NGA, JFCOM Examine Ways To Improve Tactical Exploitation of Imagery.

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," Navy Cmdr. Joe Ellenbecker, JFCOM's JGA project officer, told sister publication Defense Daily in a recent interview.

He defined tactical warfighter as those personnel who are operating below the joint task force (JTF) level. GEOINT includes electronic maps, 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 (CONOPs), data standards, training, and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) 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.