do, the more experienced analyst can do that. The military currently trains those basic-level people separately. We see in the future a synergy from bringing them together and training them in much the same way that we train civilians. Then when they get to the intermediate and advanced level, they can get more specialized training for imagery or geospatial analysis.
Q: What do you see as the most critical needs for GEOINT training in the NSG?
A: I think we’ve done well in organizing ourselves for DoD and the intelligence community. We have focused on making sure we can meet the basic needs for instruction, including at advanced levels, for our work force there. What I don’t think we’ve done well is with the huge demand from other government agencies. Homeland security’s growth is indicative of an area that we want to move into, and they want us there as well. Equally important are state and local law enforcement agencies. We’ve worked with the FBI and done some train-the-trainer activities with law enforcement to give them knowledge and curriculum, so they can train their employees in how to use geospatial information as part of geo-profiling and other activities of interest to law enforcement.
So the most pressing needs for GEOINT training in the NSG are outside of what we have looked at as our more typical customers in NGA and DoD—other federal agencies and in the international community. At one time, a forerunner of my school had a strong topographic basis with many foreign countries. Our mission focus changed as we’ve focused on GEOINT consolidation and NIMA grew up into NGA. I think we’ve developed to the point where we’re going to fully assume our functional manager responsibilities outside of NGA by working with foreign partners, doing production agreements and training them in GEOINT.
Q: How have you modified or expanded training in response to the needs of forces operating in Southwest Asia?
A: I’ll go back to what we just talked about—greater collaboration between the military parts of GEOINT, between imagery analysts and geospatial analysts. NGA analysts are trained in a combined analytical environment, and they gain a lot from that synergy. But for military geospatial analysts, whether Marines or Army, the first time that they may train with their counterparts on the imagery analysis side may be when they deploy. That’s unfortunate, because we’re missing the opportunity for each to learn what the other does. We have an initiative where we’ve sent geospatial engineers to Fort Huachuca on a trial basis, to see how that could be worked into a training scenario there. The results were good, and we’re seeing how we can build on those in the future.
We sent some students, instructors and subject matter experts out to Fort Huachuca to see how the students would work together. It was successful, and they all got something out of it. We want to get people working together so they understand each other before they deploy. So that’s one way that we have tried to help deploying forces, by encouraging them to work GEOINT together before they deploy. That’s an initiative of [NGA Director] Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, whose perspective is that he always had the same team as they trained for deployment. But we don’t always see that with our deploying forces currently. It would be good for GEOINT to encourage that anyway we can, and we’ve taken some initiative to enable that at the Army level. The Marines already do that as part of their new training program, and we’re encouraging that.
We’ve also modified and expanded training in other ways. Our MTTs have gone from about 100 per year four years ago to last year’s 250—two-and-a-half times growth. Most of that growth is for deploying units or those that are preparing to deploy, prepping their soldiers who work in GEOINT to be able perform in the combat environment. We’ve also developed a deployment technical preparation course [DTPC], which is a two-week internal NGA course designed to refresh analysts on software programs and analytical needs that they will encounter in CENTCOM. So every person who’s going to deploy will go through this two-week course, to refresh them on skills they will need downrange, introduce new concepts or software packages, and also acclimatize them to the intense type of work they will be doing. No training regime can ever mirror what goes on in theater, but we can at least prepare them for what they will face.
I’d like to highlight some other efforts in the global war on terrorism environment as well. We have a wonderful diversity in terms of our faculty and staff here at the school. We get people who are coming straight out of an operational environment. So they can bring their own examples to help reinforce the GEOINT training concept. We’re constantly refreshing our curriculum with fresh experiences from the front line. Our civilian cadres are also part of NGA deployment, and they come back with that as well.
My perspective is that we have different sets of graduates from the school each year. Obviously there are the students, both civilian and military, who go through our courses, graduate and then go to their workplace. We also have our instructors, primarily military but some civilians as well, who leave us for their next assignment, where they are the geospatial-intelligence experts. As the subject matter experts, they are tapped when in the field. One of our former instructors is now responsible for training the new Iraqi geospatial agency. He’s in Baghdad now helping to stand that up. We’ve expanded training by making sure that our instructors don’t just know their little slice of GEOINT, but understand the broader perspective, so that when they leave here they are truly subject matter experts in all things GEOINT.
