Q&A: Letitia A. Long
GIF 2011 Volume 9: Issue: 8 (November/December)
Content More Accessible
Letitia A. Long
Director
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Letitia A. Long was appointed director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on August 9, 2010.
Prior to her appointment, Long served as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from May 2006 until July 2010. Previously, she was the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence (policy, requirements, and resources) from June 2003 until May 2006. She also served as the deputy director of naval intelligence from July 2000 to June 2003 and as the director of central intelligence’s executive director for intelligence community affairs from January 1998 to June 2000, where she was responsible for communitywide policy formulation, resource planning, and program assessment and evaluation.
Long entered civilian federal service with the Navy in 1978 as a project engineer in training with the David Taylor Research Center. Upon completion of her degree in 1982, she continued with the David Taylor Research Center for six years, working on various submarine acoustic sensor programs. In 1988, she joined the Office of the Director of Naval Intelligence, where she managed intelligence research and development programs.
Long was selected into the Senior Intelligence Executive Service in July 1994 and was dual-hatted as the director, Requirements, Plans, Policy, and Programs Office for the Navy intelligence staff, as well as the director of resource management for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). From 1994 to 1996, she was on rotational assignment from ONI to the DIA as the director of military intelligence staff. In 1996, Long joined DIA as the deputy director for information systems and services, where she directed DIA’s worldwide information technology and communications programs. She was also DIA’s first chief information officer.
Long earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from the Catholic University of America.
Long was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: In your recent remarks to the GEOINT 2011 Symposium, you addressed what had happened in the year since you outlined your vision of “Putting the Power of GEOINT in your hands.” How would you sum up your conclusions on what you have seen so far?
A: I am optimistic about the progress I’ve seen in implementing the NGA vision, and I want to see more. I’ve talked with so many of our GEOINT users, and they are ready for the changes we are delivering. There are a lot of good ideas out there that will create new value for our GEOINT users. The men and women of NGA and our partners from across the intelligence, defense, industry and academic communities are aggressively implementing the NGA vision.
In the first year, we laid the foundation necessary to make this vision a reality and generated important conversations throughout the agency and among our partners to align efforts, identify redundancies and build a roadmap for the way forward. We delivered several mobile applications, or apps, serving a variety of domestic and military mission sets. We also challenged the way we did business by establishing incubators and test beds—learning cells—based around real, operational intelligence mission sets. We purposefully applied new sources, analytic methodologies and new business practices to see what was possible and where we had gaps. All of this work culminated in the identification of a set of strategic initiatives. Each initiative is a set of integrated, objective-oriented, measured and timebound activities that are delivering key capabilities.
Taken together, the strategic initiatives will ensure our content is discoverable and accessible through an open IT environment, allowing GEOINT users—inside and outside of NGA—to operate in a self-, assisted- and full-service environment and enabling analysts to do deeper and richer analysis. This is about continuous improvement, and the work accomplished so far has whetted the appetite of the GEOINT users—whether they are customers, creators, contributors or collaborators.
Q: Your address devoted a considerable amount of time to demonstrating some of the new mobile apps being developed by NGA. How would you characterize progress in that area?
A: This is an area that has a great deal of growth potential. We’ve had great initial success with our application in support of the homeland security/domestic disaster support mission, sometimes building them on the fly in response to our analysts observing operations in the field. In addition, in support of our safety of navigation mission, we are delivering a mobile deviceenabled set of air navigation aids, helping to streamline our processes, get updated information to the user faster and reduce paper product generation.
We have worked with our community partners to develop applications for the warfighter to access commercial imagery and with our industry partners to help integrate geo-positioning capabilities. This area is clearly made possible by geospatially enabled content that is discoverable and accessible, a supportive open IT environment, and a customer service model that allows users to interact with content in a way that best suits their needs. We still have a lot of work ahead of us—work that is necessary to enable this new way of doing business and facilitate NGA’s transformation.
Q: Your 2010 vision also included a call for deepening analytic expertise. What do you see as the key accomplishments and challenges in that area?
