[ad_1]
Acting Director Maguire Attends Groundbreaking Ceremony
for NGA West Campus
Acting Director of National Intelligence (ADNI) Joseph Maguire joined local, state and federal officials for the November 26 groundbreaking ceremony of the new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) West Headquarters in the northern section of St. Louis, MO. The nearly 300 people in attendance included past, current, and undoubtedly some future NGA employees, as well as business and community leaders and higher learning institutions with geospatial foci.
Other VIPs in attendance included Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, Sen. Roy Blunt, Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Lacy Clay, St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, and U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, Army Corps of Engineers Commander.
According to NGA Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, the ceremony marked the official kick-off of a project that will bring new energy, innovation and capabilities to his organization, as well as approximately 3,000 new jobs.
Sharp explained that NGA is responsible for providing hard-copy and digital maps, as well as raw and finished imagery information and intelligence, to military and IC planners, leaders and operators, first responders, humanitarian assistance workers, and anyone else who has a need to have easy and quick access to critical data in near-real time.
The new work spaces will contribute to the growth and proliferation of new ideas designed to evolve systems at a pace that meets the demands of shepherding and securing data that is collected and analyzed 24 x 7 from sensors all over the world.
Projected to be fully operational by 2025, the new facility will be in a geographic location that already boasts high-ranking academic institutions and cutting-edge industries. NGA’s leaders and those in the St. Louis community believe this co-location will not only benefit the agency and prospective academic and commercial partners, but the IC as a whole as it strives to build a greater information-sharing capacity in both classified and unclassified info systems.
The expected scientific and technological innovations will help evolve geospatial and open-source analytic tradecraft in ways that decrease the amount of time it takes to capture, analyze, store, retrieve and disseminate geospatial information and intelligence so that operators can get needed information when, where and how they need it.
“The American people expect us to keep them safe, and this facility will enable us to do just that,” said Acting Director Maguire.
In keeping with the IC’s ongoing transformative efforts to enhance collaboration, coordination and integration across its 17 agencies and organizations, the design of this work space will reflect the need to build tools and collaboration spaces to bring about new capabilities in rapidly-changing threat environments that demand continuous improvement processes.
This facility is the first in the IC to be built with unclassified office spaces to facilitate greater volumes of analysis that incorporate all available sources of imagery, regardless of whether gleaned from government or commercial imagery systems or open source.
This workflow model will achieve several objectives simultaneously; increased volume and rate of unclassified intelligence production created within reduced production timelines; enhanced information and intelligence sharing with the private sector, with state, local, and tribal governments and international partners.
In addition, the presence of unsecured work space will allow new employees – who can sometimes wait as long as three to four months for security clearance investigations and adjudications, and their clearances, to increase their contribution to the mission starting on day one.
[ad_2]
Source: DNI