Beauchamp began working for the department in 2015, and most recently served as the director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. In that role, he oversaw the Air and Space Forces’ highly-classified special access programs (SAP) and worked on insider threat mitigation.

But Beauchamp’s 29-year career spans across multiple positions at the Department of the Air Force, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). By and large, he either led or was involved in several critical events within the national security space — so much so that someone once described him as “the Forrest Gump of the national security world.”

“He goes, ‘You were kind of there in all the big happenings of your time of your career. You were right in the middle of all these things that were the big developments. Sometimes you were there in the background of the scene, and sometimes you were there front and center doing the thing,’” Beauchamp told DefenseScoop in an interview on July 3, his last day at the Pentagon, recalling how a colleague described his tenure.

After graduating from Lehigh University in 1992, Beauchamp was hired as a systems engineer for General Electric Aerospace’s programs with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He would eventually move to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) — the precursor to the NGA — after it was founded in 1996 as an operations analyst supporting work to collect imagery and targeting data in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars.

In 2000, Beauchamp became NIMA’s senior technical advisor for studies and analysis when he was 29 years old, making him the youngest person to be hired for a senior executive position within the agency since it was founded. Almost immediately, he was tasked with developing a congressionally mandated strategy that would convince the government to purchase imagery from commercial vendors.

At the time, the IC held a monopoly over space-based imagery and data, and the industry market was only just beginning to take hold. Beauchamp described the assignment as “trying to sell milk to people with their own cows.”

“Why would the NRO want to encourage the government to buy commercial imagery? They’re the judge to build and operate imagery satellites,” he said. “So I figured out what it would take in terms of investment to get industry to buy and build satellites sufficient to meet the government’s demands, because the national satellites were not meeting all of the government’s demand for mapping data.”

But after developing a business case for the strategy, Beauchamp said the government was largely opposed to implementing it. He decided to shelve the strategy after one final unsuccessful meeting held on Sept. 10th, 2001, he said.

“On the 11th of September, [Congress] called me up,” he said. “I’m in my office, we’re watching pictures of the [Twin Towers] smoking, and my phone rings and it’s the congressional staff saying, ‘You’ve got your money. Could you spend more?’”

Beauchamp’s $830 million plan was funded by one of Congress’ post-9/11 supplemental packages and created ClearView — the first program that allowed commercial companies to provide satellite imagery to the IC. Once U.S. forces had entered Afghanistan, Beauchamp also moved to purchase all of the overhead imagery of the country, he said.

“What we really wanted to do was make sure that this imagery that was being collected wasn’t being used by the Taliban to target our forces,” he said. “So I basically stitched a camouflage net made out of $100 bills over the country of Afghanistan in order to keep our forces safe.”

Today, commercially derived imagery is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet Labs all have several lucrative contracts with the federal government to provide space-based data for national security, weather and other needs. 

“So this industry, would it exist? Maybe. But would it have blown up the way it did? Probably not, if we hadn’t done this,” Beauchamp said.

The next several years of Beauchamp’s career would be spent at the NGA in various roles focused on strategy and acquisition. In 2012, he began a joint duty assignment as the ODNI’s director of mission integration under then-Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper — a job he noted was one of the highlights of his career. During his second day on the job, U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were targeted by militant groups, leading to the death of four American citizens.

Once Beauchamp’s team finished the assessment of the attack, he was immediately thrust into the fallout of the classified document leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013. His oversight led to a massive reform of the IC’s compartmented access programs and yet another overhaul of the government’s policy on commercial imagery.

“All of a sudden, now I’m convening people on the analytics side [and the] collection side, trying to figure out how to make up for the losses and capability that Snowden revealed,” he said. “And part of that is doing a reform of the IC’s compartmented programs, because they had way too many of them in overlap.”

Toward the end of his three-year assignment, Beauchamp started working with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work on a “side project” focused on standing up a new organization to pivot the Defense Department away from counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and towards great power competition, he said.

Beauchamp’s time in the intelligence community came to an end in 2015, when he was picked to be the Department of the Air Force’s deputy undersecretary for space and director of the principal DOD space advisor. There, he had two critical tasks, he noted.

