Inked by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth during the annual GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, the MOA outlines the boundaries between NGA’s operations and the Space Force’s nascent Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program — putting an end to a two-year turf war over which organization should purchase commercial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products and deliver them to combatant commanders.

“What [the agreement] really reflects is the quality of collaboration and every echelon that was necessary to work through these procedures,” Saltzman said in a statement. “I’m excited about this because of what it represents, and that’s really industrial strength collaboration.”

Whitworth first shared news of a drafted MOA with the Space Force in April during an interview with DefenseScoop, noting that moving forward NGA will work closely with the service to ensure the organizations weren’t “paying twice” for commercial ISR.

In a statement, Whitworth called the finalized agreement “a new standard for collaboration.”

While the full text of the MOA was not made public, the document outlines a “governance framework” between the intel agency and the Space Force by detailing the roles and responsibilities each organization has in providing commercial ISR to military leaders, an NGA spokesperson said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

Furthermore, a Space Force spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the MOA requires the service to collaborate with NGA support teams to “ensure data purchases and derived products … conform to consistent, mutually agreed upon National System for Geospatial Intelligence standards when applicable.”

The accord also states the Space Force will “coordinate processes and procedures for dissemination and releasability of products,” and submit a report to NGA each quarter that describes the service’s efforts to minimize overlapping efforts, the spokesperson added.

Disputes between the Space Force and NGA first arose when the service kicked off TacSRT in 2023. The program established a marketplace where combatant commanders can directly buy and rapidly receive “operational planning products” — including unclassified imagery and data analytics — from commercial space providers. 

Although Space Force officials have touted the success of TacSRT and begun efforts to scale it, the program caused some tension between the service and the intelligence community.

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA holds responsibility for acquiring commercial ISR products and determining who across the government receives them. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is tasked with buying commercial remote sensing imaging and sharing it across the department and intelligence community.

Space Force leaders have claimed that TacSRT is not meant to step on the toes of NGA and NRO, but instead serve as a complement to the intelligence community’s work.

During a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Saltzman said the program “fills a niche where you have unclassified capabilities that can get quickly into planners’ hands.”

Now that the Space Force has finalized an agreement with NGA, the service is expected to also reach a similar arrangement with the NRO.

When asked by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., about progress on the Space Force’s work with the intelligence agencies on Tuesday, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink emphasized that foundations for collaboration have been laid — but “the devil’s in the details.”

“We’re just starting to feel good now and starting to do experimentation with [TacSRT] now, using tools to allow that to happen,” Meink said. “There’s obviously still a lot of work to go, but I think there’s been great progress made, and the fact that we already have systems that we can start doing testing work and start doing exercise will be critically important.”

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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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“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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The NGA director unveiled this initiative — called the Accreditation of GEOINT AI Models, or AGAIM — during a roundtable in Washington hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

“The accreditation pilot will expand the responsible use of GEOINT AI models — and posture NGA and the GEOINT enterprise to better support the warfighter and create new intelligence insights. Accreditation will provide a standardized evaluation framework. It implements risk management, promotes a responsible AI culture, enhances AI trustworthiness, accelerates AI adoption and interoperability, and recognizes high-quality AI while identifying areas for improvement,” Whitworth said.

Historically considered the United States’ secretive mapping agency, NGA is the Defense Department’s functional manager for geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. Broadly, that discipline involves the capture of imagery and data from satellites, radar, drones and other means — as well as expert analysis to visually depict and monitor physical features and geographically referenced activities on Earth.

One of NGA’s primary contemporary missions encompasses managing the entire AI development pipeline for the U.S. military’s prolific, evolving computer vision program Maven.

With increasingly “intelligent” capabilities, the agency’s capacity to detect threats globally is getting sharper. 

“[We’re] distinguishing objects, let’s say, for our aviators who fly our planes in and out of airfields. [We’re] distinguishing objects that could actually bring them harm, that are new, that encroach upon the airspace as they come into an airfield — or that might be new as it relates to a newly discovered seamount on the seabed, or that might be new relative to bathymetrics and hydrography for people who are in ships,” Whitworth explained. 

“These are things that keep people alive,” he said.

And as the technology rapidly matures, officials at the agency are using machine learning techniques to train models to detect anomalies for humans, as the director put it, “while we might be asleep or while we’re not looking at a particular image.”

New and more sophisticated models are also starting to emerge at an unprecedented pace. 

“In GEOINT — getting back to that issue of distinction — it is so important that we make sure these are good models, because the issue of positive identification underlies, effectively, whether you’re going to be correct and whether we might have some sort of an apology on behalf of our nation or an alliance” if the U.S. government gets something wrong, Whitworth said.

The agency envisions this pilot to eventually become a pathfinder within DOD that ultimately ensures that all players have the same standards to guide their GEOINT model development.

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” the director said.

Traditional computer vision and generative AI capabilities will be addressed in the new pilot.

“There are a whole lot of different types of models, and everyone likes to talk about [large language models, or LLMs]. This is more of the LVMs — I’m going to make that term up a bit for a large visual model, or a visual transformer — I think is actually a better way of talking about this,” Whitworth told DefenseScoop.

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NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth highlighted this CSO pilot program — and discussed the broader aims of the agency’s new Project Aegir initiative that it’s associated with — during his keynote at the annual GEOINT Symposium and in a media roundtable that followed. 

