The waterfall ceased to exist by the end of 2021, and in 2023, U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador Michael Fitzpatrick contacted NGA leadership for help. Specifically, he asked for assistance capturing data and digitally mapping the impacted areas of intensely challenging terrain using drones.

“I think that was mighty rare. I have not heard of any other instances assigned to NGA where an ambassador literally reached to the director of NGA to ask for support because of an environmental disaster that’s going on,” U.S. Coast Guard Capt. John Boller told DefenseScoop on Tuesday.

Boller serves as operations chief in the NGA Data and Digital Innovation Directorate’s Warfighter Support Office. With more than three decades of experience across the intelligence community and law enforcement, at NGA he oversees the rapid delivery of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) technology and capabilities to military personnel at the tactical edge.   

During a presentation at the annual GEOINT Symposium this week and an interview with DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the conference, Boller shared new details about NGA’s mission support effort — Project Condor — which was led by the Warfighter Support Office and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with support from the U.S. Embassy, Army Corps of Engineers, the Ecuadorian military’s geospatial division and electricity cooperation of Ecuador.

When the riverbed collapsed in 2020, the Coca River was diverted through a sinkhole below the waterfalls that eventually demolished the lava dam supporting them.

According to Boller, that regressive erosion upstream accompanied by excessive sedimentation downstream is now seriously threatening Ecuador’s oil pipelines, bridges, towns, roads and critical infrasturcture.

Also at risk is the future operational status of the China-built Coca Codo Sinclair Hydroelectric Dam that’s approximately 12 miles upstream from the point of collapse. The associated plant, Boller noted, supplies at least 25% of Ecuador’s power — and losing the electricity generated by this dam would be the equivalent to the U.S. losing power in every state west of the Great Plains. 

“The erosion is a mess, and it’s starting to wipe out towns. The oil infrastructure is getting devastated right now. And the big takeaway is if the electric plant goes down,” he told DefenseScoop.

“We’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen to that country, because it’s already in chaos with some of the problems going on internally. And the last I heard is that Ecuador shuts down 13 hours a day for lack of power, so they can’t afford to lose the hydroelectric dam,” Boller added.

Without proper mitigation informed by high-resolution data models, the erosion could ultimately result in a humanitarian crisis. 

Because the terrain of the surrounding Amazon rainforest basin presents austere conditions of unpredictable and extreme weather, high-altitude sensors were determined to be inadequate to collect imagery there.

So NGA brought in a cache of small drones.

Between Nov. 29 and Dec. 7, 2023, the agency’s QX team deployed small unmanned aerial systems on-site in Ecuador to collect more than 62 miles of unclassified, high-res, electro-optical, thermal and multispectral imagery of the river. 

“The NGA team processed the raw data into multiple 2D and 3D products for the Army Corps of Engineers and the government of Ecuador, to assist in creating better engineering models to mitigate the erosion threatening the critical infrastructure,” Boller said during his presentation.

“The team’s speed, flexibility and ingenuity led to not only a successful mission, but also improved relations with our partners in Ecuador. The team over-delivered by providing more data than planned and less time and expense than projected,” he added. 

Two officials who participated in this mission — Matt Larson, a research and development staff scientist in autonomous systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and NGA’s principal systems engineer Michael Shellenberger, who is also a former Green Beret — accompanied Boller onstage for the presentation, where they shed light on the 39 flights their team conducted at 800 to 2,100 feet above terrain that presented a range of environmental challenges. 

Beyond using visible, thermal, multispectral sensors, they said the Project Condor team deployed three UAS platforms: the Quantum Systems Trinity F90+, AgEagle eBee TAC and Skydio X2D.

“The guys that went into the field and went into the jungles — that was a big deal. I mean, that’s not a typical assignment for NGA,” Boller told DefenseScoop in the interview.

This leg of the collaborative effort concluded, he confirmed, but the overarching mission is still far from complete.

“There’s ideas being put forward. The Army Corps of Engineers, embassy and national electric company of Ecuador want to be able to remap it again. Will it be NGA doing that? I’m not exactly sure. I don’t determine that. I think a lot of that’s going to come back to, if it’s requested through the proper channels, then we can discuss and maybe put our guys back on it again,” he told DefenseScoop.