“One, I’m working with all the international relationships with other countries who want to cooperate with us in space,” Beauchamp said. “At the same, I’m trying to convince the Americans to shift from space as a sanctuary from which you provide services, to space as a domain for warfighting.”

At the time, the Pentagon was reluctant to expand operations in space out of fear of being the first to weaponize the domain. But Beauchamp argued that the idea wasn’t about weaponization, and instead protection of critical space-based capabilities.

“It’s almost like before then, we were deliberately not protecting them so as you didn’t look like you wanted to start something,” he said. “And I was like, ‘This is not an option anymore.’ The Chinese had already demonstrated they could shoot down their own satellites, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing to us?”

Part of Beauchamp’s work was to develop a plan for how the Pentagon could make its space systems more resilient — many of which have become central to the Space Force’s operations, he noted. And when the first Trump administration decided to stand up the Space Force, Beauchamp was at the forefront of the effort to convince officials to approve the new military service.

Beauchamp would then transition to the Department of the Air Force’s office of the CIO, first as its director of enterprise IT in 2018 and later as the deputy CIO in 2020. His main focus was preparing the DAF for transitioning to telework operations as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, as well as consolidating the department’s enterprise licenses and creating a plan for modernizing base-level infrastructure, he noted.

“The overall trend line was eliminating the county option of uniqueness that was taking place at every base, and replacing it with a core set of enterprise services that were provided centrally,” Beauchamp said. “Big things like moving to zero trust — you can’t do those things if every base and every two-letter has their own architecture independent of everybody else’s.”

Today, the DAF has a strong path forward on modernizing its IT infrastructure, but Beauchamp said the true challenge will be convincing the department’s major programs to rely on enterprise services instead of building their own networks.

“It’s going to allow them to consolidate and collapse multiple redundant networks and really reduce the amount of money we’re spending on sustaining all this infrastructure,” he said. “When you modernize those networks, you also improve your cybersecurity, because the more deviation you have, the more gaps are created between the different baselines and different versions of software.”

Moving forward, Beauchamp said he will be taking time off but is open to other opportunities in the future.

“I’m excited for whatever the next challenge might be,” he said. “I’m interested in talking to folks who do exciting things, and to see who needs somebody like me to solve big problems.”

The post Winston Beauchamp retires from federal service after 29 years at Air Force, IC appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Combatant commands, in particular, have increased their use of MSS to command and control dynamic operations and activities in their theaters. In response to this growing demand, the [Chief Digital and AI Office] and Army increased capacity to support emerging combatant command operations and other DOD component needs,” a defense official said Thursday.

Questions linger, however, regarding the MSS deployment plan — and who is part of the expanded user base set to gain additional software licenses through this huge contract increase in the near term.

The Pentagon originally launched Project Maven in 2017 to pave the way for wider use of AI-enabled technologies that can autonomously detect, tag and track objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.

In 2022, Project Maven matured into Maven via the start of a major transition. At that time, responsibilities for most of the program’s elements were split between the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, while sending certain duties to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. 

All three organizations running the program have been largely tight-lipped about Maven — and the associated industry-made MSS capabilities — since the transition. 

The Defense Department inked the initial $480 million, five-year IDIQ contract with Palantir for the program in May 2024. The Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground was listed as the awarding agency, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the funding agency. Around that time, executives at Palantir told reporters that the work under that contract would initially cover five U.S. combatant commands: Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command/NORAD, and Transportation Command. The tech was also expected to be deployed as part of the Defense Department’s Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE).

In a one-paragraph announcement on Wednesday, DOD revealed its decision to increase that contract ceiling for Palantir’s MSS to nearly $1.3 billion through 2029.

A Pentagon spokesperson referred DefenseScoop’s questions about the move to the Army.

“We raised the ceiling of the contract in anticipation of future demand to support Army readiness. Having the groundwork for the contract in place ahead of time, increases efficiencies and decreases timelines to get the licenses. No acquisition decisions have been made,” an Army official said.

That official referred questions regarding the operational use of MSS — and specifically, which Army units or combatant commands would be front of line to gain new licenses — back to the Pentagon. 