“On the maritime CSO, I would say that certainly what’s happening in the Red Sea would complement that. But in its infancy, this really stemmed from requirements that we get from the Indo-Pacom commander more than anybody,” Whitworth told DefenseScoop during the roundtable.

“And I hope — whether it’s now [the new Indo-Pacom commander Adm. Sam Paparo or former Indo-Pacom chief Adm. John Aquilino] because it was on [Aquilino’s] watch that we really listened hard to this requirement — I hope that they’re happy, because it’s another indication of how responsive we are,” he added. 

CSOs are a relatively new mechanism that enables the Defense Department and its components to buy innovative and emerging commercial capabilities from non-traditional vendors. 

Solicitations that follow CSO procedures generally allow the Pentagon to more rapidly select commercial solutions that meet fast-changing contemporary needs. 

“It was written into law in the [fiscal 2022] NDAA, and so we want to make sure that we’re using all the tools in our toolbox — not just operationally, but in the acquisition space — to get at those capabilities and to help unlock the potential in the industry,” NGA Commercial Operations Director Devin Brande told DefenseScoop during the media roundtable.

Through the new CSO pilot for capabilities to expand maritime domain awareness, NGA aims to “work more flexibly with industry and to allow them to come in with more creative ideas, where we don’t necessarily have the clearly defined thing that we want them to build and provide for us,” Brande explained.

This acquisition experiment marks just one element of Project Aegir, NGA’s new pursuit to shape a multiple-vendor approach and generate a commercial sensor architecture that can track and monitor illicit maritime activity all over the world. 

Whitworth emphasized how this new effort and aligned pilot collectively underscore the agency’s commitment to staying ahead of evolving threats and ultimately support frontline efforts against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, illicit trafficking, and other activities that pose problems for global security.

In this initial CSO pilot, “commercial vendors will work collectively to establish tasking algorithms for tipping and queuing a diverse array of sensors, conduct analysis and deliver wholly-unclassified, shareable intelligence of illicit maritime activities in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility,” according to the agency’s press release announcing the work.

Vendors can submit their responses May 6-24, after which time selected vendors will be invited to pitch their capabilities at Defense Innovation Unit headquarters in Mountain View, California, June 24-28, per the release.

“The selected vendor or group of vendors will be invited to participate in a $1.5 million pilot program to test capabilities. If the pilot program is successful, Project Aegir will be rolled into a major acquisition effort,” the release states.

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Last year, responsibilities for original Project Maven elements were split between NGA and the new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), while its oversight moved to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (I&S). 

“As we look back on just a couple of months since we’ve actually inherited leadership of the geospatial portion of the program, the fact that it’s no longer [just] a ‘project’ is very real to us,” Whitworth said during his keynote at the annual GEOINT Symposium on Monday.

He confirmed his team has been moving to embrace AI and machine learning to quickly fuse enormous amounts of data from across disparate datasets, and are working to automate significant portions of dynamic collection, imagery, exploitation, and reporting workflows to rapidly exploit data that can help anticipate notable activity. 

“In mere months since taking over the project, we’ve made important strides. We’ve worked closely with the combatant commands to integrate AI into workflows — accelerating operations and speed-to-decision. It benefits maritime domain awareness, target management, and our ability to automatically search and detect objects of interest. We’ve increased fidelity of targets, improved geolocation accuracy, and refined our test and evaluation process. And we’ve ensured Maven models can run in other machine learning platforms,” Whitworth explained.

Even amid its transition into its latest iteration, Maven is “playing an essential role” in informing future military operations, in his view.

Geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, is gleaned from satellites and other systems.

On today’s operational landscape, “the volume of GEOINT data expands with the proliferation of collection systems and expansion into the space domain,” Whitworth noted. 

Though most details connected to Maven’s actual use in the real-world are sensitive or classified, Whitworth in a press briefing at the symposium expanded on how his team is collaborating with military commands to integrate AI and supporting algorithms associated with Maven into mission workflows.

“I have a saying that all targeting is inherently geospatial — and so the targeting crowd will be relying on a lot of our outputs,” he told DefenseScoop, clarifying that “most people, at least in combat readiness terms,” refer to targeting as “the intended effect at a particular place at a particular time.”

Maven-aligned algorithms can detect objects on Earth based on certain factors, to a certain level of positive identification or geolocation accuracy — and essentially inform the determination of military targets.

When asked for a tangible example of how NGA is technologically supporting U.S. military units via Maven, Whitworth said: “I wish I could [disclose that], because I am dying to tell that story. However, I might be responsible to be too specific with exactly where on the Earth it’s being applied. But I can definitely tell you that there are three-star equivalents — people with whom I’ve served — who are proving to be really excited participants in the growth of Maven.”

NGA has been providing key insights on Russian forces and infrastructure since before the conflict started unfolding in Ukraine last year. Now, combat happening there is informing Maven and some of the agency’s other AI-affiliated pursuits. 

In particular, the conflict is enabling NGA to train its AI models on imagery and data showing “destroyed equipment,” NGA’s Data and Digital Innovation Director Mark Munsell told reporters at the GEOINT symposium.

Maven is on track to become an official program of record by this fall, Whitworth and Munsell said.

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