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As America’s first in-operation exascale system, Frontier has the proven capacity to perform one quintillion — or a billion billion — calculations per second. Years in-development, the complex machine earned the top ranking as the fastest supercomputer on Earth when it was measured in May, reaching 1.1 exaflops of performance on the latest TOP500 list, following a set of standard tests that researchers conduct annually to compare the most advanced machines among competing nations. (Some experts speculate that China has built its own exascale systems that have yet to be publicly ranked.)

Frontier was formally unveiled last month at the Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which has roots that go back to supporting the initiative that led to America’s development of the world’s first atomic bombs during World War II.

“Since the earliest days of ORNL when we were established as part of the Manhattan Project, we have provided cutting-edge science to support national security. Frontier will continue that legacy, offering significant insights to enable the development and deployment of new technologies, materials, and capabilities that will serve the nation,” the lab’s Director Thomas Zacharia recently told DefenseScoop in an email.

His remarks echoed sentiments he expressed to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk during their recent tour of the lab to look into unfolding R&D initiatives.

The lab was the first stop on a two-day trip across four states that Hicks led to review tech-focused government-driven projects. DefenseScoop accompanied her on the tour. 

“We are just finishing up our second stop here at [the Air Force Research Lab at] Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and we began the day over at Oak Ridge,” Hicks told DefenseScoop during a meeting with a small group of reporters towards the end of the first day of her whirlwind trip. “I think the big theme coming out of the whole day for me is really the reinforcement of the U.S. innovation ecosystem advantage, right, where we are able — and we saw it in spades today — to bring together research communities, the government and industry in a very problem-centric way to go after issues that are facing the warfighter and deliver results.”

At the core of the next-generation of high performance computing (HPC) are exascale machines. 

Massive and powerful, such systems are anticipated to simulate processes associated with national security and scientific discovery in more realistic ways than what has ever been done before. The Energy Department in 2019 announced plans to buy Frontier from computing manufacturer HPE-Cray and chipmaker AMD via a contract worth around $600 million. 

Other U.S. exascale supercomputers are also currently being built at other DOE labs. Originally, Frontier was not slated to be the first U.S. exascale system to reach functionality — but manufacturing delays for components of another system pushed it to the front of the pack.

“The herculean public-private effort required to deploy this incredible ‘serial number one’ system is itself a testament to the talent, commitment and ingenuity of the U.S. workforce in the STEM fields, especially high performance computing,” ORNL’s Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences Doug Kothe recently told DefenseScoop. “That in itself is an embodiment of national security for the U.S.” 

Through pathfinding joint efforts like this one, in his view, high-tech products and solutions that ultimately benefit American taxpayers are both accelerated and improved. 

“Better technology has a direct impact on U.S. national security,” Kothe added.

Frontier’s components take up space roughly the size of two football fields and each cabinet weighs thousands of pounds.

During Hicks’ ORNL visit, Associate Laboratory Director for National Security Sciences Moe Khaleel told DefenseScoop that Frontier will prove essential to assessing data on crucial military topics, such as the state of battlefield assets.

“In hypersonics, you need to simulate complex things. And I think a tool like Frontier can actually prove to be extremely, extremely important to us for that. So, there’s a lot of defense applications a machine like this can help us advance,” Khaleel explained.

After the visit by senior DOE and DOD officials, Kothe told DefenseScoop that the lab leaders “enjoyed interesting discussions about the role and impact of exascale-class artificial intelligence and machine learning, whereby larger models than ever can be trained — in terms of number of parameters.” And that, he noted, holds promise to lead to potentially more accurate predictions, efficient extraction of knowledge, and elucidation of data relationships and correlations than ever before.

“This is a very exciting time. Many of us who have been working for years toward Frontier’s deployment as a ‘used, usable, and affordable’ system now see a fantastic reality that cannot be denied. Next step is for the HPC, science, and engineering communities to show the world the types of problems we can address and ideally solve,” Kothe said. “Stay tuned, because I’m confident we are all going to see some ‘eyebrow-raising’ solutions and insights to roll off this system.”