Defense officials did not share further details after follow-up inquiries on Friday. A Palantir spokesperson also declined DefenseScoop’s request for comment.

NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth confirmed this week that there are currently more than 20,000 active Maven users across more than 35 military service and combatant command software tools in three security domains — and that the user base has more than doubled since January. 

Palantir also recently signed a deal with NATO for a version of the technology — Maven Smart System NATO — that will support the transatlantic military organization’s Allied Command Operations strategic command.

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As a combined intelligence and combat support agency, NGA is tasked with collecting geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) from satellites and other sources and turning it into actionable data for military operators and decision makers. Although the organization is already well-versed in AI capabilities — as it runs the Pentagon’s high-profile Maven computer vision program — NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth is pushing personnel to leverage the technology even more this year.

“As I was looking at the last several years, we use descriptors for the ‘A’ in NGA with a little bit of alliteration, and we would say ‘action’ or ‘acceleration,’” Whitworth told DefenseScoop in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of Space Symposium. “I wanted to put a finer point on it and say, the ‘A’ for this year is going to be AI.”

Research from NGA and industry on multimodal artificial intelligence has been one of the key factors driving his push for acceleration, he noted.

Similar to generative AI, multimodal models can simultaneously process information from multiple source types — including text, images and audio. But while generative AI is geared toward creating new content, multimodal AI expands on those capabilities and allows users to understand different types of data in a single, integrated output. 

For NGA, that could mean creating more holistic intelligence packages from sources beyond just imagery, which will be critical as available data is expected to exponentially increase in the coming years due to new sensors being fielded across domains.

“Distinction is really difficult — to distinguish enemy from non-enemy, combatant from non-combatant,” Whitworth said. “While GEOINT, imagery-derived intelligence typically is one of our primary forms of identifying and driving distinction, we always are looking for other forms of corroboration.”

NGA has already employed three test cases for multimodal AI, although Whitworth said the capabilities are still too early-on in their development to talk about them more specifically. However, he emphasized that the agency continues to explore other ways to collect and verify data beyond computer vision. 

“It’s a big Earth, and so while we have really good indications typically of where to look, there’s no guarantee,” he said. “Our business is to steal secrets, and when people are trying to keep things secret from us that could cause us harm or change the American way of life, we’re going to have to rely on all kinds of sources to ensure we’re looking at the right place.”

NGA also intends to leverage lessons from ongoing AI-focused targeting programs like Maven and apply them to its other roles, such as warning — which Whitworth described as a “behemoth” responsibility.

“Warning involves establishing a baseline of equipment, behaviors, activities around the world and being able to prioritize where you’re looking, and then ensuring you can find anomalies and announce them,” he said. “That’s going to take a lot of work. … Warning requires improvements in workflow, improvements in automation and yes, it will involve AI and ML.”

The warning mission is currently under the purview of the agency’s Analytic Services Production Environment for the National System for GEOINT program, also known as ASPEN, Whitworth said. 

Kickstarted in 2023 to address massive increases in data, ASPEN is a suite of analytic capabilities that leverages automation and AI to help NGA analysts provide more accurate warning indications to customers.

In order to streamline adoption of AI across all of its roles and responsibilities, Whitworth noted that NGA has recently established a new program executive office for advanced analytics helmed by Rachael Martin, who previously served as the program lead for NGA Maven. The PEO intends to bring together the agency’s best practices of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The new office is NGA’s latest organizational change made to help its AI adoption in 2025. The agency also recently named Mark Munsell as its first director of AI standards, while Trey Treadwell and Joseph O’Callaghan are serving as director of AI programs and director of AI mission, respectively.

“We didn’t actually have people who came to work and said, ‘I am the director of AI.’ And it was time to do that,” Whitworth said. “As the organization begins to mature, you at least have somebody who’s thinking about, what do I need in my organization? Do I need to change names? Do I need to change the organizational structure to ensure AI/ML is treated with the seriousness it deserves?”

At the same time, NGA is keeping an eye out for AI-enabled capabilities being developed by the commercial industry that could be incorporated into its workflows, while leveraging innovative procurement methods geared towards commercial solutions, Whitworth said.

