Thanks so much for that introduction, Yvette.
It’s great to be with all of you.
Congratulations to USGIF on their 20th anniversary. The foundation has done so very much to strengthen our community, and once again, they’ve planned an outstanding venue for us to learn and collaborate.
There are additional congratulations to convey publicly this morning – and these reflect the confidence our Nation has in NGA’s talent. First, congratulations to our own Deputy Director, Tonya Wilkerson, for the President’s nominating her to be our next UnderSecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security! Let’s give a hand to Ms. Wilkerson! Second, congratulations to our own Inspector General, Cardell Richardson, for his being confirmed by the Senate as the next Inspector General of the Department of State! Let’s give a hand to Mr. Richardson! Like I said at our Ops and Intel brief on Friday – great things happen to great people at NGA – and by extension, in the GEOINT community!
My remarks today will cite what NGA has accomplished over the last year, and more significantly, where we’re going in the future.
I will address four areas:
• First, meeting the needs of our warfighters and decision-makers – at speed and scale.
• Second, our assessment and investment in commercial analytic services.
• Third, the way forward for GEOINT A.I.
• And fourth, I‘ll close by discussing NGA’s role in Space.
MEETING THE NEEDS OF OUR READERSHIP
So, let’s start with meeting the needs of our Nation’s warfighters and decision-makers.
At the core of this is the 24/7 timeliness, proactivity, and responsiveness of our new National GEOINT Operations Center – or NGOC, for short.
As we speak, our Watch is fully manned with imagery analysts, collection orchestrators, IT experts, facility managers, and security personnel – all under the on-site leadership of a Senior Executive or military officer.
Until the beginning of this year, we had two watches – one for the Agency’s accountability, and one for overseeing our Warning mission. We’ve now synthesized and strengthened their mandate into one critical nerve center. That Senior Executive is the GEOINT Operations Officer – or GOO for short. Yes, it sounds funny, but that name ironically will stick with you.
If you’ve heard of NSOC and SOOs in the SIGINT domain, it’s not by accident you can memorize NGOC and GOOs in the GEOINT domain. Those names should demonstrate the alignment that the Directors of NSA and NGA share – one that improves our respective agencies, and the timeliness afforded to our national Warning and Targeting.
We’ve invested decision authority in the GOO to “Own the Night!” While most of us sleep, the NGOC evaluates newly arrived GEOINT for potential action and dissemination – for our Combatant Commanders around the world – for Executive Branch decision-makers – and for our Intelligence Community. Autonomously – without any prompting from me or NGA’s leadership – the NGOC turns verbal notifications within seconds or minutes, and turns analysis and products within the same cycle of darkness. To give you an idea of their timeliness – well before sunrise today, I had already discussed with them two real-world developments – Israel’s announcement regarding the movement of civilians in Rafah – and Russia’s announcement of their intent to exercise non-strategic nuclear weapons.
But that’s just the start – because our agency also has so many exceptional analysts and collectors who show up to work at oh-dark thirty – either because they’ve been alerted by the NGOC to an evolving issue, or they’re independently driven by their expertise and professionalism. They complement the Watch – and it’s an impactful choreography.
That mission focus is not new. NGA’s role as a Combat Support Agency is fundamental to who we are.
Throughout our history, we’ve focused on providing decision advantage to military commanders and policymakers.
Of course, the global threat posed by strategic competitors today – and the crises in Ukraine and Russia, as well as in Gaza, Israel, the Red Sea, and now Iran – have heightened the GEOINT requirements for warning, situational awareness, targeting, safety, and humanitarian assistance.
At NGA and across the National System for Geospatial Intelligence, we’ve been simultaneously meeting today’s requirements, and evolving our discipline at speed, scale and with sound stewardship.
The bottom line is that NGA is delivering GEOINT at the speed and scale required to provide decision advantage.
And as we’ve done for decades, we have NGA Support Teams embedded with every Combatant Command and warfighting headquarters. Rather than have military organizations “reach back” for GEOINT expertise, we project our expertise forward. In fact, about 25% of our workforce is collocated or deployed with our customers around the globe. Our deployers form the tip of our agency’s spear, and they’re globally integrated – to provide direct action support in the air, land, sea, and space domains.
