NGA To Tap Commercial Data On Military Targets

WASHINGTON: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will announce plans in May to contract with commercial companies to for analyze satellite and other imagery data of military targets, says David Gauthier, head of NGA's new(ish) Commercial and Business Operations Group. While the first contracts will be small, the move is a big step toward the spy agency's goal of creating a "hybrid" pool of data that combines commercial imagery with low-resolution but high re-revisit rates with traditional high-resolution that is less timely Intelligence Community imagery provided by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and others. "We do foresee in the future a hybrid architecture, where we definitely require both national systems for their capabilities, and commercial systems for their capabilities," he said. While Gauthier wouldn't provide a budget for the new effort, he told me earlier this week that the plan is to evaluate the capabilities of a number of commercial companies to meet NGA's needs. "I don't want to discuss numbers at this time, but we are still operating at small scale and plan on contracting with multiple vendors to compare and contrast their capabilities," he said.