For example, the agency used the Defense Innovation Unit’s commercial solutions opening (CSO) process to award pilot funding for Project Aegir, a program that focuses on commercial techniques to identify, monitor and track illicit maritime vessel activity in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. NGA is also exploring using bailment agreements, which allows the Defense Department to temporarily loan government-owned systems to smaller companies in order to test, research and develop new capabilities during a trial period.

“It is really focused on, how do we get industry into the door quickly? That’s why we did things like the CSO, that’s why we’re trying bailment agreements,” Whitworth said. “We’re leaning forward on trying to bring them in, because industry moves at the speed of light.”

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Initiated as a pilot effort in 2023, TacSRT established a marketplace where CoComs can directly purchase commercial imagery and related data analytics. In order to expand the program, the Space Force received an additional $40 million in funding as part of the continuing resolution passed by Congress in March. 

“The addition of this money represents a congressional vote of confidence in our efforts to tap into the commercial space market for the collective good,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Wednesday during his keynote address at the annual Space Symposium.

Saltzman and other service leaders have touted the success of TacSRT in recent months, especially the initiative’s ability to rapidly deliver critical information to warfighters. Through the program’s Global Data Marketplace, combatant commands can put in requests for “operational planning products” that include unclassified data from imagery and sensors collected by commercial space vendors. 

Col. Rob Davis, program executive officer for space sensing at Space Systems Command, told reporters Wednesday that TacSRT data is primarily being used to support humanitarian operations and monitoring of illegal fishing around the world. 

And while the pilot version of TacSRT initially supported U.S. Africa Command, leaders at other combatant commands are leveraging the program’s marketplace as well. For example, U.S. Central Command also purchased commercial data analytics during construction of the Joint-Logistics-Over-the-Shore pier in Gaza, and TacSRT provided U.S. Southern Command with real-time tracking of wildfires in South America, according to the Space Force.

As it looks to scale TacSRT, the service is still figuring out the best ways to operationalize the program, Davis said.

In the TacSRT Tools Applications and Processing Lab, “we are doing the development of additional techniques, partnering with industry, partnering with [Space Force] component field commands … to develop new tools that we can then operationalize, as well,” Davis said during a media roundtable. “We continue, in that more developmental space, to do ad hoc support through that experimental space to answer questions that combatant commands have.”

With plans to expand TacSRT, the Space Force is also working with the intelligence community — including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office — to delineate roles and responsibilities for purchasing commercial imagery. 

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA is responsible for buying analytical models and ISR products from commercial providers, as well as determining who across the government receives the packaged data. At the same time, the NRO is tasked with acquiring imagery from commercial remote sensing satellites and disseminating it across the Pentagon and intelligence community. 

However, the Space Force’s TacSRT pilot caused some tension between the service and intelligence agencies — with some concerned that the Space Force’s acquisition and distribution of space-based commercial imagery is a duplication of NGA’s and NRO’s work. 

But after years of back and forth, NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth told DefenseScoop in an interview that the agency and the Space Force have drafted a “memorandum of agreement” over the relationship between NGA and TacSRT. The service is also finalizing a similar agreement with the NRO, according to a report from Breaking Defense.

Whitworth explained that in his role as functional manager for geospatial intelligence, he is charged with oversight of both the Defense Department’s and intelligence community’s acquisition of space-based ISR from commercial satellites. To that end, his responsibility moving forward will be reporting on the use of commercial imagery in warfighting — including via TacSRT — to lawmakers while also involving the Space Force, he said.

“This fits beautifully into being that integrator, and Congress feels the same way from a stewardship perspective,” Whitworth said. “So getting to that issue [of] we’re not paying twice, keeping that denominator involving TacSRT officially in our world and vice-versa is healthy.”

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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s site, including all web pages with press releases, open-source data and federal maps, and staff and leadership information remains inaccessible on Friday afternoon. DefenseScoop first noticed the website was not working on Thursday — and on Friday morning online tools that routinely check server statuses showed that systems for NGA.mil were still not responding. 

