U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are exploring how to improve the access of individual marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen to imagery-derived intelligence products and are leveraging exercises like this week’s Strong Angel III disaster-response drill on the West Coast to learn, according to officials from both organizations.

The two organizations are currently examining options and formulating recommendations under the auspices of an initiative that they launched last year called the Joint Geospatial-Intelligence Activity (JGA). A memorandum of understanding signed in late 2005 cemented the relationship and defined the project’s goals.

"JGA grew out of a concern that the Department of Defense wasn’t doing as good of a job as it could about providing geospatial intelligence, Geoint, down to those who needed it most: the tactical warfighter," U.S. Navy Cmdr. Joe Ellenbecker, JFCOM’s JGA project officer, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

He defined tactical warfighters as those personnel who are operating below the joint task force (JTF) level. Geospatial intellitence (Geoint) includes electronic maps, satellite and aerial imagery, and any type of product that visually depicts physical features and geographically references them.

While the belief is that NGA, which is the functional manager for Geoint within the U.S. national security infrastructure, has been doing "a marvelous job" getting imagery products to the JFT level, there have been challenges in disseminating it down to lower levels, Ellenbecker said.

Accordingly, he said the goal of the JGA is to identify simple, near-term changes that could be made to the Department of Defense’s existing data-sharing architectures, or modifications that could be applied to the service’s current policies, concepts of operation, data standards, training, and tactics, techniques and procedures so that warfighters at the tip of the spear of combat can utilize Geoint to their advantage in ways that have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to date, even for those soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

"And just as important," Ellenbecker said, is the desire for those at the tip of the spear to be able to pass back to higher echelons the valuable visual intelligence that they obtain.

"If we do our jobs right, the end user at the tactical level of Geoint will have better access to it, and conversely, he/she will also be able to take the Geoint that they discover or create and push it back up," he said. "We are not about creating a magical box on somebody’s desk. We are about taking the tools and capabilities that are out there already and using them in a better way."

While the focus is on seeking the near-term, non-material solutions, the JGA is also studying the longer-term requirements and new systems that may be necessary in order to enable the network-centric flow of Geoint to the tactical end users.

"We want to ensure that we can help create an enterprise that allows that data to flow down to the person who needs it — somebody in a helicopter, a ship or somebody who is going to do humanitarian assistance," said the NGA’s Otis Leake, who is the JFCOM-NGA Support Team project lead for JGA.

The JGA is a vehicle that is bringing together the services, combatant commands and defense agencies in order to create a joint enterprise-wide solution to share the Geoint in a manner that is consistent with the Pentagon’s vision for having data that is universally accessible, discoverable and sharable, he told Defense Daily.

"We are now trying to capture the architecture as is — what is out there today, and what the services are planning to provide over these next few years," said Leake. "And then we want to leverage all of that capability that each of the services independently is building so that we can establish our joint enterprise."

Both he and Ellenbecker stressed that the JGA is a collaborative project with the services, combatant commands and defense agencies with an equal amount of give and take as opposed to one group trying to tell the others how to conduct their business.

While the focus of the JGA is on Goeint sharing within the U.S. military, the project is also looking at how to improve the flow of information to coalition partners, and with U.S. governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations in scenarios like disaster relief, said Ellenbecker.

JGA staff recently completed visits to four combatant commands — U.S. European Command, U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Special Operations Command — as part of its fact-finding and exploratory work. It chose to focus on several commands that it thought represented a good cross-section of the military in terms of mandates and challenges, such as Northern Command’s unique homeland defense and domestic disaster relief missions and Pacific Command’s enormous area of responsibility.

The JGA personnel studied the commands’ current architectures for sharing Geoint, and examined how each determines its Geoint requirements. They also observed how personnel in each command discover and obtain Geoint and how it is shared and maintained. Further, they sought to identify the best practices across the commands.

With this knowledge in hand, JGA staff will analyze it and formulate its recommendations.

"A lot of the stuff can be fixed in a non-material environment," said Ellenbecker. "But we will have to wait until our analysis is complete before we can make that final judgment."

Some of the short-term gains that the JGA is pursuing include a joint Geoint concept of operations, said Leake.

Participating in joint exercises and experiments is also an important aspect of the JGA, said Ellenbecker. JGA staff participated in the Navy-led Trident Warrior exercise earlier this year. They also took part in August’s Strong Angel III exercise in San Diego to test the ability of civil and military authorities to share information as part of humanitarian-aid and disaster-relief efforts.

Such exercises "allow us to come in from a Geoint perspective, establish something called a Geoint cell, and [work with] JTF members of the exercise by saying, ‘Hey, you do a pretty good job of using Geoint, but if you changed your practices, if you adopted some of these procedures, you might see the flow of Geoint back down to you and back up work a little bit better," said Ellenbecker.

The JGA is also leveraging JFCOM’s modeling and simulation and experimentation capabilities. Further, Leake said NGA is establishing one of its Geospatial Intelligence Advanced Testbeds near JFCOM’s headquarters in Norfolk, Va.

"It helps us ensure that we can work together and are interoperable," he said.

Overall, Leake said the JGA is making good progress.

"We are very pleased with how we are moving ahead on getting Geoint to the end user," he said.

–Michael Sirak