Sue Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the intelligence community needs to reassess how it adopts data and digital connectedness as it faces a new inflection point, C4ISRNET reported Monday. 

“We find ourselves again at a point where we have to reimagine how this magical mission of intelligence is going to be effective, because this is a world where the threats are to and through information,” Gordon said during her keynote speech at the GEOINT 2019 Conference in San Antonio. “It is a world of ubiquitous technology, of digital connectedness and data abundance and those three things are so different and will challenge so many things that we thought,” she added.

Gordon said she believes the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been the first agency within IC to consider how to use data and become more open to commercial innovation.

The U.S. Marine Corps wants to make the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial systems permanent in its inventory through President Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal, National Defense Magazine reported Friday. The service requested $117 million in funding to buy three Reapers in the coming year and additional three for fiscal year 2021.

Officials said the UAS will enable the Marines to bring new weapons to the field and conduct missions currently unsupported by its existing systems. Capt. Christopher Harrison, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, said the service currently operates the Reapers under a contractor-owned, contractor-operated agreement.

“The MQ-9 Reaper provides increased lethality to the Marine Air-Ground Task Force by providing persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and strike capability, which the Marine Corps has not previously possessed in an unmanned system,” Harrison said. 

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the drones would support the service in surveillance and electronic warfare in the South China Sea, armed reconnaissance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Africa and power competition against Russia and China. Congress has yet to approve the funding for the FY20 budget proposal. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration unveiled an online tool to help users prepare and handle the effects of coastal flooding. The Coastal Inundation Dashboard is designed to deliver 48-hour water level forecasts, storm surge information and historic flooding data through the use of real-time information gathered from 200 coastal water level stations, NOAA said Friday. 

“The Coastal Inundation Dashboard, like OceanReports and other National Ocean Service online tools, brings vast amounts of NOAA’s data together to benefit businesses and communities that drive our nation’s blue economy,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, acting director of national ocean service at NOAA.

The agency noted that the platform will help coastal residents and decision makers validate flooding risks and allow fishermen to secure tidal information. The platform will also enable access to Storm QuickLook, an information tool built to provide cyclone track forecast and storm surge warnings to users.