“We’ve temporarily unpublished our public-facing presence while we work diligently to ensure that we are in compliance with the President’s EOs,” an NGA spokesperson said in an emailed response to questions on Friday.

The agency also temporarily deactivated its social media accounts as part of the pause, they confirmed.

Broadly, NGA missions encompass data collection, field operations and comprehensive analysis of geospatial information and intelligence about movements and happenings all around the globe that could impact U.S. national security.

According to the spokesperson, the website outage is “not impacting anyone’s work” at the intel hub.

“As an intelligence agency, most employees work almost exclusively on classified networks. Those who do work on unclass systems, don’t do so through our public-facing website. All internal systems are still functioning,” the spokesperson said.

“The timeline is still being determined,” the spokesperson added.

The official did not directly answer DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the presidential EOs that sparked the move.

One of Trump’s orders directed an end to all U.S. government diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

At least one defense agency also reportedly halted all activities related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other “special observances” in the almost immediate aftermath of one EO.

Trump’s Jan. 20 order to name “the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America” could also possibly have implications for many of NGA’s public maps, and other geographic content.

When asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson said the department’s Chief Information Office does not administer the NGA websites. 

They did not specify whether any other public-facing defense-aligned websites are also being put on pause.

Spokespersons from the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for more information on Friday.

On Friday night, certain webpages associated with NGA.mil appear to be back up and accessible. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to comment.

Updated on Jan. 31, 2025, at 10:15 PM: This story has been updated to note that on Friday night, certain webpages associated with NGA.mil appear to be back up and accessible.

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In an interview with DefenseScoop this week, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new and first-ever Chief AI Officer Mark Munsell shared initial details about one ongoing pursuit to train a cutting-edge model and shed light on his approach to steering NGA’s early adoption of the still-uncertain technology.

“We could not have predicted some of these inventions with transformers, like [generative pre-trained transformer or GPT] and stuff, and because of that and the trajectory of those, I think certainly we’re going to be living in a better world. But for the first time, we’ll have to really guard against misuse,” Munsell said.

As the CAIO suggested, genAI, geoAI and associated frontier models are part of a rapidly evolving field of technologies that are not fully understood, but are pushing the boundaries of what existing AI and machine learning can accomplish. Typically, such tech can process massive volumes of data and perform increasingly “intelligent” tasks like recognizing speech or generating human-like media and code when prompted.

These capabilities hold a lot of promise to dramatically enhance how the agency’s analysts detect and make sense of objects and activities they are tracking across sprawling data sources, inside NGA’s world that revolves around capturing and deciphering geospatial intelligence about movements and happenings all around the globe.

Munsell is expressly determined in his early months as the new AI chief to set the agency on a clear path for responsibly exploring and adopting powerful frontier models in their day-to-day operations.

However, one immediate challenge he said his team is confronting has to do with the fact that the major companies developing these next-generation models to date have not prioritized geographic use cases that would impact NGA’s work.

“So, we have a big role to play, I think, there on behalf of the country — and really, potentially on behalf of the world — which is to ask these companies to focus on certain capabilities that don’t exist yet, or that the models do not do well yet,” Munsell explained. 

He provided several examples to demonstrate this issue, particularly when it comes to existing computer vision technologies.

“How well the models can identify things on a photo —  that is super important, and we want companies to do that better,” he noted.

Beyond that realm, Munsell said, modern large language models are learning to generate GEOINT assets, like graphs and graphics. But, in his view, these systems are not yet highly skilled at understanding geography and critical features, like longitude and latitude coordinates. 

“Simple things, like depiction of boundaries or understanding certain geographic locations. Today, it’s all based on maybe words in a gazetteer, or words in an encyclopedia, or words in an atlas. A lot of the training has been like that. So there’s a lot to do to turn these large models into things that are geographically aware. NGA will have a big part to play in that,” Munsell said. 

During the interview, the CAIO also offered DefenseScoop the first preview of an initial generative AI experiment that agency insiders are pursuing. 

“One of the examples we’ll have soon, early next year, is we’re doing a retrieval augmented generation — so people just use the term the RAG — implementation of a large language model that’s being trained … on every NGA report ever written,” he said.

