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.”

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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 technology suite, dubbed Otter, was launched Jan. 14 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the Navy said in a news release Friday.

The platform’s primary payload has “space-based maritime domain awareness capabilities.” The secondary payloads — an X-band transmitter and an LED on-orbit payload (LOOP) — will “help the government evaluate communication technologies and concepts of operations on future CubeSat missions,” according to the release.

The vehicle will be operated by Naval Postgraduate School faculty and students on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office, via the Mobile CubeSat Command and Control network.

NRO is one of the United States’ premier spy agencies when it comes using satellites for intelligence purposes. President Donald Trump has nominated Troy Meink, one of the office’s senior leaders, to serve as the next secretary of the Air Force.

“The NRO is always looking for innovative ways to advance our capabilities in space,” Aaron Weiner, director of the organization’s advanced systems and technology directorate, stated in the release. “This demonstrator … showcases the value in rapidly qualifying low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf hardware.”

New Zealand’s Defence Science and Technology organization is also a partner in the project.

The Otter effort comes as the Pentagon and intelligence community are embracing the concept of putting relatively inexpensive platforms and proliferated satellite architectures into LEO to improve resiliency and reduce latency, among other benefits. For example, the Space Development Agency is working to build out a massive constellation, known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), for data transport and missile tracking.

“One of the things we’re excited about when you look at taking satellite communications from [geostationary orbit] all the way down to LEO and not GEO, [is] you’re able to … decrease latency, increase throughput,” Mike Dean, director for command, control and communications infrastructure in the office of the DOD Chief Information Officer, said Thursday during a panel at the Potomac Officers Club’s annual Defense R&D Summit in Northern Virginia, noting that the Pentagon is about to kick off a new study focused on non-terrestrial networks and protocols.

The Navy is also looking to improve its SATCOM and networking capabilities.

“When you look at 5G and Navy, a big part of this becomes, what’s the base component? … And for us it’s about that high data rate, high speed, large bandwidth capability. So as you start to look at those applications that we’re working on in the future, what would that be when you’re looking at the afloat? It’s that satellite communications to improve the bandwidth and connectivity to our strike groups at sea. That’s huge,” Scott St. Pierre, the service’s director for enterprise networks and cybersecurity, said during Thursday’s panel.

“Afloat [command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting], long-range fires — those are big data capabilities that we need to move data fast. We want to get it up to the satellite, down to an analysis station, [and] back up to the satellite with the results of what we’re looking at,” he added.

The Otter technology, an experimental system that’s not currently part of the PWSA, is intended to “add sensors in the space layer to be able to see what’s going on in the water,” Wenschel Lan, interim chair of the Naval Postgraduate School’s Space Systems Academic Group, stated in Friday’s release. “It’s not just a camera, but a lot of different phenomenologies that you can sense from space to then help paint the picture of what’s going on.”

The X-band transmitter “is ideal for space communications optimized for data-intensive payloads,” according to the release.

The Otter project is also envisioned as a risk-reduction effort that could smooth the way for future Pentagon satellite programs and give personnel important know-how.

“We’re spending a small amount of money to buy down the risks so that when they actually do a full program of record, they’re not going into it blind,” Lan added, noting that the initiative will also give NPS students direct experience with space missions and make them “better prepared to serve as Space professionals in the Navy, throughout the DOD, and beyond.”

Otter isn’t NRO’s and NPS’ first rodeo when it comes to collaboration on satellite projects. Last year, they launched a CubeSat called Mola that also carried an X-band transmitter and LOOP technology, according to the release.

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The confab will bring together experts from industry, academia and government to think through challenges and what solutions — available both now and in the future — will be required, according to a solicitation posted on Sam.gov on Wednesday.

“The space operational environment is a complex web of state and non-state actors and private individuals; friendly, neutral, and hostile audiences; information networks; information systems and links; and information itself in a myriad of formats,” the document states. “The space information environment of 2030 will be even more complex due to geopolitical competition and conflict, new technologies, increasing prevalence of AI enabled operations and information manipulation techniques, and advancements in adversary space capabilities and systems.”

During the gathering, participants will be given a scenario that involves threats posed by adversaries across the entire range of space operations — including ground, link and on-orbit environments — and tasked to find “multidomain and multidimensional” solutions, according to the solicitation.

