The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is committed to the commercial imagery sector and sees the opportunity to leverage that industry in the future, said the agency’s new director.

“We are determined to work closely with the two primary vendors we have in the U.S. in commercial imagery and other associated entities to increase the value and the precision of commercial imagery in ways that will allow us to provide a broader array of products, especially at a low classification level, to as many people as we can deal with,” U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of NGA, told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview.

In July, Murrett was nominated to head up NGA, replacing retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, who left the agency June 13 after almost five years at the helm. Murrett, who had been serving as director of Naval Intelligence, N2, is the third director in the agency’s 10-year history.

NGA has contracts with both Digitalglobe and Geoeye, which was created when Orbimage acquired Space Imaging in January. “In a broader context, that specific area is one example we can give of the close partnership that we have throughout industry which is pretty extensive and applies to just about everything this organization does,” Murrett said.

Murrett sees dramatic growth in the commercial imagery sector, both in the United States and internationally.

“The commercial sector, not just here in the U.S. but around the world, will certainly grow fairly dramatically in the future …,” Murrett said. “In terms of the industry itself, you will see a whole raft of nations building the capability in the next 10 years or so.”

The technical opportunities made available to NGA by this expansion are vast, Murrett said. “When you look at the developments that we have had in geospatial technology in just the past few years and the things that are on the horizon, we are at a threshold of leveraging some significant technical advances that have been made in terms of imagery, imagery intelligence and [the whole area of] geospatial products we produce that is going to allow us to realize additional efficiencies and allow us to do so in a way that provides our products directly to the people who rely on us in a way we haven’t done before,” he said. “The technical opportunities that we have today are awesome.”

There are a number of technology developments that NGA is going to continue to push, Murrett added, such as digital nautical charts NGA has been developing in conjunction with the Navy. The effort is attempting to boil down thousands of pages of nautical charts into 29 compact discs.

“That is a good example of how this agency has moved into the future,” Murrett said. “We are working very closely with one of our key partners, the Navy, to advance the technology and provide it to the services.”

It is one of the ways NGA is using information technology (IT) to more aggressively accelerate the products and services the agency provides, Murrett added.

Another example is automated processing, which includes things such as change detection, ingestion and sorting of vast quantities of data. Change detection enables NGA to move from human interfaces to detect changes taking place in geography and other areas, to systems used to detect changes taking place anywhere on the face of the Earth that might be of interest. “It is a huge value to us,” Murrett said. “The vast amounts of data we are ingesting, if you can do that with automated processing it makes it much, much easier and much, much more effective.”

These developments also include better use of advanced imagery technologies such as hyperspectral and multispectral. Within that subset falls the integration of all the sensors NGA has available and processing them in a way that is complementary, Murrett said. The trends toward automated systems will also accelerate in the very near future, he added.

“In terms of our ability to use search tools, change tools, and a variety of other analytic support tools, it is something I think is just beginning to be fully realized,” Murrett said. “Some things are coming online this year in that area for processing and having better automated libraries of points of interest which are great value to us. I expect to see that trend accelerate soon, within the next year or so.”

One example of some of the systems coming on line this year are commercial sensors that NGA has and a variety of optical and infrared sensors being developed by industry, Murrett added.

NGA also is actively involved in the Pentagon’s effort to find ways to detect and defeat improvised explosive devices (IED), Murrett said. “This agency is doing absolutely everything it can to support the war fight. That includes supporting the Joint IED Defeat Organization under [U.S. Army] Gen. Montgomery Meigsand supporting every component of the forces that we have overseas, especially Iraq and Afghanistan,” Murrett said.

Since taking the helm of the agency, Murrett said one of the most impressive parts of NGA is the NGA Support Teams (NST). Personnel are embedded with every organization that NGA is responsible for supporting including the services, combatant commands and the intelligence community. “It is those teams and those personnel that are fully embedded and deployed around the world that keep us grounded and in a position to provide the best support we possibly can,” he said.

NGA continues to refine the support it provides throughout Central Command as the campaigns have developed, Murrett said. “One of the biggest challenges that we are working very hard is the integration of all the sensors we have over there,” he said.

— Geoff Fein