Each day, agency officials compile detailed documents on intelligence activities around the world, such as adversary undertakings at specific locations.

“Essentially, [we’ll] be able to ask it any question on any report that’s ever been written, and it [could] have the depth of knowledge and understanding of analysts that worked on accounts for 30 years,” Munsell explained. 

The longtime technologist joined the Defense Mapping Agency (which evolved into NGA) for the first time roughly 30 years ago, as a software engineer in 1995.

Notably, he’s part of a very small percentage of senior executives in the government who have around a million lines of software code under their belts.

“For example, I wrote the system that NGA used up until last year to produce all its aeronautical information that goes into all of the DOD aircraft. That was my first assignment here at NGA,” he noted. 

After that, Munsell spent some time in the private sector. He returned to NGA in the early 2000s and has been rising through the tech ranks there ever since. In recent years, he helped launch the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate — a hub he’s continuing to lead in his now dual-hatted role as CAIO.

“It made logical sense for the agency and for the director to appoint the director of that component as the chief AI officer,” he said.

Munsell has been taking it all in as AI and machine learning have intensely evolved over the course of his career. 

Looking back on his first stint at NGA, he said he didn’t totally anticipate the emergence of generative AI. And while he believes it will improve the human experience, he also repeatedly pointed to the need to adopt these yet-to-be-fully-understood technologies responsibly.

“It’s really kind of a one-two punch. On one hand, you’re going to promote these great inventions that will do wonderful things for for the world. And on the other hand, you do really have to watch and protect people from misusing these. So, that’s … how I look at my responsibilities. It’s two gloves,” Munsell said. 

“On one hand, I’m promoting the use — the proper use — because we know it’s good and better. And on the other hand, we’re checking and we’re ensuring that people are doing right by this technology,” the CAIO told DefenseScoop. 

The post ‘One-two punch’: Inside NGA’s approach to exploring powerful next-gen AI appeared first on DefenseScoop.

During an interview with DefenseScoop on Tuesday, Munsell reflected on his motivation for taking on this nascent role, and discussed those and other key priorities on his near-term agenda as NGA’s newly named CAIO.

“I think you’ll see a lot more energy around implementing generative AI in the analytic workflow,” he said.

Historically considered America’s super-secret mapping agency, NGA is the Defense Department’s functional manager for geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. That discipline involves the capture of imagery and data from satellites, radar, drones and other means — paired with expert analyses to visually display and monitor physical objects and geographically referenced activities on Earth.

As Munsell suggested, the maturing realm of generative AI (which broadly incorporates disruptive models that can pull patterns within existing data to generate original content across many forms) presents heaps of opportunities and risks for NGA analysts.

The emerging technology and associated, advanced frontier models were already top of mind for Munsell as NGA’s director of data and digital innovation. In addition to serving as CAIO, he’ll continue to lead that directorate — and in doing so, he’s set on “putting AI into the hands” of the agency’s users.

“And what I mean by that is a lot of these … big models being developed by the big companies like Anthropic and Google and OpenAI are still not accessible by the folks at NGA. They are still not usable by the folks in NGA. So I would consider myself successful when our analysts and the officers at NGA have access to those — the world’s best models — on a top secret network,” Munsell told DefenseScoop. 

One primary task that’s already in-play for his team related to this intent, involves revamping NGA’s guidance for how its personnel adopt artificial intelligence to include additions that better confront generative capabilities.

“A new AI strategy will be published by NGA probably after the [2024] calendar year” ends, Munsell said.

Among other responsibilities as CAIO, he’s also working closely with the agency’s first-ever Responsible AI Officer Anna Rubinstein on pursuits to establish more technology governance assets and facilitate initiatives geared at strengthening the trustworthiness and reliability of GEOINT models.

“We know that the work that we do with AI is serious work — positively identifying targets, accurately geo-locating them — it’s serious work that could be used in warfare. And we knew how important it was for us to establish that program of responsible AI implementation and to have a senior officer in charge of it,” Munsell said. 

As CAIO, he now oversees “a couple-hundred-person organization” with offices, divisions and branches. Some of that staff will also be supporting Munsell in an ongoing but complex effort to produce a full inventory of all NGA initiatives and programs on artificial intelligence. 