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That Tennessee-based lab has roots that trace back to massive investments during the 1940s supporting the Manhattan Project that led to America’s development of the atomic bomb — a feat of research, development and engineering that changed the world and gave the United States a major strategic asset in its competition with advanced adversaries. Now, U.S. leaders say, the nation needs new innovations to compete with China and address other challenges of the modern era.

During her first stop on a four-state, technology-focused tour, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks heard from multiple senior Oak Ridge lab officials that the infusion of funding from the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science for America Act, presents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate. The legislation, championed by the Biden administration, will provide funding for a variety of high-tech initiatives.

“We are treating this as the second Manhattan Project, essentially. We have an urgency to deliver,” Dr. Xin Sun, associate lab director for ORNL’s Energy, Science and Technology Directorate, said during a briefing during Hicks’ visit.

Oak Ridge’s technology focus areas now extend well beyond nuclear science and include applied materials, advanced manufacturing, biosecurity, transportation, supercomputing and more.

During their half-day visit, Hicks and Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk jointly toured America’s largest open-access battery manufacturing research and development center, based at that lab, and visited the Battery Manufacturing Facility there. They also saw the debut of Frontier, the United States’ first exascale — and currently most powerful — supercomputer.

“U.S. taxpayers have already put substantial R&D dollars down against this. What we want to see now is where that’s paying off and where we need to take it from here,” Hicks told FedScoop during the flight to the lab.

She and Turk also connected with dozens of scientists and engineers during the stop — and met with lab leadership.

“It’s a historic opportunity,” ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said of the additional financial backing that the nation’s labs are receiving.

“If you look back to the Manhattan Project,” the government had the support, investments and resources that led to the introduction of entirely new technologies and associated fields, he noted.

Now, he said, the national lab system once again has boosted resources and a responsibility to deploy and demonstrate innovative capabilities to drive new breakthroughs supporting national security.

“It’s a historic opportunity,” Zacharia said. “We have a once in a generation opportunity to make this real.”

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As the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, Hicks has been a driving force behind the department’s efforts to adopt artificial intelligence across the force, implement Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and other high-profile initiatives. Departing on a whirlwind two-day trip on Wednesday, she is set to visit Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Scott Air Force Base in Illinois and Purdue University’s hypersonics hub in Indiana. 

The trip marks one of multiple engagements Hicks is leading in the near term to promote tech collaboration across sectors and, explicitly, support U.S. strategic competition with adversaries.

“This is [all about] building our capacity and capabilities to compete against China,” a senior Defense official told reporters Tuesday during a background briefing to preview the trip. The briefers spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.

In Tennessee, Hicks will meet with Oak Ridge National Lab Director Thomas Zacharia and other Energy Department leaders and scientists to learn about ongoing efforts to bolster American supply chains — particularly as nations everywhere grapple with a semiconductor shortage exacerbated by the pandemic. Hicks will also meet with researchers and students, see the first U.S. exascale supercomputer, and tour two manufacturing facilities.

“From a broad perspective, what the unjust invasion of Ukraine has shown us is our ability to really network together — from a second-, third- and fourth tier-supplier base — what we need, and we’re reprioritizing that,” another senior Defense official noted during the briefing. “We obviously, from a domestic perspective, have stepped forward and you’ll see the next generation from procurement contracts of some of these weapons systems. But these older systems do have strategic relevance. And so we’re now rethinking exactly how we make sure, using things like additive manufacturing, we’re helping industry be responsive and flexible.”

After visiting Oak Ridge, Hicks will head to Wright-Patterson to visit the Air Force Research Laboratory. There, she will be briefed on counter-directed energy weapons experimentation and initiatives — and other cutting-edge capabilities being developed to advance national security objectives. 

At Scott, where U.S. Transportation Command is based, Transcom officials will brief her on efforts to integrate artificial intelligence into their logistics systems, among other topics.

For the last destination on the tour, Hicks will meet with faculty and students at Purdue University, and visit the Hypersonics Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, where she’ll deliver a speech and be briefed on efforts to bolster the nation’s pipeline of professionals with microelectronics and hypersonics expertise, which will be critical for the Pentagon’s modernization efforts.

“We let our hypersonics capability sort of atrophy over time,” a senior Defense official said. “So, we are now trying to reengage — and that’s why the workforce has to be reengaged as well.”

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