The SSDP will also ask participants to describe what the space operational environment could look like in 2030, what technologies will be needed to conduct space domain awareness and targeting, and how the United States could deter aggressive activity in space with capabilities and mission concepts.

In recent years, leaders at the Pentagon have highlighted the growing number of threats to U.S. space capabilities — particularly from adversaries like China and Russia. A 2022 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that the space domain has become increasingly militarized, and that some nations have developed and deployed anti-satellite weapons and other counterspace capabilities.

With those trends in mind, the SSDP’s upcoming confab will look at “bolstering the U.S. ability to compete by, with and through space during competition with near-peer adversaries,” the solicitation notes. “This includes, but is not limited to, the preservation of on-orbit capabilities, preservation of space enabling infrastructure (SEI), gaining/ maintaining information advantages in space, and gaining/maintaining unfettered access and freedom of maneuver as it pertains to U.S. national security interests during competition.”

Capabilities and concepts discussed during the gathering could be developed further through a subsequent “Rapid Capability Assessment,” per the solicitation.

The document outlines more than 40 areas of expertise that the hosts are interested in, including artificial intelligence, offensive cyberspace operations, missile defense, electronic warfare and more.

The gathering is SSDP’s first “innovation foundry event,” which is a process spearheaded by U.S. Special Operations Command to facilitate engagement between subject matter experts in different emerging technology areas. The goal of such events is to discuss real-world scenarios and to generate capability solutions that could, potentially, lead to further research and development of prototypes.

The confab will be held Aug. 22-24 in Tampa, Florida. Applications to participate are due by July 16.

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Broadly, multi-cloud computing models involve two or more public cloud options, and hybrid cloud computing refers to environments with a mix of private (or enterprise-hosted) and public cloud services.

Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are competing for task orders via the Defense Department’s enterprise cloud initiative, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). The intelligence community’s multi-cloud construct, Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), is similar to JWCC and incorporates the same vendors, as well as IBM.

Awarded in 2020, C2E is a 15-year contract.

At this point, though, U.S. intel organizations “don’t have a multi-cloud/hybrid architecture at the IC level that would allow us to freely be able to exchange information with one another — and we don’t have a catalog … for [sharing] datasets,” Fred Ingham said last week during a panel at the annual GEOINT Symposium. 

Ingham is a CIA employee who’s currently on detail as the deputy chief information officer at the National Reconnaissance Office.

“In the old days, if I were to create a system that needed to take data from a spaceborne asset and write it very quickly to memory process that data, do analysis on that data, eventually come up with some intelligence and perhaps store it in a repository — what I might build is I might create a very high-speed network” and a storage area network, he said. He added that he’d also buy “purpose-built servers” and a database for processing, among other assets.

The government would approve that system for storing information only after “I knew precisely how all of those bits and pieces work together,” Ingham explained.

“Now, let’s fast forward into a multi-cloud construct” with that same system — “completely contrived,” he said — offering a hypothetical to demonstrate current challenges. 

“So we’re downloading the same bits and I’m going to choose to put that into Google, because I like their multicast capability, so we’re going to write those bits very quickly into Google. And then I’m going to process them. And let’s just say I’ve got my processing already in AWS, I’ve got heavy GPUs there. So, I want to process that in AWS. And I happen to like Microsoft’s [machine learning] algorithms, so I’m going to do the analysis there, inside of Azure. And this intelligence that I accrue, I’m going to go store this in an Oracle database. I didn’t leave out IBM, it’s just IBM is on the high side. Alright, so I want to do that — [but] I can’t do it,” Ingham said. 

He spotlighted reasons why officials can’t yet make this move-across-a-multi-cloud vision a reality.

“Number one, [the IC] acquired five cloud vendors, and we didn’t have a strategy or an architecture about how all of those things would fit together and work with one another,” Ingham said. 

The intel community does not currently have an overarching cloud governance model. 

Ingham noted at the conference he spoke to a representative from IBM, who told him about a commercial “cloud exchange, where each of those cloud providers are sitting in that same data center, and therefore they have the same type of networking capabilities — and so transport between the clouds are equal.”

“We don’t have that in the IC today,” he pointed out.

He highlighted a present lack of capacity to deterministically understand the performance of each cloud, onboarding tools, operational support, identity management, how data moves and comprehensive situational awareness across the cloud service providers, among other issues. 

“What I like to think about is frictionless computing, that’s not frictionless — and until we solve those issues, I don’t see us being able to use the multi-cloud in the manner that I just described,” Ingham said. 