“We’ve been doing the inventory for a couple of years now, but it’s one of the harder things to do,” he said. 

“There are designated programs that are building and making and implementing AI, but there are hundreds of programs that could sort of suddenly be using AI. And so at some point you do want to know every program and every initiative that’s using AI, so you can have some level of audit on it, some level of security on it, and some level of safety evaluation on it. But sometimes the AI is embedded in software that you’re buying commercially off-the-shelf, and then you’re bringing [it] into the agency and you might not even know it,” Munsell explained.

For that and other reasons, NGA’s inventory will be, as he put it, “less literal,” as well as “a little more logical” and “a little bit more about investments in programs that are deliberately either building or buying or implementing AI.”

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding why NGA tapped him as its first CAIO at this particular point in time, Munsell noted that the move is now obligatory for federal organizations under multiple recent directions from the White House and Congress. 

But in his view, the spy agency has also been ahead of the game, especially over the last four years. He called out defense “visionaries” who impacted NGA’s path to realizing AI and enabling the Pentagon’s high-stakes Maven computer vision effort — including former and current NGA and DOD officials such as Phillip Chudoba, Sandra Auchter and Drew Cukor.

“For me, it’s an honor to be the first [CAIO]. But in a way, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants — and I think you should say that, because it’s so true,” Munsell told DefenseScoop.

The post NGA’s new artificial intelligence chief previews near-term priorities appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The move comes amid a broader push by the U.S. intelligence community and Defense Department to onboard more AI technologies. Last week, President Biden issued a new national security memorandum that prods the Defense Department and IC to go faster in adopting these types of capabilities. Munsell was at National Defense University where National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan rolled out the memo, according to a post on LinkedIn.

“NGA had an important role in developing the National Security Memo on Artificial Intelligence,” he wrote. “Congratulations to the National Security Council and the team that worked so hard to layout a framework for the promotion and safe adoption of AI for the country.”

The agency has a number of major ongoing artificial intelligence-related initiatives, including a high-profile effort known as Maven.

Last month, the organization unveiled plans to launch a $700 million data-labeling effort to advance computer vision models.

Previously, it rolled out an initiative called Accreditation of GEOINT AI Models (AGAIM) — which aims to set a new government standard for assessing the robustness and reliability of computer vision models deployed for national security purposes — and an educational tool dubbed GEOINT Responsible AI Training.

In his new role as CAIO, Munsell will be tasked with overseeing, coordinating and integrating NGA’s current and future planned geospatial intelligence AI efforts, advising leadership on applying the tech to production and operations; creating an inventory of AI initiatives and programs; recommending new initiatives; and establishing the governance and responsible use of artificial intelligence capabilities, among other responsibilities, according to a press release.

He will also serve on the intelligence community’s CAIO Council, which is responsible for helping formulate the IC’s broader AI strategy; providing oversight of investments for implementing that strategy; coordinating policy and procedural guidance on managing AI-related risks; promoting the use of enterprise purchase agreements; making recommendations for using and improving “AI-enabled” architectures; and boosting the “trustworthiness, equity, integrity and resilience” of the tech, among other efforts, per the release.

In addition to taking on the new job, he will be dual-hatted as the leader of NGA’s data and digital innovation directorate, a role which he previously held.

Prior to taking on his current positions, Munsell served as the agency’s deputy director for data and digital innovation, chief technology officer, and deputy director for the IT directorate. He is also a founder of NGA’s Moonshot Labs, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The spy agency describes Moonshot Labs as an “unclassified innovation hub and collider space for NGA, its partners and customers to meet, create, collaborate, and innovate.”

DefenseScoop reached out to an NGA spokesperson for more information about who previously held the CAIO role and where they went after exiting the position.

“We’ve had different folks filling some of the roles, but he’s the first publicly designated,” they said of Munsell.

Updated on Oct. 29. 2024, at 6:00 PM: This story has been updated to include comment from an NGA spokesperson.

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Senior leaders from the watchdogs unveiled their plans to open this new review in a memorandum issued Sept. 9.

