DoD and DNI Battle Over Billions

Very qui­etly and out of sight of almost every­one but the actual play­ers, the Director of National Intelligence’s office and the Pentagon’s head of acqui­si­tion are bat­tling for the soul of the next-​​generation of recon­nais­sance satel­lites. A deci­sion on this is likely this week, we under­stand. A draft “Statement of Guidance” is cir­cu­lat­ing, but it is clas­si­fied so we can­not tell you what is in it.

The out­come of this strug­gle may well reshape the rela­tion­ships between the mil­i­tary and the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, since the power to deter­mine require­ments largely deter­mines what will be bought and how much it will cost — not to men­tion which com­pany will most ben­e­fit.

In addi­tion to the high intensity-​​low vis­i­bil­ity bat­tle between the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the mil­i­tary, the future of two com­pa­nies may depend on the deci­sion: DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.

GeoEye plans an August launch of its high res­o­lu­tion recon­nais­sance satel­lite, GeoEye 1, which will be able to pro­vide com­mer­cial cus­tomers and the national secu­rity estab­lish­ment with bet­ter than half-​​meter res­o­lu­tion in full color. DigitalGlobe plans a launch of its WorldView2 satel­lite in late 2009.

Both com­pa­nies need cus­tomers for the imagery. If they don’t lock in the fed­eral gov­ern­ment as a major cus­tomer they may find it dif­fi­cult to con­vince investors that they should stick with them. And both are spend­ing sub­stan­tial amounts of money to build these new satel­lites. And they haven’t launched or deployed yet.

Lockheed Martin wants to build what has been termed the “exquis­ite” solu­tion to this require­ment and is report­edly push­ing this. However, we under­stand from a senior intel­li­gence source that Lockheed is unlikely to get this busi­ness in the next two to three years.

Let’s look at where the major gov­ern­ment play­ers in this drama stand. The DNI’s direc­tor of acqui­si­tion, Al Munson, report­edly wants GeoEye to get a con­tract for pro­vid­ing imagery. But he is being chal­lenged and coun­tered by Don Kerr, prin­ci­pal deputy direc­tor of National Intelligence. Kerr, whose last job was run­ning the National Reconnaissance Office, wants to buy — not lease — the satel­lites to do this kind of work…

Read the rest of this story on Military.com’s Warfighter’s Forum page.

– Colin Clark

June 9th, 2008 | Catch the "Buzz" | 289619 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/06/09/dod-and-dni-battle-over-billions/DoD+and+DNI+Battle+Over+Billions2008-06-09+14%3A27%3A18Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.