Q&A: Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett
MISSION SUPPORTER:
Providing Effective GEOINT for Military and Intelligence Needs
Interview with
Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett
Director
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett was appointed director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) on July 7, 2006. Prior to his appointment, Murrett had been serving as the director of naval intelligence since April 1, 2005.
After receiving his commission in the Navy, Murrett was assigned as an afloat intelligence officer, including Mediterranean, North Atlantic and western Pacific deployments aboard USS Kitty Hawk, USS America and USS Independence.
Following assignment to the Defense Intelligence College in 1980, Murrett was detailed to the Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot as a watch stander and briefing officer for Navy civilian and military leaders. From 1983 to 1985, he served as assistant intelligence officer for the commander of the Second Fleet. He participated in deployments to the North Atlantic, the European theater and the Caribbean aboard USS Mount Whitney and USS Nassau. Between 1986 and 1988, he was assigned as assistant naval attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway.
In 1989, Murrett reported to the commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, where he was assigned as operational intelligence officer. From 1992 to 1995, he served as assistant chief of staff, intelligence, for the commander, Carrier Group Eight, and deployed to the European and Central Command theaters aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt. He was also assigned as J2 CJT F 120 aboard USS Wasp for operations in the Caribbean.
Between 1995 and 1997, the future NGA director was assistant chief of staff, intelligence, for the commander, Second Fleet, serving concurrently as N2 for NATO’s Striking Fleet Atlantic and as J2 for U.S. Atlantic Command’s CJTF 120. From June 1997 to September 1998, he was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations Staff as executive assistant to the director of naval intelligence.
In 1998, Murrett became director of the Intelligence Directorate of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and assumed the duties of commander, Atlantic Intelligence Command (AIC) the following year. He was responsible for the transition of AIC to Joint Forces Intelligence Command in October 1999. From 2000 to 2002, he served as director for intelligence, U.S. Joint Forces Command, and from 2002 to 2005 as vice director for intelligence, J2, on the Joint Staff.
A graduate of the University of Buffalo, Murrett received master’s degrees in government and strategic intelligence from Georgetown University and the Defense Intelligence College, respectively.
Murrett was interviewed by MGT editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: You’ll be addressing the GEOINT Symposium 2008 in October. What message would you most like to get across to geospatial intelligence experts in government and industry?
A: One message is the importance of the work we do with our partners of all types, whether in government, the international community or industry. The relationships we have with our vendors and contractors are a key part of what we do at NGA. We have a heavy reliance on all of them to balance our considerable mission sets and the demands that exist for NGA by the military support we provide for the Department of Defense as well as our role as part of the intelligence community under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In addition, I would emphasize the reliance that so many people have upon us, as represented by all the externally assigned personnel that we have from NGA, and the tremendous difference they are making every day.
Q: What is NGA’s expeditionary mission, and what are you doing to carry it out?
A: NGA’s expeditionary role is something that has historically been a strength of this organization, certainly going back to the days of NIMA and before. Based on the demands of the nation, especially since 2001, this organization has stepped up smartly to the responsibilities we have to deploy NGA personnel overseas to combat zones and to locations where they make sure that the GEOINT that we’re responsible for is most effectively utilized by the people in whose footprint we operate.
We currently have NGA personnel assigned to roughly 25 different locations in the Middle East, where they are fully embedded with other partners from across the defense intelligence and civil agencies. They are in a position to ensure that we provide the GEOINT products and services in ways that can be most effectively absorbed and utilized, in this case by the military partners that we have in combat zones.
That’s a consistent best practice of this organization that we implement for a wide variety of military and civilian personnel around the world. One of the most telling statistics about NGA is that we have externally assigned personnel from our organization at more than 150 locations around the world. Managing that responsibility and making sure we have our people in the right places is one of our biggest challenges. At the same time, it is also one of the biggest dynamics that we have as an organization in terms of the payoff and the difference that they make because of the fact that they live in the footprint of the people who depend on us to make sure they have what they need from NGA.
Q: Can you give us some examples of the work of NGA Support Teams?
A: The NGA Support Teams [NST] that we have at different locations execute a wide variety of missions. Some specific examples that would be useful include the NSTs we have across the defense intelligence and civil agencies here domestically to provide support for a variety of mission sets such as at the FBI, entities that are part of the DHS, and, not least, on short notice for contingencies and natural disasters such as the California wildfires that we had last year. The way that that team provided support forward is also an example of how the technology is advancing.
As part of that evolution, we were able to post on our unclassified Website, which is accessible to everyone with access to the Internet, overhead commercial imagery and air-breather collections relative to wildfires, as well as a variety of other mapping products that gave specific locations of where they were. This was, all in the open domain on the NGA.mil Website.
On the other hand, NSTs in Asia and Europe have responsibility for a lot of our international relationships, and do great work in terms of leveraging the connections we have with foreign counterpart organizations. They help make sure we are dovetailing our efforts with our allied partners as effectively as possible.
A third example of our NSTs are the ones that we have assigned to the combatant commands of the military services. These are a tremendous mechanism for making sure that the NGA mission sets provide the combat support functions that are very much at the core of our mission.
Q: In what ways will the new headquarters being built for NGA improve the effectiveness of the agency?
A: It will make us a far more effective agency, a far more effective part of the intelligence community, and a far more effective part of DoD. I say that because the real importance of the new building is what happens outside of the building, and what we do in terms of our partnerships with other elements across the defense intelligence and civil agencies, and with our international partners.
