Statement of Strategic Intent
Written by MICKEY MCCARTER
NGA RECENTLY RELEASED THE NATIONAL SYSTEM FOR GEOSPATIAL-INTELLIGENCE STATEMENT OF STRATEGIC INTENT, A VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently published a high-level document that not only lays out the executive strategy for the agency but also recognizes the integration of contributing agencies and private industry partners to fulfilling its mission.
ntelligence (NSG) is the combination of people, technology, policies, capabilities, doctrine, activities and community necessary to produce geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in an integrated multi-intelligence environment in support of national security objectives,” states the 16-page document, titled the “NSG Statement of Strategic Intent.”
The agency had developed a statement of strategic intent (SSI) in past years, explained Tom Ferguson, director of NGA’s Office of Geospatial Intelligence Management, but 2005 is the first year that the document described NGA as the leader of a GEOINT community. NGA’s predecessor, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), had developed an SSI in 2003, and NGA basically reproduced the same document in 2004, Ferguson said.
“We had a document that laid out five key goals and then a series of eight or nine objectives. That document was focused on NGA or NIMA,” he said.
But the goals and objectives were not necessarily linked in a useful way, Ferguson added. The statement did not spell out how the objectives were linked to the goals, nor did it acknowledge a role in GEOINT for agencies and partners outside of NGA.
“NGA is essentially evolving to not just be an agency looking over itself, but an agency overlooking a broader community, the geospatial intelligence community,” Ferguson noted. “We call that community the National System for Geospatial Intelligence, or the NSG.”
NGA made this transition from thinking as a single agency to thinking as an entire community very methodically, first making the transition from NIMA and then carefully embracing the community as a whole, Ferguson said. The agency took this approach to ease its own employees as well as other members of the community into a common culture without trying to change too many things too quickly.
“You have to realize this is an agency made of many agencies and we have been going through a rapid evolution here of becoming a single organization, to which everyone is committed,” Ferguson said. “So changing something from the NIMA/ NGA document to the NSG and literally redoing an entire product, we felt was a step too far.”
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
In embracing the NSG community, the new SSI document—available on the NGA Web site at www.nga.mil—also links clear objectives to four strategic goals.
“We really wanted to come up with a document that established a vision, goals and objectives tied specifically to those goals, so that it was clear to the readership that there was goal one, and here [are] objectives one, two, three, etc., tied directly to that goal,” Ferguson explained. “There is no more room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding of what we are trying to do.”
The four goals established by the SSI are:
1. Establish an integrated, collaborative analysis and production environment that is responsive to and predictive of continuing and emerging global threats
2. Institute and expand an interoperable, strategically aligned National System for Geospatial Intelligence
3. Attract, develop, sustain and engage a workforce with the skills and competencies required to meet current and future threats and challenges
4. Identify, develop, acquire and deploy capabilities and technologies to anticipate and meet the ever-increasing demand for timely, relevant and accurate
GEOINT
Each goal has a series of objectives attached to it as a means of achieving that goal. For example, the first objective under the first goal reads, “Focus aggressive and innovative collection and analytic techniques to understand the capabilities and predict the intentions of hard targets.”
The SSI itself does not get into detail as to how those objectives are to be executed, but the document does provide an overarching structure for the development of a series of other documents that will spell out such details, Ferguson revealed. For example, the NGA and its fellow GEOINT community members will now undertake the development of a concept or operations, which will explain the mechanics of supporting the goals and objectives. The SSI therefore provides a vision that will guide the development of other products to drive such things as the development of performance metrics.
“The [SSI] document helps us clear the next step to help us start thinking about our architecture, where we are going to make our investments, strategies that affect our organization, which includes everything from composition, mission and people to processes, concepts of operation, the way we do our job, infrastructure to include the facilities, resources, systems and tools,” Ferguson described. “From that, we wanted to draw a line to develop metrics on how we execute those dollars and fulfill those things and define our successes and, quite frankly, our failures.”
So while GEOINT analysts and specialists are not likely to think about strategic intent each and every day, the SSI does provide the framework in which they do their jobs.
“It allows us to build other things,” Ferguson elaborated. “The concept of operations is far more detailed, and it brings in the whole community to participate in drafting that document. It’s a very important step for us. It’s a recognition not just by people here but by people in this community that we have a leadership role in the GEOINT community.”
Ferguson stressed that the SSI is the personal vision of retired Air Force Lieutenant General James R. Clapper Jr., who serves as both director of NGA and the functional manager of the NSG community. So while NSG partners will collaborate on items like the concept of operations, NGA alone shouldered the development of the SSI.
“So we don’t ask people to coordinate on his vision, but we do give them the opportunity to comment once that is out there, and we take into account their comments,” Ferguson said.
