The Pentagon’s Project Maven is becoming a program of record under the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
NGA said on Nov. 2 that it “has formally designated NGA Maven as a program of record, effective Nov. 7, 2023.”
“NGA Maven will leverage the Software Acquisition Pathway to accelerate, deliver, and sustain geospatial artificial intelligence capability maturation,” the agency said. “The designation of NGA Maven as a program of record follows a nine-month intensive period of requirements development, documentation, and approvals, which is equivalent to more than two years of effort. With NGA Maven, the agency has taken deliberate steps to ensure that the integration of AI into workflows will continue to accelerate operations and speed-to-decision for combatant commanders. As a program, NGA Maven will benefit maritime domain awareness, target management and NGA’s ability to automatically search and detect objects of interest.”
Programs of record are presidential budget line items overseen by Congress. Such programs typically have specifications approved by the DoD Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC).
NGA said on Nov. 1 that the JROC had approved the Software Initial Capabilities Document for Maven.
Software programs that have requirements from more than one military department must use a Software Initial Capabilities Document rather than a DoD Capability Needs Statement. The JROC must validate the Software Initial Capabilities Document applies to joint needs before the program moves into the Software Acquisition Pathway.
This year, NGA assumed leadership of Project Maven, an effort to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to process object data from full-motion video (FMV) collected by unmanned aircraft, such as General Atomics‘ MQ-9s; decrease the workload of intelligence analysts who may spend hours sifting through FMV; and reduce targeting to firing timelines from hundreds of minutes to single-digit minutes–a capability that Pentagon officials have said is needed for fleeting, “time sensitive targets.”
In May, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth told the Geospatial Intelligence Symposium in Colorado Springs that combatant commanders are routinely using Maven to satisfy their operational needs (Defense Daily, May 22).
Whitworth said in a Nov. 1 interview at NGA headquarters in Springfield, Va., that one of NGA’s vital but “unheralded” responsibilities is “collection orchestration,” the execution of imagery priorities among competing demands from the National Command Authority, combatant commands, the intelligence community, military services, and commercial companies.
The now wide availability of commercial imagery may point to a new NGA approach toward “collection orchestration” to ensure, in NGA terminology, delivery of “the right image, at the right place, at the right time.”
“Can that be automated to some degree?” Whitworth asked during the Nov. 1 interview. “And that’s why when you think about Maven, and what we’re doing with AI and ML [machine learning], I do think that function could scale where you have more of a rheostat approach, where a human might tell the algorithm, these are the factors I want to prioritize, these are the factors we need to de-prioritize, and we might be able to realistically be able to keep up with the constellation. That’s why I’m energized by Maven being here.”
“We’re demonstrating that we’re making progress,” he said. “The number of detections is going up precipitously, and so why not expand Maven into the orchestration role? But I need to make sure I don’t get ahead of the Congress, the president and the secretary of defense. I need to tell them what the art of the possible is.”
As of now, however, Congress “just wants us to be the best Maven for the targeting function,” Whitworth said.
NGA’s immediate predecessor was the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), established on Oct. 1, 1996 through Section 1112 of the fiscal 1997 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). NIMA became NGA on Nov. 24, 2003 through the enactment of the fiscal 2004 NDAA.
The fiscal 1997 NDAA makes NGA a “combat support agency,” and the 2008 revision to Executive Order 1233 makes NGA the functional manager of geospatial intelligence. The office of the director of national intelligence defined “collection orchestration” in 2017, and the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security detailed “collection orchestration” in policy and strategy documents in 2020 and 2021.
NGA said that it is the head of geospatial intelligence “collection orchestration,” which includes satellite imagery, but that details on “collection orchestration” are classified.
The agency has about 14,500 employees in the Washington, D.C., area, St. Louis, Denver and other locations, including 1,500 to 2,000 who advise military leaders on collection and collection priorities at combatant commands. Those performing “collection orchestration” as their sole duty at NGA are “in the hundreds,” Whitworth said.