If this were a classified forum, we could spend an hour discussing NGA’s impact to US European Command and US Central Command – as they have been front and center this year, but our reach doesn’t stop there. Here are just a few unclassified examples reflecting NGA’s global ethos:
1. Our analysts at US Africa Command provided data and analysis that led to the interdiction of a vessel engaged in illegal fishing off the coast of the Seychelles. And just last week, after flash flooding in Kenya, the NGOC immediately tasked both exquisite space-based capabilities and commercial sources to support Kenyan situational awareness and operations.
• The moment clouds there lifted, we produced an unclassified imagery product that was based on commercial electro-optical collection.
• Our team at USAFRICOM worked hard to send it immediately to our Defense Attaché, for passage to the Kenyan Director of Military Intelligence.
• Recognizing our speed and value, the Kenyans then prepared a support request package for submission back to NGA.
• And I shot a note to the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, attaching the imagery product, so they could see it as well.
2. For US Indo-Pacific Command, we’re automating tradecraft to meet the goals of tracking every ship, every day, keeping a free and open Indo-Pacific. NGA is also participating in Tradewinds – which is an experimentation framework for emerging capabilities during the Exercise Valiant Shield 24 timeframe.
3. The NGA team at US Space Command provides the warfighter with world-class GEOINT on both sides of the von Kármán line – 54 nautical miles above sea level – while developing new techniques in the expanding realm of time-dominant space launch and space domain awareness.
4. For US Southern Command, we continue to provide situational awareness regarding the tenuous security conditions in Haiti, and we’re planning support for the Multinational Security Support mission preparing to deploy there.
• Even more recently, commercial imagery has been crucial to monitoring southern Brazil, where storms and flooding are causing significant damage.
• Specifically, our NGOC and NGA USSOUTHCOM Team proactively leveraged commercial assets to capture imagery of areas difficult to access by ground or air.
• And commercial collection for panchromatic and multispectral imagery is running daily over the affected area for as long as our analysis and dissemination can provide value in saving lives.
5. Our team supporting US Special Operations Command, has been working with Special Operations Aviators to enable rapid identification of Helicopter Landing Zones and Beach Landing Sites, in support of global contingencies and integrated deterrence reinforcing sensitive activities.
6. At US Strategic Command, our analysts provided more than 27,000 nuclear targeting reports – which are obviously incredibly important.
7. And for US Transportation Command, we exposed the global proliferation of China’s Zhenua Port Machinery Company ship-to-shore cranes…to ports that the Defense Department commonly uses for global sustainment.
Besides military and external missions, NGA responds quickly to requests for support to natural disasters and humanitarian crises here at home.
We’ve been called upon by FEMA to help our own citizens after wildfires and hurricanes.
We stand ready to support the breadth of the US Government with our expertise, whenever it’s requested. When the NGOC received reports of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s collapse in the middle of the night, the Watch began an immediate coordination with civil authorities, tasking both commercial and government imaging systems under our domestic disaster authorities.
The NGOC immediately notified our Maritime Safety of Navigation Office, which issued a navigational warning to all commercial and DoD mariners at sea, informing them that the port of Baltimore was closed until further notice. The NGOC also coordinated with other ops centers and organizations across Government that might need GEOINT assistance. We were then ready for follow-on support requests from the designated lead federal agency, the NTSB, as well as interagency components, such as FEMA and the Coast Guard.
When it comes to our people, they always remember that there’s a huge difference between delivering a raw image and delivering understanding and context. So our workforce is the instrument that delivers understanding and context to every image that’s collected.
They leverage the widest array of GEOINT-related platforms, from seabed to space – and I’ll come back to that at the end.
They also utilize the broadest array of GEOINT-related data – to inform military commanders and policy makers.
And let me finish this section by addressing two specific important work roles at the agency.
First, our collection and tasking teams have decades of experience. Thanks to our integration with the Combatant Commands and interagency, they have a deep understanding of operational priorities – and they use that understanding to develop innovative GEOINT collection strategies that leverage every source of GEOINT, regardless of origin.
In the face of multiple crises, these strategists orchestrate collection of thousands of images in these crisis areas, without interfering in the collection of strategic warning sets – not to mention our safety-of-navigation mission. It’s a delicate balancing act, and they do it well.
And the second important work role involves our experts in GEOINT policy and foreign disclosure. These hard-chargers work with the Combatant Commands, warfighting headquarters, IC partners, and the interagency writ large – to understand requirements, explore options for adjusting classification, to meet the needs of all of them. That, too, is a delicate balance.
