The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is working on creating a hub for space intelligence collection and decision-making, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said on May 6.
During his keynote address at the GEOINT Conference in Orlando, Fla., Whitworth said that NGA plans to create a space intelligence hub — dubbed the Joint Mission Management Center (JMMC) — that will integrate data collected by the Defense Department (DoD) and various agencies and international partners from the intelligence community (IC) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) community.
“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,” Whitworth said.
The push behind this collaboration center is being driven in part by an increasingly dynamic threat environment that requires better data from multiple intelligence sources.
According to Whitworth, government agencies often manage data in stovepipes. But space is a vast domain where many organizations operate, and “it’s no place for a stovepipe – or multiple stovepipes,” he said.
“Integration is the right thing to do,” Whitworth said. “[Space] requires a joint or integrated approach, were we all work together.”
JMMC would provide a place where government agencies — and varying space organizations — can obtain clear and complete situational awareness based more on trusted sources and information and less on assumptions.
The collaboration hub will also leverage advanced intelligence collection capabilities, “to push us forward into a new more dynamic end-to-end GEOINT collection enterprise that must be postured for a sense of urgency,” Whitworth said.
JMMC is still in the concept phase, but NGA is working quickly to get it up and running, he said.