A: Building and deepening analytic expertise is a top priority. A key component of building analytic expertise is understanding issues broadly and applying tradecraft to anticipate what the consumer will need. Over the past year, we have focused our analytic efforts and discussion around the intelligence questions of utmost concern to national security decision-makers. Beginning with new analysts, we have focused them on going beyond the GEOINT tradecraft and encouraging them to delve into a broader grasp of what’s happening in their area of responsibility— the leadership, demographics, population and so on. Armed with this broader knowledge, analysts can provide better context to their GEOINT analysis, participate more actively in community discussions, and help consumers understand the significance and implications of a course of events. Building expertise is a process, but all of these steps help contribute to an analyst’s grasp of an issue and our ability to answer the hard questions. But building expertise takes time—time on an account, time researching, reading and writing, time in training and academic work, and time discussing with colleagues. A key goal of the vision is to provide an analytic environment where analysts spend their time doing analysis and not waste their time looking for data, or building spreadsheets, or signing onto multiple systems. The realization of the vision will give analysts the time to do analysis, build their expertise and deepen our analytic understanding against some of the most challenging issues we face.
Q: What is your process for measuring achievements by your agency?
A: We recently approved a suite of metrics that we will use to determine our progress toward achieving our vision. Our metrics were selected to measure the extent to which we are achieving our objectives. These metrics measure progress in making content accessible and discoverable across the GEOINT community; creating an open IT environment where GEOINT applications can be shared and used; developing customer service processes to enable self-, assisted- and full-service capabilities; and strengthening analytic capabilities and processes to fully address key intelligence issues.
Our leadership will review the metrics on a quarterly basis to keep the agency on course for achieving our vision. Many of our measures focus on online capabilities using the model of spreading business via the web. These quantitative measures will identify whether our customers can easily access and use our GEOINT data, products and services to meet mission needs. They will also help us determine whether our online users are consuming, creating, collaborating or contributing during their online sessions. Other measures monitor our progress toward developing online self-service apps that our customers will use to consume our GEOINT data or create their own GEOINT products.
We also have metrics that focus on the value of our GEOINT analysis. We will determine if NGA is performing and publishing anticipatory analysis that focus on key intelligence questions. The expectation is that NGA’s intelligence will prepare our customers to anticipate potential national security issues and rapidly respond to them if they arise.
A very important aspect of our metrics program is customer satisfaction measures. We are building simple, online reviews to solicit customer feedback regarding the quality, relevance and timeliness of our online GEOINT products and services. In addition, we are conducting face-to-face interviews with our customers to determine whether the information technology and GEOINT content meets their needs and improves over time. These qualitative measures will provide valuable customer perspectives to enhance the assessments from the quantitative metrics.
Q: The theme of the recent symposium was “forging integrated intelligence.” What is NGA’s strategy for contributing to this widely acknowledged goal?
A: NGA is closely aligned with the director of national intelligence’s [DNI] strategy on integration, working closely with the national intelligence managers. Our strategy to support integration is based on collaborating with our counterparts, understanding the context and issues of our key consumers, and aligning GEOINT analysis accordingly. GEOINT, by its very nature, provides the critical underpinning to integrate all of the other INTs on many issues and naturally postures NGA to take a key role in forging integrated intelligence. Our goal is to ensure GEOINT plays an effective and key role in intelligence issues and support. Our proactive approach to reach out to our consumers or embed ourselves with them allows us to “show” them how the power of integration can be effectively enabled with GEOINT. This approach has and will continue to pay off major dividends.
Q: What do you see as NGA’s greatest challenges?
A: Among the agency’s biggest challenges is the constant struggle to achieve a proper balance between the demands to support our range of mission partners in the “current fight,” while at the same time planning in a very deliberate manner to effectively meet tomorrow’s strategic and operational requirements. As a combat support agency our highest priority is warfighter support, but at the same time the agency cannot neglect the longer term need to prevent strategic surprise and to understand developing threats over the horizon.
NGA support to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan includes both embedded and reach-back support—leveraging the analytic firepower of the NGA analytic corps at our NGA Support Teams and in NGA facilities. We have also been developing a cadre of analysts that can repeatedly deploy to corresponding geographic and functional areas, thus increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of support to operational forces, demonstrating that NGA is capable of adapting to the needs of our partners and providing insightful analysis and products that support a variety of intelligence needs.
