Advancements in space technologies present a variety of benefits for both Department of Defense and Intelligence Community components, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency wants to reshape the ways these agencies collaborate on space operations.
To take on this challenge, the NGA architected the new Joint Mission Management Center, a space intelligence hub for the military services, combatant commands, IC agencies and international allies designed to help define each organization’s role in the evolving domain.
The center — which NGA Director Frank Whitworth said came about as the agency witnessed an expansion of space agencies’ satellite networks — has now achieved initial operating capability, Air and Space Forces Magazine reported.
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“We do tasking for a constellation, but when you’re talking about something that’s getting this big, and especially given the investment that DOD has made in this particular constellation, we knew that we needed to have a place for collaboration. It needed to exist,” Whitworth, a 2024 Wash100 awardee, said during a Defense Writers Group event in August.
The JMMC, he said, will serve as a vehicle for space-focused agencies to identify their specific priorities.
“There’s a certain amount of time, there’s a certain amount of sensors, what’s going to go first, what’s going to go last, what falls below the cutline. And that is exactly the type of conversation and process that will be integrated into the JMMC,” he explained.
To make the center a reality, the NGA worked alongside the U.S. Space Force, a major player in the nation’s space activities.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations for the USSF, said at the AFCEA/INSA Intelligence Summit in August that the JMMC will “bring together the operational side as well as the intelligence side to do the joint tasking, the collection and dissemination of the data.”
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