We’ve also expanded our activities with NATO. One of our staff recently attended the inaugural NATO imagery orientation course, which was organized to meet NATO’s needs because of its expanded role in Afghanistan. The goal of the course was to familiarize students with the processes that NATO uses, the cutting-edge technology that NATO has developed and buys off the shelf. NATO is facing many of the same issues we do, in managing the plethora of information, disseminating it and gaining access for the guy on the ground all the way up to the national level.
Q: Does the training of geospatial analysts and imagery analysts require different approaches? Can these two work roles be combined into one occupation?
A: That’s a very topical question, and one that’s important for the agency. Discussions are still going on about combining both. We’ve seen how the DMA and the National Photographic Interpretation Center can be combined into NGA, and NGA has achieved outstanding success in providing support to DoD and the intel community as a unitary operation. However, IAs and GAs are much different occupations and work roles. They have different ways of processing information. Although we don’t teach tradecraft here, we train the original subjects, and we’ve seen that the learning patterns of these two sets of students are different. The geospatial engineer/analyst is very graphically focused. They’re mapmakers, and they are very precise in the ways they do things.
The IAs are also precise, but they’re much more spatially aware. They look at patterns, and we’ve tried to develop their critical thinking skills so that they think “out of the box.” Both occupations need to do that in their own ways, but it’s very interesting to watch the two sets of students go through a course together. The GAs and IAs will break out separately, and when they come back together, they bring a whole new context to the problem they are solving. It’s fascinating to watch them work together. At the basic level, the GEOINT analyst can provide those kinds of products. It’s when you get into the more advanced things that they really start to specialize.
The other thing is that the concept of GEOINT analysis covers a broad spectrum. The learning environment for IAs and GAs at the basic level should be about the same. Keeping them together at the basic level helps with cross-pollination. When I go out to the field to talk to people who have been through our course, I ask what kinds of advanced training they want. Nine times out of 10, the IAs say they want to learn more about the GA stuff, and the GAs say they want to learn more imagery analysis. They want to know more about the other’s field, not to be a specialist but to solve broader problems that require products from both areas.
Q: What do you see as the obstacles and challenges to effective GEOINT education?
A: I see opportunities for GEOINT education to grow into the perspective of where the NSG needs us. The obstacles there are resource-based—we never have enough for what we would like to do. However, there are also obstacles that are not GEOINT education, but the education of GEOINT—here’s what geospatial intelligence is and what it can do for you. Combining imagery intelligence and geographic information into that fused nexus known as GEOINT is so powerful in demonstrating why the different areas work so well together. We think we need to go out and help advance what GEOINT is, training the power that is equally important as the technical training of the individual aspects of GEOINT. For us, the most important focus is to positively reinforce why collaboration is important, both within the military services and the federal government, and reinforce that through a demonstration of where GEOINT is today, and where it can be in the future. We have a role not just in training GEOINT, but in promoting it as well.
Q: What are some of the initiatives and new programs that you have launched or sponsored during your tenure?
A: The most fundamental approach that we’ve taken is a holistic review of our curriculum. We’ve made sure from a developmental standpoint that our curriculum supports other departments. The growth of new curriculum has been along the lines of the growth of new technology. If we have an emerging sensor package that we need to have training on, we make sure that we have training that is incorporated into the curriculum not as a stovepipe, but also into our programs, including our Geospatial Intelligence Training Program for civilian analysts, or our Community Geospatial-Intelligence Analyst Course [CGAC], which is for mid-level NCOs from all four services. We incorporate those training packages into those courses to make sure those topics are introduced. The integrated approach is very important in how we’re doing things.