Another challenge is the sheer amount of data in both types and amount from an ever-increasing list of sources, and the requirements to ingest, process, exploit and analyze it all in a way that becomes more meaningful to a decision-maker. The concurrent challenge is content management in deciding how much data to keep, where and for how long to store it, and how to do so in a manner that is discoverable and accessible. NGA is also working with the challenges of deepening our analysis, exploring new phenomenology and tradecraft to close key intelligence gaps, and dealing with the challenge of emerging threat detection through an increased focus on transnational and nonmilitary challenges, while tracking activity-based trends.
NGA’s traditional order-entry processes and supply chain model are outdated, and we are working to adapt our role from a legacy producer of product to a broader role as a GEOINT service and application provider that enables end-users to configure GEOINT according to the needs of specific users, particularly in the expanding mission areas of homeland security and disaster relief.
We are also working closely with our counterparts to address challenges in cyber-operations for the entire Department of Defense and intelligence communities and NGA’s growing role supporting lead agencies with geospatial intelligence to identify and locate cyber-threats. At the same time, we are taking the responsibility seriously to protect our own infrastructure from cyber-threats, and constantly working to that end.
As the GEOINT mission evolves, we also need to ensure NGA aligns its operating model with NGA’s vision, balance our resources in light of fiscal realities, and invest in initiatives that will provide lasting value for the entire GEOINT analytic enterprise. In light of the DNI and secretary of defense’s direction for agencies to assess where workforce efficiencies can be achieved, we have conducted extensive reviews of our current mission construct, doing away with unnecessary redundancies and obsolete technology and considering how we will position NGA to most effectively and efficiently close the gaps on key intelligence questions. We are also ensuring we uphold those interests most vital to our mission partners and pursue opportunities to leverage the full analytic capabilities of the National System for Geospatial Intelligence [NSG] and Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence [ASG].
Q: What topics have you been focusing on in your role as the functional manager the NSG?
A: My primary responsibility is the development, coordination and promulgation of standards across the NSG that apply to GEOINT systems, collectors, training and tradecraft. Effective management of standards serves to bind our community together, keep us in pace with industry common practices, and ensure interoperability of our technological solutions. My secondary responsibility for the NSG is ensuring that the GEOINT community aligns its resources and priorities. Inevitably, when budgets are ample, funds may not match up cleanly with priorities. However, in the declining budget environment, we must collaboratively re-evaluate our country’s greatest needs, decide who can provide them, and determine how we will pay for what is required.
To accomplish this, I initiated an NSG assessments program, which for the first time will develop a communitywide GEOINT baseline that illustrates our community’s capabilities and identifies programs that can be leveraged to avoid duplication. This undertaking will require time to complete, but the payoff will be worth it. The NSG has evolved over the past few years, and it is now mature enough to take on new challenges from a community perspective. This effort can only be successful with a unified community and a willingness to address these challenges jointly.
Q: NGA is one of five intelligence agencies working to restructure and consolidate IT programs, which DNI James Clapper suggested would need to bear a major share of anticipated budget reductions. What role do you see NGA playing in this, and what impact do you see on it?
A: There were actually four agencies initially working on this effort: NSA, NRO, DIA and NGA. Subsequently, the CIA became the fifth agency involved. To help put things into perspective, let me share a bit of the genesis for this effort. In November 2009, the directors of NSA, NRO, DIA and NGA signed a memorandum of understanding forming a collaborative partnership tasked to eliminate traditional information-sharing barriers and to improve cross-agency intelligence support among the four DoD agencies. This partnership came to be known as the Quad.
Information technology engineering and technical working groups representing the four agencies met over the last year and a half, leading to the concept, design and development of a common operating environment [COE] across the Quad. The working groups are divided into six integrated process teams [IPTs] with each team led by an agency representative. NGA is the lead for infrastructure services, which includes the base operating system and related services that enable the environment such as a consolidated user directory and virtualization services for a common desktop. Other teams include Undercarriage [for example, facility and hardware], Security, End User Service [email and other applications], Customer Care, and Operations and Maintenance. Each of the agencies, now including the CIA, contributes subject matter experts to work with the lead agency to deliver the team’s objectives. The structure of the IPTs enables each agency to work together delivering the COE while ensuring their unique intelligence services are available to the entire IC.