For anyone who suggests we’re not moving as rapidly as possible – in our actions and our products – let me be clear: That’s a complete myth.
NGA has set the community standards for more than two decades – assuring integrity in this operational capability for the combatant commands. So we’ll continue to advocate for a unified GEOINT enterprise, with a collective focus on providing the best integrated picture of the battlefield – at speed, and with precision.
We invest our deep expertise and unparalleled efficiencies in a whole-of-community approach. That’s the way to ensure success.
The pace of available information is accelerating. With all of the government and commercial satellite programs achieving full operational capability in five to ten years, GEOINT data will at least triple.
Storage, access and management of GEOINT data takes significant resources, and we’re also the only agency with the architecture in place to serve the Nation’s varied needs.
I’ll conclude this section by repeating a constructive quote we offered last month. NGA is the best postured entity in the US government to provide rapid GEOINT to the combatant commands. As the Combat Support Agency charged with providing GEOINT, NGA is already (1) integrated with the commands and services, (2) operating at the speed of combat, (3) optimizing speed of delivery between exquisite space-based capabilities and commercial sources, and (4) dedicated to ensuring the taxpayer pays only once for these services.
ASSESSMENT AND INVESTMENT IN COMMERCIAL ANALYTIC SERVICES
My second focus area is commercial analytic services. You already know NGA combines commercial imagery with that of our exquisite, national assets and the data provided by our capable, international partners. As a GEOINT community, we’re turning more and more to commercial analytics – this to free up our exquisite capabilities and analysts for deeper intelligence and defense work.
So let me start by addressing how we’ve used commercial imagery in Ukraine – as the crisis there demonstrates the speed of GEOINT dissemination for real-world operations, the breadth of global users, and the value of unclassified GEOINT data for intelligence sharing with U.S. allies.
From the beginning of the conflict, NGA worked with our commercial partners to increase collection over Ukraine’s Area of Interest – and we provided immediate access to that commercial imagery to Ukrainian counterparts upon collection.
How did we do that? By making commercial imagery available to more than 6,000 of their distinct users through the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery platform – or G-EGD for short. It’s a production, storage, archive and web-hosting service that provides map-ready unclassified products on the worldwide web. And unlike the myths you may have heard – there’s no delay or intermediary in that dissemination – it’s immediate.
At the beginning of the crisis, we also accelerated efforts to integrate a new type of commercial imagery data into the collection schema – specifically, Commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar, or COMSAR.
Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery is useful during nearly all-weather conditions, day or night – it always provides situational GEOINT.
And we also facilitated an agreement that enabled commercial imagery providers to directly furnish imagery to Ukrainian analysts.
We made use of newly-adopted End User Licensing Agreements between NRO and NGA, and in so doing, the IC pushed release decisions to the operational level.
In a nutshell, we’re approaching commercial analytics three ways:
First, by applying mature commercial solutions with good, operationally relevant capabilities today.
Second, by evolving technical solutions through partnership, between companies and NGA.
And third, by seeking commercial solutions that still need work in delivering operational impact, where we’ll continue to evaluate the commercial market.
Across all those categories, we’re continuing to invest heavily in commercial analytics, and we lead the GEOINT enterprise in exploring and applying all forms of Artificial Intelligence and automation.
I’m now going to detail 1.5 billion dollars in investment this year.
Last year, you may have heard me announce the Luno A contract that we plan to award next year. It will be up to a 290 million dollar investment in unclassified commercial GEOINT-derived computer vision and analytic services – which will help us take advantage of our emerging data deluge.
Later today, we’ll release the Luno B Request for Proposal. Luno A and B together will have a combined ceiling of 490 million dollars – representing a potential 17-fold increase in ceiling, compared to our old Economic Indicator Monitoring contract.
I know many of you are excited about that, and have been watching Luno closely. But I have some other exciting news, too.
Today I’m pleased to announce the solicitation for NGA’s first ever Commercial Solutions Opening – or CSO – that’s focused on maritime domain awareness. We believe partnership here – with and among our commercial industry colleagues – will unlock promising solutions to some of our customers’ most challenging needs. The CSO project underscores our commitment to (1) staying ahead of evolving threats, and (2) supporting frontline efforts against IUU fishing, illicit trafficking, and other activities that pose threats to global security.
