Sharing our view

By Capt Mike Hance, Commerical Imagery Team, Operation Iraqi FreedomAugust 9, 2011

Sharing our view
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Sharing our view
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Sharing our view
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - When Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander, International Security Assistance Forces, published his guidance for conducting counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, one of his main points was the need to act as one team. He encouraged U.S. forces to work closely with our international and Afghan partners stating the absolute need for acting in cooperation.

Working together in a joint operating environment with coalition and Afghan partners requires the ability to share products, such as satellite imagery. Access to satellite imagery is a key component to planning and conducting operations, but many times U.S. forces obtain classified imagery from National Technical Means severely limiting the ability to share it with our partners. A solution to this problem is the use of commercial imagery.

The U.S. Army Commercial Imagery Team is a specialized team providing high resolution unclassified commercial satellite imagery to U.S. forces, coalition forces, and non-government organizations that can be openly shared with coalition partners and Afghan and Iraqi counterparts.

The CIT is an operational element of the 1st Space Brigade, a subordinate command of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/U.S. Army Forces Strategic Command. The team is operational control to U.S. Central Command and works in conjunction with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the topographic community, the intelligence community and CENTCOM’s Commercial Imagery Collection managers.

The CIT has a unique, direct relationship with the NGA and the commercial imagery providers, Digital Globe and GeoEye. The CIT has an agreement with the NGA that allows the receipt of raw imagery directly from DigitalGlobe and GeoEye over a 45 megabytes per second connection into a Virtual Ground Terminal (VGT) that automatically processes the raw imagery into an ortho-rectified NITF format.

This minimally processed imagery can be provided to units with organic geospatial support (S2/J2, topographical teams, geospatial support teams, etc.) so they can manipulate the images as needed. Or the CIT can package imagery into a finished format, such as GeoPDF, GeoTiff, JPEG, Mr.Sid and hard copy maps to units lacking organic geospatial assets.

The CIT has 72 terra bytes of archived commercial imagery covering a large portion of the CENTCOM Area of Responsibility. This allows the CIT to rapidly process and deliver imagery requests, many times within hours of the request. This archive grows each month with updated collections of pan-chromatic (black and white) and multi-spectral (color) images. All of the archived imagery is less than one year old ensuring the relevancy of the products provided. The CIT also has a direct access relationship with NGA Source for the submission of commercial imagery new collects.

A second key task of the CIT is to provide Mobile Training Teams to Iraq and Afghanistan to teach TalonView to requesting units. This training focuses on training the users on how to request commercial imagery and how to use TalonView to manipulate the imagery to create their own products.

The CIT has been deployed to CENTCOM since 2004 answering thousands of requests for imagery, providing education to hundreds of coalition partners and supporting hundreds of military units, coalition partners and non-government organizations. Even though deployed to U.S. Central Command, the CIT has provided products to U.S. African Command in an effort to thwart would-be pirates, and products in support of humanitarian relief efforts for the Haiti and Japan earthquakes for Southern Command and Pacific Command.

The Commercial Imagery Team can be contacted with questions or to request imagery by NIPR email at cit.rfi.centcom@me.navy.mil or SIPR email at cit.rfi.centcom@me.navy.smil.mil. The CIT can be reached by DSN at (318) 439-6215. Or visit the Commercial Imagery Team SIPR website at http://gil.nga.smil.mil/cit.