One point I would make in terms of the new building in Springfield, Va., at the Engineer Proving Grounds, which is part of Fort Belvoir, is that it is ahead of schedule. I can’t say enough for the terrific job that the Army Corps of Engineers has done in taking primary responsibility for the construction of that building. It will make us far more effective as an agency, because when it is completed in three short years, we will have all of our personnel in the National Capital Region located in one area. We won’t have to spend nearly as much time as we do now going from location to location in this wonderful Washington, D.C.-area traffic that we’ve all come to know and love. At the same time, our facilities in St. Louis, Mo., will be more important than ever because of the vital continuity of operations that they represent and the unique production capabilities that we have between the facilities in St. Louis and in Arnold, Mo.
But to put it in context, the most important thing is that it is a mission deployment to the new location. It’s about us executing our mission, and most importantly of all, about us executing our mission more effectively as part of the larger defense intelligence and civil agencies team that we work with. We took the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation folks down there a week or two ago, and they were amazed by the scale of the construction and what a terrific campus it will be.
Q: Do you see progress in managing NGA’s need for storage of massive amounts of geospatial data?
A: There’s been tremendous progress because of our relationship with industry. My sense in the aggregate is that the advances being made in technology are actually happening more quickly than our requirements for data storage. For us it’s a big issue because the geospatial mission set is very demanding in terms of data storage. We probably put as much pressure on that part of the system as any entity in government, particularly because of the evolution of certain kinds of geospatial data, such as full motion video. Having said that, the storage media that we are using today and the projections that we have in the next 18 months are truly remarkable in terms of very dense data storage hardware that will enable us to carefully archive and prioritize data to a far larger extent than before. The capacities are growing in leaps and bounds, and the miniaturization in the last couple of years is nothing short of remarkable.
Q: What role do you see for UAVs in future geospatial operations?
A: I see them growing as part of the tiers of assets that we are responsible for regarding the collection of geospatial data. There are a lot of concerns about mission assurance because of perceived vulnerabilities against one type of collection platform or another. But the real mission assurance we have in terms of geospatial collection assets is to have as diverse a range of platforms as possible. That includes government systems, commercial overhead and air-breather systems, and also full motion video, all of which derive from a variety of different kinds of platforms. The important thing is to make sure we are able to process as much data as possible from all those different kinds of platforms, and to bring it together as part of a larger community in ways that are most effective in terms of the mission set that we are looking at.
That concept has been reinforced greatly in terms of ISR by the Secretary of Defense’s ISR Task Force, which just finished their out-brief to Secretary Gates in the last couple of weeks. We were a very active part of the task force. We had an extensive team that worked with team members from DoD, the services and other entities. We participated very actively, particularly as it applied to the processing, exploitation and dissemination issues the task force looked at. The goal was to make sure the end-to-end aspects of the progress we need to make as a nation relative to ISR were being looked at, in addition to the actual hardware and platforms that execute the collection.
Q: How would you evaluate the future of the commercial remote sensing industry?
A: It’s absolutely vital, and that’s a timely question, because of the launch of the GeoEye-1 platform, whose success we have been eagerly anticipating. It’s building on the accomplishments we have had from the other major U.S. commercial vendor, with the launch of WorldView-1 earlier this year. We can’t overemphasize the level of engagement we have with the commercial remote sensing industry from the standpoint of NGA.
Getting back to one of my earlier points, the diversity of sources is vital for our mission assurance. The commercial remote sensing capability we have is an essential part of that as it applies to DigitalGlobe, GeoEye and others and will remain the case for as far into the future as any of us can see.
Q: What is your role in the National System for Geospatial- Intelligence (NSG)?
A: The responsibilities we have for general management have increased, certainly during General Clapper’s time and over the past couple of years, because of some specific things, and also because of the importance of the mission set.
It’s a timely thing to talk about, because just a few weeks ago the President signed the updated Executive Order 12333, which formally recognized three functional managers across the system for human intelligence, SIGINT and GEOINT It also established the structure for the functional management we have in the intelligence community, building on references that were made to this organization in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that was passed by Congress and signed by the President more than four years ago.
Because of that, and because of the tremendous efficiencies and mission accomplishment that can be realized, we have continued to put a strong emphasis on our functional management of the NSG. This includes our interaction with our NSG partners across the defense intelligence and civil agencies, the military services and combatant commands, and with our allied partners from Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia. The efforts we make to bring them together through the NSG Senior Management Council and the GEOINT Committee are as important as anything we do. They are something we put a tremendous effort into because of the payoff we have had for many years based on exercising our functional management responsibilities. It is important that all the entities in the geospatial community have front-end alignment in such a way that we are dovetailing effectively with each other and turning out end products that are most effectively coordinated with each other, because the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to functional management. We see that in the way we manage the NSG every day.
Q: Is there anything you would like to add?
A: I’d like to talk about our people. The most important resource we have is the people in of NGA. They are what really makes the difference. I say that because we focus very heavily on output, and we’re doing a lot of things relative to structure, acquisition and so on. But we can never lose sight of the fact that what really makes a difference for NGA is the committed workforce we have, and the way they continue to make contributions as part of the “team sport” that I’ve described GEOINT as. The others that we work with in DoD, the intelligence community and across the defense intelligence and civil agencies are absolutely terrific.
I spend most of my time looking after the people of this organization, making sure we continue to have the climate of excellence that has existed here for many years, certainly going back to General Clapper’s time and before, with the emphasis on nurturing, training and making sure our people have a straightforward an understanding of our mission set so they act as part of a team.
Moreover, we have to continue to have the climate here at NGA that makes it a place to work based on the frank assessment by our personnel that they are making a difference. We had some personnel experts here about a year and a half ago, and one of the things they warned me about was that our retention rates were too high—we needed more turnover! I take that as a particular point of pride. Our workforce here works very hard and puts out a lot of product as part of a team. But at the same time, I think the fact that they are making such a difference and that they value the contributions they make as part of NGA is the most important aspect of the leadership responsibilities we have here at the upper levels of the agency. ♦
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