We also see an explosion of requirements using secure communications networks. We have not trained with secure communications before, but now we are doing so for our analysts, especially military analysts, because that’s the environment they’re going to be working on in the future. We’ve worked hard to bring secure e-mail into our classrooms, and that’s going to progress in the future. Interestingly, we’ve also looked at some areas that we talked about in the past, but were not sure how to train, such as full-motion video, or how to use an airborne platform. Even commercial, such as the opportunity presented by the NextView contract satellites, is a different way of approaching GEOINT that we need to address in our curriculum.
Another challenge is that GEOINT is still a relatively new term, the real power of which comes from the fusion of imagery intelligence and geospatial information. Getting the community to recognize and believe in that is a challenge. You’ve got to constantly tell them what the definition is and what it means, and how that applies back to the warfighter. There’s no power in maintaining separate entities. The other piece is mission planning using GEOINT. We have to teach folks how to incorporate GEOINT into their mission planning. Certainly they’re used to it from a geospatial environment, in terms of a map of where they’re going, but they also need to understand the power of the full spectrum of analysis gained from analyzing different types of data.
Then there is the technology piece. In the past, and even today, technology is delivered, and then we have to figure out how to teach it. We’ve got to partner more closely with the acquisition community to ensure that training is being developed in parallel with technology, so that we’re able to take advantage of it as soon as it is available, rather than spending time to catch up. You’ve got to get engaged in the acquisition process.
Another initiative that we’re proud of is taking our CGAC course on the road. We’ve challenged ourselves to think of our program as not being just at Fort Belvoir, but as open to the entire community. To do that, we’re taking the CGAC program to the Navy’s intelligence training school in Virginia, where Commonwealth personnel will be able to participate. For the first time, we’ll have foreign partners attending an analysis course at an NGA facility. It’s a 59-day course, and the Commonwealth has eagerly accepted the invitation.
Q: How do you see GEOINT training and the NSG changing in the future?
A: I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities in New Campus East facility, of which the college will be an integral part. That presents many opportunities and challenges. The opportunity to be collocated with the production floor is one of the critical advantages that we will have. At our St. Louis, Mo., facility, we see the school collocated with our production facilities, so we can have subject matter experts come off the production floor, teach as an adjunct instructor, and then go back to the workplace. Here at Fort Belvoir, that’s more difficult because of time and distance factors. Admiral Murrett has talked about how another organization has been broken into seven locations, and the challenge of making that work. We’ve done well at NGA at making it work, but the opportunity at the new facility will be outstanding.
The technology and improved communications that the new facility will bring us will be even better for learners. Right now, we are working with an adequate IT infrastructure that works for us. But to get to the next level would take investment that we’re not going to do in our current facilities. By moving into the New Campus East, we’re going to skip one or two generations of IT infrastructure, and take it to the highest level possible. What a great opportunity! At the same time, we’re going to be adopting a distributed-learning environment. We’ve already made the programs and plans within New Campus East to allow this to occur. We’re going to have classrooms dedicated to blended learning, which can be distributed through video teleconferencing to classes around the world.
Also in the future is our continuing focus on accreditation. The college recently was re-accredited by the Council of Occupational Education. It was a large milestone for us, because it shows that we have the right standards in place as a learning institution. Our next level in the future is taking our accreditation role and going out to other schools to help them achieve the same. It’s an expansion of our functional management role, to be able to help other programs out there in the NSG to have a common standard, and therefore a common program, so we can have more interaction across disciplines. Someone who is trained in the Air Force can go work in an Army environment and will have the same background and set of standards. That will give us a tremendous amount of flexibility and power. We certainly can’t train every GEOINT analyst within the confines of our agency. But if we take our curriculum, make sure that it is SCORM- [Sharable Content Reference Model] compliant and has the sharable content that we can promote and export, and give it to all and let them train. So we become a center of excellence not just for content, but also for how to train.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I’ve had the privilege of being in charge of this school for the past three years, and it’s been the most rewarding and outstanding assignment I’ve had in my 25-year military career. If I have any finishing thoughts, it’s that I only see positive growth in the future. NGA has grown from its roots to become a much greater organization, as has The School of Geospatial Intelligence, which has grown from its roots as a customer-based organization to an academic-focused institution. ♦
