KISSIMMEE, Fla.—Artificial intelligence technologies are key to leveraging the large amount of imagery being collected by NATO allies and companies based in NATO countries to speed results, an alliance official said this week.
Space-based assets are the alliance’s foundation for navigation, tracking forces, communicating, missile detection, command and control, and more, Scott Bray, assistant secretary general for intelligence and security at NATO, said on Monday at the annual GEOINT Symposium.
“Working closely with the private sector and with academia to preserve and further advance our technological edge is one of the key pillars of the NATO 2030 agenda,” Bray told attendees. “And in this effort, geospatial artificial intelligence, or GEO AI, is a key area which will revolutionize the way we look at GEOINT in the future.”
Bray mentioned spatial machine learning and deep learning, “fueled by unprecedented computing power,” applied to geospatial data “to greatly improve the intelligence production cycle through applications like automatic change detection.
Spatial machine learning algorithms and deep learning techniques have become extremely powerful, fueled by unprecedented computing power. Leveraging these technologies on large collections of imagery, or geospatial data, will allow us to greatly improve the intelligence production cycle through applications like automatic change detection…socioeconomic analysis, maritime safety, analysis of space and cyber events, and many others.”
The Russo-Ukraine War has elevated the importance of intelligence for decision-making within NATO, he said.
In addition to increasing reliance on satellites for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), Bray said NATO is using unmanned assets more. In 2023, NATO “flew significantly more missions than in the previous year on the eastern flank, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the High North using its own five NATO RQ-4D Phoenix remotely piloted aircraft. The NATO ISR Force now has 30 percent more flying hours than they had a year ago.”
The RQ-4D is based on Northrop Grumman
’s [NOC] RQ-4 Global Hawk used by the U.S. Air Force for high-altitude, long-endurance ISR missions.
The NATO ISR Force numbers 420 personnel, Bray said. In 2024, the force is planning to meet the NATO 2030 vision of becoming “a platform and data agnostic organization that capitalizes on shared data from every domain and provides high quality intelligence products to NATO decision-makers and member nations at the speed of need,” he said.