Intel Funding

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is getting a $123 million funding boost. The money was shifted over from the Military Intelligence Transfer Fund.

The details are classified, but the Pentagon released a reprogramming memo signed by Comptroller Robert Hale and dated June 8 announcing the funding switch.

In related news, Inside the Pentagon reported in April that the Defense Department had asked Congress for new authority to permit NGA to provide imagery intelligence and geospatial information support to regional organizations with defense or security components and security alliances of which the United States is a member. ITP further reported:

The initiative, one of several Defense Department legislative proposals submitted to Congress this month, would be an expansion of existing authority that lets the agency, called NGA for short, share mapping, charting and geodetic data support.

"Under current law, the NGA may only provide mapping, charting and geodetic data to security alliances and regional organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU)," the proposal states. "As a result of the War on Terrorism, piracy and other recent national security issues, there are increasing requests for NGA to support these alliances and organizations and their forces with a broad range of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT)."

The proposal states the agency "has been able to find alternative legal basis for the requests to date but requires statutory changes to address the full range of anticipated requirements from these alliances and organizations." The agency can now provide foreign countries with imagery intelligence and geospatial information support. But increasingly the agency has been asked to provide "certain GEOINT support to military operations conducted by NATO in Afghanistan and security and peacekeeping operations conducted by the EU in the Balkans and Africa," DOD writes.

The agency has handled these requests by providing support to the individual countries involved or to a coalition of countries; by supporting the GEOINT needs of the State Department and other U.S. departments; by heeding a pact with NATO that permits the purchase of limited-distribution maps as foreign military sales; and by using other specific, limited and mostly temporary authorities.