This CSO will be part of Project Aegir, which is a new NGA initiative aimed at enhancing maritime domain awareness through GEOINT, and combating illicit activities around the planet.
You may remember that our Global Fishing Forecast Challenge kicked off earlier this year, which will identify novel ways to forecast illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing – IUU fishing – activities. We will announce the winners next month.
We also awarded a new, nearly 800 million dollar Research Development Contract – the RDC – this fiscal year. It’s an indefinite delivery / indefinite quantity – or IDIQ – contract, designed to develop new R&D tech, capabilities and prototypes, and bring concepts to an operational capacity. Much of that work will include A.I., Machine Learning, and Computer Vision capabilities – including research into foundational GEOINT, advanced phenomena, and analytic technologies. This contract complements our currently open Broad Agency Announcement, which invites proposers to submit innovative concepts against hard GEOINT problems.
And our R&D team has also partnered with the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, to advance multimodal modals that combine language, imagery and geospatial data – so that in the future, capabilities like Chat-GPT can be geospatially aware.
WAY FORWARD FOR GEOINT A.I.
As long as we’re talking A.I., let’s turn to my third focus area.
With the rapid increase of collection assets over the next decade-plus, how do we scale accordingly? How do we manage this tsunami of data?
While there are plenty of efficiencies to be gained from better imagery technology, better collection orchestration, and more analysts, we can’t hire ourselves out of this problem. Our analysts need help, and that help has to come from A.I.
As many of you know, NGA’s primary A.I. initiative is Maven. It was established in 2017 as the Pentagon’s flagship A.I. project, to integrate A.I. into military workflows.
The GEOINT aspects of Maven were entrusted to NGA last year. And our continued partnership with the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office – the CDAO – enables the fusion of intelligence and operations information into workflows that support the warfighter.
Based on my 35 years of experience in targeting, I can tell you that the essence of targeting is positive identification. It reflects the principle of distinction. And distinction is hard. Being able to sift through the barrage of data, and discern a target from non-target – with high accuracy, based on unique behavior, at the speed of conflict – is key to maintaining our decision advantage.
That…is where NGA Maven makes its mark. It’s integrating state-of-art computer vision and A.I. capabilities into analytic workflows – to automatically detect, identify, characterize, extract, and attribute features and objects in imagery and video.
NGA Maven is already aiding our Combatant Command partners with four things:
1. The speed to locate objects, directing analysts to abnormal or significant activity in near real-time.
2. The ability to scale to locate more targets, and analyze more images.
3. The accuracy of our models to meet or exceed human detection, classification, and tracking performance.
4. And the interoperability to interface and share data, models, and detections with partners for use in their existing tools.
NGA Maven is already producing large volumes of computer vision detections for warfighter requirements. Latency detections have been lowered. It’s generated millions of data labels. And it’s provided support to multiple operational locations.
Like with any new tool, we’ll learn what it can and can’t do, refine, retest, and relearn. That’s the cycle of innovation…and it’s no different with A.I.
But one key to fully exploiting NGA Maven’s potential is the relationships with our mission partners – both DOD and IC.
We’re in continuous communication with our mission partners, to make sure we’re giving them the information they need, when they need it. Our liaison officers and engineers work together with our Combatant Command partners. And operating near the end users has not only allowed us to better understand their requirements, but also to quickly develop and deploy solutions.
To work at all, let alone to work well, NGA Maven needs to be combined with other tools. Some of them are also new and cutting edge, but others are older, and some aren’t even A.I. The trick is combining the value of new assets with the value of still-relevant, valuable older assets.
One example is collaborating with the Defense Innovation Unit, CDAO, and other military partners on the Replicator initiative. That partnership was announced last September, and it’s going to field swarms of multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable A.I.-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026.
Deputy Secretary Hicks has described Replicator as not representative of a technological change, but a culture shift to provide “innovation at scale…with systems that are harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.” It’s an ambitious initiative, and we’re excited to be contributing to it.
The source data that we provide for Replicator will also enable autonomy – beginning with maps and GEOINT reference data for autonomous vehicles. In the Pacific, that includes accurate, timely, bathymetric data for unmanned autonomous vessels. It also means using geomagnetic data for autonomous operations in areas where our adversaries are denying our GPS access.