On the panel, leaders from other intelligence agencies also reflected on the benefits and obstacles of their unfolding, government cloud deployments.

“The government has to do a better job in defining requirements — functional requirements — and more importantly, as you go towards a potential conflict with China, the operational requirements, or the operational scenarios in which you’re expected to run and deliver solutions [via the cloud]. I think we in the government have not done an appropriate job of that to our IT solution providers,” the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Chief Information Officer E.P. Mathew said.

Meanwhile, the National Security Agency is “already very far along on its multi-cloud journey,” according to NSA’s Deputy Chief Information Officer Jennifer Kron. Officials there “truly believe in finding the right computing solution for each mission” and purpose, she said, and so they are leveraging services from multiple providers.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency started moving “everything” to the cloud in 2015. But by 2016, officials “very quickly found out” that moving all the workloads “wasn’t really the smart thing to do,” NGA’s Director for Chief Information Officer and IT Services Mark Chatelain said. Now, the agency is using the C2E contract to diversify its cloud holdings, he noted, with aims to “figure out how to smartly use the multi-cloud” over the next few years.

Recently, NGA has been requesting that industry provide “something like a single-pane-of-glass view of a multi-cloud” ecosystem, Chatelain said — “so, you don’t have to go to Google window or an Oracle window, you basically have a single-pane-of-glass window that you can manage all of the clouds.”

NGA also wants more affordable applications to move data and capabilities, as well as direct connections between the clouds to expedite information transfer.

“Imagery, as you know, consumes a huge amount of data. NGA brings in about 15 terabytes per day of imagery into their facilities, today. And that’s predicted to grow probably about 1,000% in the next coming six or seven years. So we’ve got to have the connectivity between the clouds to be able to share that information,” Chatelain noted.

He and other officials suggested that cloud providers should recommend an architecture and appropriate path forward. They were hopeful that could soon be in the pipeline.

“I had the opportunity to be with all of the cloud vendors yesterday and today — and without exception, every one of them is very much in favor of exactly that. They know they bring something to the fight that nobody else does, and they know that their competitors bring something to the fight that they can’t bring,” Chatelain said.

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ISR capabilities enable officials to gather intel about adversaries by tracking their behavior and movements. Much of what NRO does is classified, but the office has been capturing and supplying ISR data from satellites to help focus military efforts and natural disaster response throughout its more than 60 years of existence. Now though, as the strategic environment and technologies are quickly evolving, senior leaders see the need to reshape how U.S. agencies work together. 

“We need information faster and we need to deliver it quicker — and we have even more denied areas” to contend with, Scolese noted at a virtual forum hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Challenges associated with the division of different government entities’ responsibilities for ISR have also been repeatedly spotlighted since the Space Force’s establishment in 2019.

“[NRO has] a lot of experience that we can bring to bear on [ISR], and we’re working very closely with the Air Force and the Space Force [to address] how we go about doing that. How do we take what we’ve learned and what capabilities we have to solve a very urgent problem? There’s a study that’s going on right now that we’re doing jointly that’s going to inform how we move forward on that,” Scolese said. “We recognize that we have to work together in order to develop that capability at scale that we’re going to need as we work in more denied areas.”

That study is not yet complete, “but is going well,” Scolese added — though he didn’t provide further details. At this point, he said, major shifts to the NRO’s role of providing overhead reconnaissance to the nation are not expected.

“I certainly haven’t heard of any indications that there’s a fundamental change in that sense of responsibility,” Scolese noted.

His remarks came about a week after Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall affirmed a new informal agreement for collaboration between the National Reconnaissance Office and the Department of the Air Force — which includes the Space Force — and the potential for more co-funded projects to accelerate the delivery of intel solutions to meet demands. 

“Secretary Kendall and I talk regularly,” Scolese said. In his view, the NRO’s long-standing relationships with the Air Force, Space Force and U.S. Space Command are currently “expanding to recognize that, again, the world is changing.”

He added: “So, as we discussed and as the secretary said, we’re going to tighten that relationship. We’re going to work more closely together and we’re going to find ways so that we can be efficient from a government standpoint so that we can make that happen very effectively.”

Additionally, NRO is working with Space Command to develop a more resilient, proliferated satellite architecture. 

“We all know that Russia and China are becoming very aggressive with space weapons. They want to take away our advantage in space. So, we have to deal with that,” Scolese said.

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