Maritime Domain Awareness Working Group Inaugural Meeting

Opening of the Maritime Domain Awareness Working Group

The MDAWG is established to inform and educate the global GEOINT community across industry, academia, and government on a common understanding of tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TPED) of ground, airborne, space-based, and maritime sensors, derived information, and analytics that contribute to building a comprehensive understanding of the maritime domain.

Specific topics of interest in the MDAWG include:

• The National Strategy for Maritime Security and the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness
• Executive Orders 13828 and 14269
• Application of agentic AI in support of MDA
  
  

The National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO)

Speaker: Kyle Hunt, Principal Advisor, NMIO

The National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO) is a national office led by the U.S. Navy and established by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), charged with coordinating across the intelligence community, federal agencies, state & local government, the private sector, and international allies to enable unified decision-making against threats in the global maritime domain.

NMIO has an opportunity to build coordination on MDA across the government, as the various offices and commands focus on situations specific to themselves rather than formulating a comprehensive MDA strategy. Their efforts are meant to convene agencies to improve communication and efficiency rather than create a centralized entity within the MDA Community. Concern over centralized power within the MDA Community that might “race off in a direction that [agencies] don’t like very much.”

NMIO is currently focusing on developing a new charter to drive reform within the MDA Community, with a specific goal of providing an alternative to replace PPD-18 (2014), which established the United States government

NMIO and “Three Big Buckets”

Mr. Hunt stated that there are “three big buckets” that NMIO is focusing on as it attempts to reform how the government communicates in the field of MDA:

• Data organization and data as a service
  • How can the government orchestrate its tools and collection capabilities to feed data to the end user?
  • What responsibilities can the government delegate to the commercial sector to increase the government’s ability to focus on other issues?
• Quest for efficiency
  • How can the government reduce the number of disparate and disjointed workflows in MDA to a single, efficient workflow?
  • How can commercial partners more efficiently cooperate with the government, and how can the government provide more feedback to industry to improve the commercial systems and services they are providing?
• Preparing for the future
  • Inter-governmental communication needs to improve to avoid excess spending by purchasing the same commercial datasets multiple times across different agencies and commands.
  •  “Money-making is in the innovating and the problem-solving.”

Direction for MDAWG

If MDAWG were to produce one paper in the next year that NMIO could put to work, what would it be about?

• Data governance. Having a written product where we’ve had people coming from an industry perspective, joining with government, and academia to really think through how to scale, how we acquire data, and how to have a machine ready to do AI.
• If we’re ahead of the rest of the IC and the US government, which are working on commercial standards, fantastic. This is an audience. We have people from NGA who work with us. These are all people who work similar sets of commercial problems. We can start to define the work that maybe they will come behind and join us and do that. That is probably one of the most valuable things we could do in the coming year.

How can USGIF and MDAWG cooperate to address the shortage of young professionals with experience in maritime domain awareness and intelligence?

• USGIF has partnered with colleges and universities for 20+ years to accredit courses and programs to develop talent pipelines into geospatial intelligence. Over the next 2-3 years, USGIF and MDAWG could help develop a bigger talent pipeline into MDA.

Action Items

Four white paper topics have been proposed for development by MDAWG:

• Agentic AI and MDA – Focus on confidence in agentic analysis and non-deterministic systems.
  • Project lead: Rob Zitz
• MDA Data Provenance – Focus on the provenance of data within the government, with a specific interest in the sourcing of data from industry.
  • Project lead: Grady Johnson
• MDA Governance and Standards – Focus on interoperability within MDA, data types and schemas, raw data vs. analytical outputs, and the overall government management of data pipelines.
  • Project lead: Eric Zitz
• MDA Human Machine Interface – Confidence, provenance, uncertainty, and teamwork between humans and machines within MDA.
  • Project lead: Jack Brandy

The potential white papers will be developed into outlines and abstracts over the course of the next 6-8 weeks in preparation for the September 8 meeting. Volunteers are requested to assist leads with the development of these white papers.