“The DOD OIG self-initiated the project based on our ongoing assessment of operations, programs, and risks in the DOD,” a spokesperson from that office told DefenseScoop on Wednesday.

According to the new joint memo, the “objective of this evaluation is to assess the effectiveness with which the [NGA] has integrated the Maven artificial intelligence program into the NGA’s [GEOINT] operations and fielded the technology to DOD mission areas.”

The officials emphasized, however, that they “may revise the objective as the evaluation proceeds,” and will also consider suggestions for other adjustments.

“We will perform the evaluation at the NGA. We may identify additional locations during the evaluation,” they wrote.

Responding to a then-intensifying demand for military computer vision applications, the Pentagon originally established Project Maven in early 2017 to help pave the way for wider use of AI-enabled technologies that can autonomously detect, tag and track objects or humans of interest from still images or videos captured by surveillance aircraft, satellites and other means.

In 2022, Project Maven matured into Maven via the start of a major transition, which at that time split the responsibilities for most of its elements between NGA and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, while sending certain duties to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

NGA has long been considered America’s secretive mapping agency, but it’s understood that one of its primary contemporary missions encompasses managing the entire Maven AI development pipeline.

Still, all three organizations running the program have largely been tight-lipped since the transition began — particularly regarding where that process stands and how each of their primary lines of effort may shift going forward. 

“Over the last few years, the DOD OIG has conducted a series of projects on DOD’s development and use of [AI]. Three evaluations have been initiated on Maven — which as you know is one of the DOD’s primary AI programs,” the Pentagon’s OIG spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Wednesday.

The first evaluation, published in 2019, focused on early stages of the initiative’s development. The second was released in 2022 and honed in on specific contracting aspects. 

“With the Maven program now moved from [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] to NGA, the DOD OIG’s third evaluation, announced earlier this week, will focus on how NGA is integrating Maven into its operations,” the spokesperson said.

An NGA spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Thursday that the agency was expecting, and welcomes, this “planned study.”

Updated on Sept. 12, 2024, at 11:50 AM: This story has been updated to include comment from an NGA spokesperson.

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“This represents a significant investment in computer vision, machine learning and AI,” Whitworth, the agency’s director, told reporters Friday at a roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

“NGA will engage with commercial counterparts to navigate the challenges posed by increasing levels of GEOINT data. Together, we will ensure the delivery of timely, relevant and AI-enabled GEOINT to our customers, partners and allies,” he said.

GEOINT, or geospatial intelligence, refers to the field that encompasses the collection of imagery and data from satellites, radar, drones and other assets, that is analyzed and designed by experts to visually depict and monitor physical geographically referenced activities and locations on Earth.

Known as America’s leading federal, geospatial mapping hub, NGA is the Defense Department’s functional manager for GEOINT.

Whitworth noted that the agency is “responsible for the visual domain within the intelligence community, establishing a baseline of behavior or objects and where they are and the specificity of their location and their characterization — and then citing that there’s an anomaly, that there’s something new, or something different that might be troubling.”

Advanced computer vision models, powered by AI, help NGA analysts speedily make sense of the heaps of satellite imagery and geospatial data captured around the clock.

“We are growing the number of models — I’m not going to say exponentially, but significantly. And I’m not going to say the number of models, but it’s significant. I’m really impressed by the team’s ability to generate new models in the last year, and the number of detections is going up precipitously per day,” Whitworth told DefenseScoop at the meeting.

Data-labeling is a key element of NGA’s modernization effort associated with its analysis and related activities. Broadly, the term refers to experts’ practices and techniques to identify, tag and add labels to raw data, in a way that ultimately provides context to machine learning models as they are trained.

“Data-labeling is the process where the human actually identifies the object and then, in a way that is understandable by the model, informs the model. So you have to actually label it in a very specific way. And it’s part of AI, but it’s really the essence of ML for computer vision,” Whitworth explained.

Though he did not share much further details about the upcoming request for proposals, Whitworth repeatedly emphasized the size of the agency’s potential $700 million data-labeling investment.

“It’s really about the amount — that’s a big number,” he told reporters.

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