During 2010 and early 2011, there were two other strategic initiatives taking place that are now looking toward the COE as a shared or partial solution for their initiatives. First is the NGA vision of putting the power of GEOINT in the hands of the user, and second is the DNI’s IC IT Efficiency Study. The combined outcomes of these efforts support not only NGA’s goal to “broaden and deepen analysis,” but also the IC’s goal to “reduce IT across the IC and enhance information sharing and discovery.” In fact, the IC efficiency study group looked toward the Quad COE [now the Quint] initiative as a model for gaining IT efficiencies across the IC.
In support of Director Clapper’s vision, NGA has dedicated a senior executive to lead execution of the IC COE strategy. This strategy includes implementing network standardization; creating a new common domain; replicating common user services [email, security, suite of common applications, voice, video and chat]; and enabling an IC virtual desktop from any participating desktop, anywhere. We fully anticipate that the IC COE will become a solid foundation for the NGA vision of putting the power of GEOINT in the hands of the user, create new value by broadening and deepening analysis, and become the basis of IT efficiencies and budget savings for NGA and the entire IC.
Q: What are NGA’s goals and strategies in the field of “human geography” or “socio-cultural analysis”?
A: Human geography [HG] is an analytic approach used in describing spatial and temporal patterns of human behavior in the context of their environment. Incorporating HG into GEOINT analysis enables an analyst to fully consider the human element that is critical to understanding why people do what they do, where they do it, and how that influences the environment. HG is widely recognized in academia as the study of the world with people at the nexus. In the GEOINT context, we are talking about data and information derived typically from nontraditional sources that extend beyond the physical features of the earth, for example hydrography, geodetic control and coordinate system and terrain, or the human infrastructure, such as roads, buildings and power.
Deepening and broadening our analysis means integrating a wide range of political, economic, socio-demographic data and information that can be mapped to people and by extension to those associated locations and points in time. Humans are always connected to places on the earth at any point in time. Some human geography information is already incorporated in NGA data stores, such as place names and political boundaries. However, NGA recognizes that in one form or another, much more data and information exists and needs to be exploited. We are actively pursuing opportunities to partner across the NSG and ASG, to include industry and academia, in an effort to discover ongoing activities, identify and integrate new tradecraft, discover and address shared challenges, and seek cross-functional solutions.
Q: What do you see as the agency’s most significant steps in the past year in using commercial imagery, and where do you see that going in the future?
A: The Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security are among the many U.S. customers who rely on commercial imagery to support operations worldwide. In 2011, NGA used commercial imagery to quickly develop geospatial products to support operational planning and situational awareness for U.S. and coalition forces during the Libya crisis. Commercial imagery via the web-based Rapid Delivery of On-line Geospatial Intelligence is used routinely by U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to support mission planning, situational awareness and nation building. Commercial imagery provided current, shareable GEOINT in support of search, rescue and recovery during disasters such as the Midwest flooding and tornados, and for international humanitarian/disaster relief efforts, such as those following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
NGA’s commercial imagery program continues to respond to growing user demand by enabling easier online access, better quality imagery, enhanced spectral diversity, improved revisit timelines, and more complete foundational global coverage to support future contingency operations. NGA is also revolutionizing satisfaction of critical GEOINT requirements through a program that automatically orthorectifies single images into “map ready” GEOINT within 24 hours of satellite downlink, and then makes them available online, on-demand directly from the vendors. These new products provide the U.S. government and our coalition partners a high quality current image foundation built to Open Geospatial Consortium standards and available via web services.
NGA’s commercial imagery program is a key enabler of putting the power of GEOINT into the hands of the nation’s warfighters, coalition partners, first responders and IC. Commercial imagery is unclassified, shareable and enables self-service GEOINT analysis. It is the foundation upon which multiple layers of information are overlaid for predictive analysis, mission planning and a host of other governance activities.
