NGA Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth addressing the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Photo: David Aleman, USGIF

ST. LOUIS — The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the U.S. Space Force on Wednesday signed a memorandum of agreement (MoA) clarifying their respective roles and responsibilities in carrying out tactical surveillance, reconnaissance, and tracking (TacSRT) using commercial space imagery and data analytics.

NGA is a combat support agency and maintains an extensive collection of tactical imagery that it gathers from commercial vendors through the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (GEGD) repository for on-demand situational awareness by users, including U.S. combatant commands (COCOMs). Maxar supports GEGD for NGA.

The Space Force about two years ago began a TacSRT pilot to leverage commercial and publicly available space imagery and analytics to provide situational awareness products to combatant commands. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Wednesday told GEOINT 2025 attendees that the COCOMs have said they value the TacSRT planning products provided by the Space Force’s Space Systems Command.

The Space Force has provided TacSRT in support of Columbia to support disaster relief and Brazil to guide relief efforts for flooding, Saltzman said.

The MoA will help ensure “stewardship” over how the partners use commercial imagery to ensure the government does not pay for the same thing twice, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said at the symposium.

Later, Whitworth told reporters, “For commercial imagery we’re just finding common ground all over the place. And one other thing that it stipulates is we’re going to share it all. Right? We’re going to share it all. There’s not going to be a stovepipe where, if we buy a certain amount of commercial imagery, it stays in our stovepipe, and if they buy it, it’s not going to stay there. And so that’s also a really healthy understanding,”

He added that “we want to ensure that we’re not going to be stepping on each other.”

The MoA is a product of ongoing collaboration at all “echelons” of both organizations to better understand one another’s strengths and shortfalls and how they can complement each other to make up for any weaknesses, Saltzman said during the signing ceremony.

He called it “industrial strength collaboration between two really important organizations getting after a very critical mission.”

A year ago, at the GEOINT conference, the Space Force was complaining that warfighters were not getting timely support for imagery and related analytics. Space Force Lt. Gen. David Miller said then in Florida that Joint Force Commanders need to task and retask systems directly to meet their operational requirements (Defense Daily, May 6, 2024).

A year ago, NGA established the Joint Mission Management Center (JMMC) with the Space Force to “decrease the gap between collection requests and delivery, leveraging the whole-of-GEOINT constellation to optimize and deconflict collection operations in real-time.”

The Space Force currently has 20 Guardians at the JMMC and Whitworth said he hopes that number will increase. The JMMC is a “source of collaboration” with the Space Force, he said.

“I’m just going to tell you, having been involved in many, many operations involving collection and priorities, that if you’re not part of it, if you can’t touch, if you can’t witness it, there is a tendency to doubt it,” he said. “And this is the ‘I believe’ button. It’s the ultimate ‘I believe.’”

This story was first published by Defense Daily