NGA Maven will be an important thread in a tapestry of connected sensors from all branches of the armed forces in a unified A.I. network. We’re well aware of the challenges of employing an emerging technology. We’re putting some parameters in place while we develop it – and our sober analysis will not be on auto-pilot. This makes sense given the power of NGA Maven to our tradecraft. Make no mistake, NGA will lead this enterprise in applying A.I. to the GEOINT mission, enabling decision advantage for warfighters, policy makers, and mission partners.
Frankly, some people are starting to ask whether the Maven Smart System operating platform, which is an aspect of this, is actually tantamount to what’s being referred to as CJADC2 – a sequel of sorts to Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control. That’s a powerful endorsement.
But besides the MSS operating platform, our Maven data and detections are also fed into multiple other platforms. As the lead for the GEOINT Enterprise, I take seriously the responsibility to make our information as accessible as possible, especially to our operators – and NGA Maven is leading the way in data accessibility.
We absolutely need to produce GEOINT data and A.I. models of increasing accuracy – that generate high-quality and useful detections and reports – to be applied to defense and intelligence missions.
To do that, we need to achieve five goals
1. The first is high quality Computer Vision that improves positive ID, geolocation, and speed. So we have to improve and scale existing overhead imagery Broad Area Search-Targeting and Full Motion Video Lines of Effort. We’re looking to employ novel algorithms and techniques – for example, transformers. We need to deliver target detections from new modalities, deliver CV models to military service partners for use on autonomous systems, and automate geolocation accuracy of detections.
2. The second goal is integrating A.I. into the analytical workforce. That’s going to require common tooling, techniques, and standards. We’ll need to improve Structured Observation Management conversion to labels, increase analyst feedback to models, and explore synthetic learning and labeling. We’ll also need A.I. reasoning and search features enabled by recent advancements in generative A.I. models, and to expand the discovery of new types of objects.
3. Our third goal is to assimilate A.I. into informed collection orchestration, which is where we task overhead GEOINT collection 24/7, with very little fanfare. But we need to establish a service that will continuously present options for the collection managers, based on constellation constraints, standing needs, and dynamic events
4. Our fourth goal is to implement an enterprise A.I. infrastructure that will be optimized for imagery services, data storage, and data access, as well as compute to lower costs and increased speed. It’s going to need a common platform with data management for labels, models, and detections, and then to provide labels, models and detections as a service to our customers.
5. And last but not least, our fifth goal is for NGA to be at the forefront of ensuring the ethical and responsible use of A.I. We’re establishing a certification program that we call the GEOINT Responsible A.I. Training program – GREAT for short. It will teach developers and users to assess risk and responsibility in applying A.I. to GEOINT. It also will be consistent with national guidance, informed by leading A.I. scholarship, and ensure that our values, collateral damage mitigation, and the Law or Armed Conflict are baked into our use of A.I.
Additionally, through Human and Machine Teaming, Maven incorporates responsible A.I. by building automated user behavior metrics into the A.I. system itself – not only making it persistent and transparent, but also ensuring traceability, to verify the human behavior is consistent with our laws and principles.
So, as we balance the need to advance A.I. with the need to put parameters on its use, we also have to reassure everyone that like any tool, A.I. is not inherently good or evil. Let’s face it, we already use computer-assisted tools every day, in a wide variety of ways.
And we also need to stay vigilant about investing in our workforce – particularly the new skills needed to most effectively use and develop GEOINT A.I. One of the reasons we need the GREAT certification process is to make sure our analysts and experts can recognize, predict, and mitigate A.I. shortcomings. We’re building deliberate and systemic measures to mitigate the risks of target misidentification, including cognitive biases, such as confirmation biases induced by false positive detections.
We also understand at NGA that we’re just one agency of many DoD organizations undergoing this historic A.I. transformation.
But our NGA professionals and NGA Maven will supremely complement each other – working together to achieve the best collection, the best analysis, and, ultimately, to reach our goal of GEOINT supremacy.
It’s not a matter of tweaking the technology. A.I. is a revolution in warfare – in intelligence creation – in everything. Eventually, all nations could get there. But our charge is to get there first, and to get there better.
NGA’S ROLE IN SPACE
That brings me to my fourth and final area to discuss – it’s NGA’s role in Space.
