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.

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.”

The post The year of ‘NGAI’: Geospatial-intelligence agency looks to accelerate AI adoption in 2025 appeared first on DefenseScoop.

These moves are necessary to fulfill new responsibilities recently delegated to NGA to scale maturing AI efforts, according to Director of its Research Directorate Cindy Daniell, who spotlighted ongoing initiatives and fresh opportunities at Capital Factory’s Fed Supernova conference in Austin, Texas. In her view, they’ll likely also prove essential to ensuring the U.S. maintains a technological advantage as technology and global competition evolve in the near term.  

“The future is unknowable — but our resources, our strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, as well as the trends that lie before us, are not. From these, we can make educated guesses on how to enable the future, and where possible, accelerate it,” Daniell said. 

Speaking to an audience of government officials, technologists, investors and entrepreneurs in Texas’ capital region, she also repeatedly emphasized “our national security challenges are too difficult for the government to solve alone.”

NGA provides geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) that is fundamental to the nation’s security. And that GEOINT “tells you what is happening, where, and what might happen when,” Daniell said. The term refers to the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.

While GEOINT capabilities have been “a critical source of information for all eternity,” she said, that has especially been the case for the modern national security apparatus. 

“When we layer this with multiple types of imagery and combine it with other intelligence sources, it literally reveals the ground truth — informing critical national security decisions surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, and support for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” Daniell explained. “Needless to say, it has also played a crucial role in the war in Ukraine.”

Given the shifting conflict and political landscapes of this era, the NGA leader and former electrical engineer said she could “not emphasize enough” how important it is for the public, private and academic sectors to work together to drive “novel practical solutions” at this moment.

From a research perspective, Daniell said NGA capability development is informed by three lines of effort. 

“The first is validation” or accurate, high-resolution and continually updated representations of Earth’s elements, through physical or activity models, and positioning navigation and timing (PNT), she noted. The second, “collection technologies,” encompasses efficient strategies and methods to deliver spatial-temporal data from an ever-increasing number of sources. The third area, analytic technologies, is all about “accurate, timely, reliable, and scalable methods for data exploitation and analysis,” which are constantly evolving, she noted. 

GEOINT elements of the Pentagon’s trailblazing early AI effort — Project Maven — are presently being transitioned to NGA’s purview, and the project is now a major priority for the agency.

“Maven will enable us to integrate and institutionalize automated, geospatial AI capabilities with NGA’s strategic priorities. This will ultimately enable NGA to provide our military service customers with the critical and timely insights they require,” Daniell said. “To this end, we’re looking for the full spectrum of capabilities — everything from discrete, bespoke software products to complete end-to-end solutions.” 

The agency is developing software and requirements for future systems that are specifically designed to ensure the information is accessible, and it has legacy and new datasets that must be fused. New sensors and information sources are being built and refined “at a rate we’ve never seen before,” Daniell also said, noting that NGA needs to incorporate more automation, advanced modeling and machine learning to push the envelope. 

“We need your help — every single one of you — to accelerate this development, integration, sustainment and refresh of automation and computer vision,” she told the audience in Texas. “And we are expanding our partnerships with all sorts of innovation in the commercial space. This means we’re providing new engagement venues and mechanisms to enable government teaming with smaller non-traditional companies who are no less innovative than their larger counterparts.”

Last year, NGA launched a broad agency announcement to speed up how it buys specific priority technologies to perform its required functions. 

“We will be releasing more topics, both broad and specific, with the BAA in the future. So, stay tuned,” Daniell said.

Beyond expanding collaboration with government research labs and military branches and other pursuits, the agency also recently launched a new Data, Digital and Innovation initiative (DDI) to help to lead the GEOINT community “through the agency’s adoption of AI,” the director also noted.

To build advanced models, NGA needs accurate test data that closely represents the format and structure of operational data. 

“So over the next year, we are working to create an open-data repository with a variety of sample datasets made just for you, for use by academia and industry requirements,” Daniell noted. Further, her team is looking at producing “a truly representative development sandbox architecture” to run, test and demonstrate models in an operationally relevant architecture.

That work will be tested and accelerated as a permanent feature at NGA’s brand new “moonshot laboratory facility” in St. Louis.

“Our goal is to enable you to quickly iterate on solutions while maintaining operational security and control,” Daniell said.

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