Q: What impact do you think the new headquarters will have on the work of the agency in the future?
A: The recently completed deployment to our new NGA headquarters allowed us to unify our workforce in the east for the first time and create the conditions for NGA to achieve and harness significant, unrealized potential in a number of ways. NGA was intimately involved in all facets of the design from the earliest stages, meaning that the campus is purpose built to enable the workforce to deliver better geospatial intelligence.
Geographically, the consolidation from six separate sites scattered around the Washington, D.C., metro area to one location provides a mechanical advantage in our collaboration and communication both within the agency and among our mission counterparts within and outside the DoD and IC.
Technologically, the consolidation helped the agency to fundamentally transform our IT environment. We pushed adoption of virtualization—utilizing a mix of server, application, network, storage and desktop virtualization technologies— to reduce costs and improve performance. These technologies allow us to be much more agile in how we build and deploy new IT capabilities to our users around the world. We’ve also improved our ability to collaborate both within and outside the agency, by giving every employee access to secure and nonsecure phones and by integrating our video teleconferencing system with our partners on JWICS.
Operationally, the new facility includes a state-of-the-art, central NGA Operations Center where we are able to maintain a common operating picture of worldwide geospatial intelligence priorities, and communicate and orient to support our mission partners about what’s relevant in order to better help our clients.
Socially, the campus was designed to promote an environment of collaboration among the workforce, with a center of activity in the form of an atrium surrounded by meeting and gathering places that encourage collaboration and communication, a radical departure from “traditional, cave-like” workspaces seen in many federal buildings. As mentioned previously, the campus achieves people benefits through the consolidation of a good portion of the analytical workforce in one place, enabling more interface that helps with productivity. Workspaces and work stations are open and airy to encourage our workforce—particularly analysts—to collaborate with their peers on a continuous basis. Obviously too, for the large portion of the workforce at NGA Campus East [NCE] the advantage of being able to get up from your work station and visit a counterpart in any part of the building also improves our mission effectiveness and efficiency in ways we are just beginning to realize. Similarly too, the strength we gain through the NCE consolidation also certainly benefits the large St. Louis-based NGA workforce and other personnel worldwide locations in their dealings with NCE.
Q: Geospatial intelligence clearly played a key role in many of the military, intelligence and humanitarian operations of the past year. What lessons have you learned as a result?
A: That the power of GEOINT that NGA brings to decision-makers can help save lives and better accomplish a mission, whether it is under our Title 10 or Title 50 authorities, and that we can always get better. Putting the power of GEOINT in the hands of the user is something we need to improve, and we’re on the right track. It is not just about improving—making more efficient and effective—the mission partners’ use of GEOINT. It is also about NGA providing that deeper/broader analysis that enables better decision making at all levels, be that at the major agency level or at ground level with the individual warfighter or search and rescue team member.
Q: How are NGA’s recruitment and training programs faring in the face of the anticipated retirement of many key employees in the next few years?
A: NGA is committed to maintaining a strong talent pipeline and robust recruitment effort to meet future challenges. From a recruitment perspective, we are strengthening relationships through academic outreach and professional partnerships, and making more aggressive use of technology in our recruitment efforts.
For example, last year we improved our geographic reach by using Skype to conduct interviews, a step that has proven to be a timely and cost-effective method to interview qualified candidates all over the world. We are using our internship program to introduce students to the GEOINT business, and I am happy to report that applications for summer 2012 employment increased by over 50 percent from prior years, allowing us to continue to select highly qualified students from across the country.
While hiring will remain a priority, it is equally important to “build the bench” by affording our workforce with development opportunities to meet our current and emerging mission needs. The National Geospatial-Intelligence College’s extended learning sites and online courses provide a multitude of training opportunities for new and existing workforce to build upon and advance their skills.
In addition to traditional mentoring programs for analysts, we are establishing a new program within the National Geospatial-Intelligence College to record the history, experience and tradecraft successes of retiring members of our workforce in order to pass that knowledge on to newer employees to help broaden their perspectives and capitalize on the lessons of history. ♦
