Geospatial intelligence has played a pivotal role in U.S. defense and intelligence operations from providing early detection of nuclear missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis to delivering warfighter support on the southern border, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has developed approaches to meet the mission needs of the Department of Defense and intelligence community. 

Recently, establishing new missions has increased DOD’s need for intelligence and technology that improves GEOINT production. Decision-makers and warfighters rely on GEOINT for early detection, targeting and safety in their various mission sets, and partnering with commercial industry contributes to GEOINT accuracy and speed of delivery. 

NGA established its Commercial Operations group on Oct. 1, 2018, to discover, assess, and acquire commercial data, products and services in accordance with mission priorities. In 2023, the National Defense Authorization Act assigned the Director of Commercial Operations as a direct report to the NGA director. This codified the importance of leveraging commercial capabilities across the DOD and IC. The mission of NGA Commercial Operations has since evolved to solve national security challenges with innovative GEOINT solutions and leverage commercial capabilities to achieve GEOINT supremacy.

NGA Commercial Operations scans the GEOINT marketplace to identify commercial capabilities across industry that can meet mission needs and facilitates assessment, piloting, adoption and integration of new capabilities. 

“We focus on solutions that can be leveraged to meet operational requirements for multiple needs and multiple partners around the globe — as efficient stewards of GEOINT resources we want to maximize the mission value of commercial capabilities,” said NGA Commercial Operations Director Devin Brande. 

NGA Commercial Operations identifies partnerships and commercial capabilities to satisfy and supplement analytic gaps and needs across the DOD, IC and civil community. This approach is part of the agency’s ongoing mission to execute an agile, flexible and responsive acquisition strategy that unlocks the commercial geospatial industry’s capacity and innovation. NGA Commercial Operations identify contracts for unclassified capabilities, including computer-vision driven AI for object detection, object classification, broad area search and area monitoring. The unclassified nature of commercial data ensures that products, data and services are easily shareable with key partners and allies across the globe.

“We also work closely with teammates across the agency and across the government to take advantage of a full range of acquisition tools to deliver capabilities at the point of mission need, helping to demonstrate NGA’s innovation, creativity and GEOINT leadership.” 

Additionally, NGA Commercial Operations drives a portfolio strategy for new and innovative AI, expanding computer vision capabilities to support non-standard mission planning in multiple domains, such as low-altitude aviation and subsurface maritime. The increasingly complex hybrid environment of crewed and uncrewed systems challenges DOD’s ability to conduct time sensitive and critical mission planning. AI is crucial for meeting this challenge, and NGA aides the U.S. military with commercial GEOINT AI to accelerate their mission planning efforts.

NGA Commercial Operations pursues innovation pilots using process automation and other techniques to improve efficiencies and meet the growing demands of users. The branch continues to harness a diverse portfolio of non-imagery GEOINT capabilities impacting global security and economic trends, ranging from minerals and resource extraction to an increasingly intricate web of the global supply chain. 

“It’s not always about cutting edge technology,” said Brande. “Sometimes it’s a matter of looking to commercial industry for ways we can improve the basic blocking and tackling of everyday intelligence production.”

His team does not just take in requirements and buy tools, said Brande. They also strive to understand users and their needs, help shape that understanding into requirements and match those requirements with commercial solutions in a customer-centric way. 

“This is a challenge we welcome every day,” said Brande. “A win today is not enough; we must stay hungry to keep winning, to maintain persistent advantage.”