Regarding that vision, Clapper writes in the introduction of the SSI: “The focus of the NSG remains on threats to our security—the global war on terrorism, impending global threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the regional developments that threaten U.S. national interests.”
NSG COMMUNITY
The NSG community is best thought of as a layered pyramid, Ferguson offered. NGA sits atop the pyramid as the agent for directing fulfillment of national goals and strategies for the application of GEOINT resources.
The second layer of the pyramid would consist of programs outside of NGA that support either the national intelligence program or the military intelligence program with GEOINT resources.
The next layer of the pyramid would consist of U.S. government agencies ranging from the U.S. Geological Survey to the Department of Homeland Security as well as commercial industry partners.
“We want to work as a family, as a community, using our broad GEOINT resources to take on any number of mission responsibilities and activities,” Ferguson said.
The SSI provides high-level guidance on how NGA leaders can look out over the NSG community and coordinate specific resources. For example, the NGA director of analysis and production has responsibility for managing resources within NGA and also for orchestrating and facilitating analysis and production across the NSG community, Ferguson observed.
“What we are trying to do with the NSG community, and the value of this whole functional management approach, is try to build a community where we have true collaborative decision-making,” he explained. “We want to make sure our policies are consistent. We are doing things such as making directives. We are building our own doctrine, which we never had before, to ensure that consistency in guidance. We want to be able to have some programming agility so that we can see where we want to go and as things twist and turn, missions change, and other crises pop up, we can move dollars and move resources to meet that mission immediately, so that we are not left hanging.”
That collaborative decision-making process goes hand-in-hand with sharing the burdens of GEOINT operations, Ferguson said.
“We want to build a community of burden-sharing, not just informationsharing, where we want to get information fully accessible from the national level down to the pointy end of the spear where the troops are on the ground,” he detailed. “We want to bring in all of these other organizations in this GEOINT community to work collaboratively and share the burden. We could use our resources better and get things done more rapidly and make information available to a broad array of consumers, not just a small set.”
In strengthening communication with the rest of the NSG community, Ferguson anticipates an increase in “clear and immediate feedback” from both partners and consumers of NGA.
Government and industry partners outside of NGA have responded very well to the release of the SSI, which NGA announced on January 12. They also have embraced their participation in the drafting of the concept of operations, Ferguson said.
The role of industry in the GEOINT community is critically important, Ferguson emphasized, as reflected by NGA’s participation in the annual GEOINT Symposium, co-sponsored by the agency and U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), based in Herndon, Va. The GEOINT 2006 Symposium is scheduled for November 13-16 in Kissimmee, Fla.
In addition to large events like the symposium, industry makes large contributions to everyday GEOINT operations.
“Commercial imagery vendors play a big role in that they support us in commercial industry” Ferguson said. “But there’s a bigger role in the tools and the capabilities that commercial vendors provide us, whether it is for processing or dissemination that is really important to our everyday function here. We use opportunities such as the GEOINT Symposium to identify those tools and identify partners in industry that can join us.”
The importance of industry is also reflected in GeoScout, the largest NGA contract vehicle, designed to move the agency forward and integrate disparate programs into a cohesive whole. The resulting architecture would operate throughout the NSG community by leveraging enterprise information systems and transforming the processes throughout the community, according to NSG.
Another critical consideration is that private contractors make up more than half of the actual NGA workforce of about 15,000.
DEVELOPING THE STRATEGY
Of course, tasks like the development of strategic intent do not occur in a vacuum, Ferguson acknowledged. Several oversight and advisory bodies had recommended the development of the new SSI. Those groups ranged from Congress to the Defense Science Board. In addition, as Ferguson’s office drafted the SSI, it had to be careful not to contradict conclusions and recommendations from the Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Intelligence Strategy.
To that end, NGA had to coordinate its work on the strategic statement with the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence (DNI). Ferguson said he and his staff were mindful of the role of DNI John Negroponte and sought guidance from his office. Ferguson himself met with the assistant DNI (ADNI) for strategic planning and policy to coordinate the development of the NSG strategy. The ADNI was impressed with the process and approved of the final strategy, Ferguson added.
Recent events validated the approach to the SSI, even while it was in development. The approach and aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the U.S. Gulf Coast required a great deal of support and imagery from the GEOINT community, Ferguson said.
“Katrina and Rita clearly emphasized the importance of geospatial intelligence and not just the role that we can play in foreign intelligence but also in national support,” he said. “If you look at the language in there, the level of support that we gave to Katrina and Rita and the document certainly fit together very nicely.
“Geospatial intelligence has taken a much larger role than we had anticipated just a few years ago in terms of supporting the nation internally,” he added. ♦