Washington: The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has been moving to speed its processes for acquiring commercial imagery in order to help support a robust US industrial base, according to the spy satellite agency’s deputy.
“We continue to enhance our internal processes to award contracts faster, which industry likes, and to create more opportunity and great engage with new industrial partners. We are willing to go big on investments where it makes sense for success. The electro-optical contract we ordered a couple years ago, which is about $4 billion over 10 years, is an example,” Troy Meink, NRO’s principal deputy director, told the Mitchell Institute.
“That said, we’ve got to make ourselves even easier to do business with, and we do that by accelerating investment decisions, again, trying to accelerate the timelines to support what the commercial companies are trying to do, and by adopting a wide variety of risk management strategies that allow us to use industry partners that we may not been able to in the past,” he added.
Meink explained that tapping commercial innovation — in remote sensing, in launch, in data processing and in artificial intelligence/machine learning — is critical to helping the NRO meet one of its key challenges: keeping up with the pace of technological change.
Meink stressed, however, that keeping ahead of the tech curve, and being able to rapidly deliver new capability to users, is a “whole of government” effort, involving Congress and the Department of Defence — especially with regard to speeding acquisition processes.