Last year, I mentioned the change in our motto. It’s now “Know the World, Show the Way…from Seabed to Space.” You heard Dr. Dixon refer to it in her remarks, just a couple of hours ago. We retained the spirit of the previous motto, but we wanted to recognize our expanding responsibilities into areas not quite as visible to ordinary citizens. So instead of a motto that could suggest we know the land masses, we now have a motto that conveys we’re looking up, down, and everywhere our Nation’s interests may be threatened. And make no mistake – distinguishing friendly from unfriendly behavior in Space has become particularly important to us.
The coin I provide for excellence reads: “NGA: Vanguard of Distinction.” We take great pride in distinguishing enemy from non-enemy, combatant from non-combatant, and anomalous behaviors from baseline ones – and that’s regardless of physical domain. We embrace that challenge in all the Combatant Commands, and we do it in USSPACECOM’s enormous area-of-responsibility, too. We will do everything we can to identify, assess, and warn of foreign threats to US Space systems.
I heard the Chief of Space Operations, General Saltzman, speak last month at the Space Symposium, and we just heard “Rock” Miller Lt Gen David Miller, Cdr, Space Ops Cmd right before I got up here. I greatly appreciate everything they’re trying to do.
In spite of what you might have heard or read about any differences in opinion with respect to the way forward in Space, I believe we’re collectively figuring out the best way forward.
Space is a vast domain where many organizations operate. But it’s no place for a stovepipe, or multiple stovepipes. It requires a joint or integrated approach, where we all work together. The lessons of Goldwater-Nichols – where we learned we needed to be a joint military force – and of 9/11 – where we learned we needed to integrate intelligence – are etched in our minds.
Integration is clearly the way forward in Space, too – it isn’t fast, easy or cheap. But integration is the right thing to do.
The National System for Geospatial Intelligence’s Joint Mission Management Center – the JMMC – is going to be the way of the future for us in this regard. It will be critical to unifying DoD, IC and Allied GEOINT collection operations that deliver decision advantage at speed and scale during competition, crisis, and combat.
The requirement for this collaborative center is being driven in part by the need to counter our adversaries’ capabilities in the current global mission environment, while also being driven by new GEOINT capabilities. These capabilities are designed to push us forward into a new more dynamic end-to-end GEOINT collection enterprise that must be postured for a sense of urgency.
To meet the needed speed and scale of mission, we’re working with partners in DoD and the IC to jointly develop a Mission Demonstration Utility Assessment – an MDUA – enabled by real world mission, to exercise and demonstrate these new capabilities and tools.
So NGA is in a unique position to offer rapid solutions that enable NGA, NRO, US Space Force, US Space Command, and other IC and Allied partners, to move forward quickly and begin collaborating in a joint space, to meet the pacing challenges and key threats facing our national security.
Jointness and integration are more than buzzwords – they’re keys to our success. And we owe it to the American people– our policymakers, warfighters, and first responders – as well as those of our allies and partners – to set the right standards in every domain as we work toward GEOINT supremacy.
CLOSING
I’d like to close by highlighting that at NGA, we don’t stop at delivering raw images – instead, we deliver maximum understanding and context to every image collected. I’m proud of the culture we’ve built, and intend to continue pushing NGA to be the Vanguard of Distinction.
Geospatial-intelligence has become essential to underpinning our collective national and allied success against global challenges. Our people provide clarity to the global order, strategic competition, transnational challenges, and regional conflicts. The expertise and experience they bring to our national security issues are second to none.
I recommend you get to know the amazing, humble teammates whom I have the great privilege to lead. They’re the ones who truly make it happen.
What they do is more critical than ever, because we now find ourselves in an uncertain strategic landscape – complicated further by the explosion of data and hopes that more technology, A.I. and machine learning will deliver the answers we need.
In an earlier time, many may recall a trust – and possibly an overreliance – on so-called whiz kids and the quantification of combat. There may be some who advocate for much the same today. That seems to me…to be both wishful thinking and dangerous. We may well be experiencing a new Realist versus Idealist debate – this one not involving the balance between nuclear deterrence and arms control or disarmament, but rather the balance between experienced souls and convenient code.
Let me close with this ounce of Realism. Decisions of consequence in times of uncertainty are best not left to machines. While speed is always essential, we cannot forego the vital importance of content and context. And at NGA, our highly experienced people…who do innovate, train, and team with machines…will still always bear our standards and credentials.
I look forward to your questions. Thanks very much for all that you do for freedom.