Richard Melson

Mention the word "geospatial" to troops on
the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and they might ask, "What's
that?" "Geospatial" and "intelligence" are two words that help save
a lot of lives on the battlefields and get the combatants back home to their
loved ones safely. But the troops will never know when these two words come into
play to protect them, because much of what the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency does is top secret.

The agency is a member of the U.S. intelligence community and a Defense
Department combat-support agency. It has its headquarters in Bethesda, Md., with
major facilities in the St. Louis and Washington areas. Retired Air Force Lt.
Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., a former senior intelligence officer for the Air
Force, heads the agency.

To better understand the meaning of the word geospatial, "geo" comes
from the Greek word for Earth. "Spatial" refers to place. Therefore,
geospatial might be described as the means of finding out what's happening on
every place on Earth.

That's a good thing for warfighters from the highest-ranking combat commander to
troops in foxholes. And it's a boon for homeland-security officials and
recipients of NGA's humanitarian efforts, such as peacekeeping, tracking floods
and fires, and providing disaster relief for earthquakes and other natural
disasters.

In an interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service,
Clapper said geospatial intelligence represents an expansion of a long-used Army
term, "intelligence preparation of the battlefield."

"We've changed the term to mean intelligence preparation of the
environment," Clapper said. "That's what we can glean from looking at
the Earth and those matters which have national-security implications deriving
from either natural or manmade factors."

NGA's objective is to provide timely, relevant and accurate
geospatial-intelligence to decision makers, whether they're sitting in a foxhole
or the White House, said the former enlisted Marine.

"Obviously, our biggest customer is the military," Clapper said.
"But we support other cabinet departments, too. A growing mission for us is
(supporting) the Department of Homeland Security."

Geospatial intelligence combines mapping, charting, imagery analysis, and
imagery intelligence. NGA uses pictures to make sense of volumes of data and
information. The organization provides tailored, customer-specific
geospatial-intelligence analysis, services and solutions.

When counterterrorist operations are to be launched, NGA tries to provide
geospatial-intelligence answers to where the bad guys are located, the type of
terrain in the area, and lines of communication.

Clapper said the war on terrorism has changed NGA profoundly. "We're not
unique here," he added. "We're part of a sea change that is going on
in the intelligence community."

He said the battle model of legions of motorized rifle divisions charging an
enemy is obsolete. "And the intelligence structure, which built up over
decades during the Cold War, was geared toward that monolithic nation-state
threat," Clapper said. "Of course, that's profoundly changed --
symbolized most graphically and most unfortunately with the attacks of 9/11 and
the aftermath of that. So now we've gone from large, fixed complexes, as we did
during the Cold War, to chasing individual people -- very fleeting
targets."

Today's adversaries place a lot of emphasis on such things as denial, camouflage
and deception, which makes fighting them tougher, Clapper said.

NGA has contributed to many successes in the war on terrorism, but most of them
must go unpublicized, Clapper said. Saying he can't go into specifics, the
retired general said there have been some profound successes in terms of
attacking terrorists' networks. "We'd like to think we had some impact
there," he added.

"In a homeland security context, we think we've helped effect the safety of
many special events in the United States -- political conventions, Super Bowl,
World Series or any other potential event where a terrorist attack could
occur," he said. "The nation has done a lot to protect such events,
and we play an important role by providing the common operating picture for all
the entities, whether they be federal, state or local."

NGA and its predecessor – 
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency 
 have participated in consequence-management 
support after natural disasters, Clapper said.

"This includes imagery, which is a great assist to planners and responders
so they can see graphically the full extent of damage, such as where roads are
out and power lines are damaged," he said. "That helps with planning
for recovery efforts. So after 9/11, it was sort of a natural morphing from
support to disaster relief and recovery efforts into a homeland security mission
because it's much the same."

NGA support teams are embedded in the Department of Homeland Security to provide
front-end support with "reach back to mother NGA," just as is done
with combatant commands, Clapper noted.

A major challenge facing NGA today is modernizing infrastructure. "We need
to modernize and create an infrastructure that will accommodate the many sources
of data and information we're acquiring," he said. "We're going to be
in a very data-enriched environment. So we must come up with an infrastructure
that will automate this process so we're not depending on humans to do so much
of the labor."

With dramatic improvements in communications over the last decade, "we're
able to move around a lot of data and imagery these days that we couldn't do 10
years ago," Clapper said.

Increasingly, NGA's experts are finding that they need insight from troops in
the field. "There's no substitute for what the boots on the ground can
see," Clapper said. "One of our challenges is to extract information
from what they see and can collect. Every soldier is a sensor, and we need to
capture that data as well.

"So it's a two-way street," Clapper noted. "It isn't just a
monolithic national agency descending on the soldier. We need their input and
their feedback and this needs to be a constant loop."

Related Site:

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency