The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) released portions of its Congressional budget request for fiscal year 2014. The pages contain some juicy insights of the agency tasked with designing, launching, and maintaining America’s intelligence satellites. The remaining 90 percent of the budget document, however, will stay a state secret.
The intelligence community’s $53 billion annual budget is largely classified—the so-called “black budget” leaked by Edward Snowden to The Washington Post last year. Not everyone approves of its secret nature as demand for transparency of US spy operations intensifies. In fact, a bipartisan bill is underway in Congress that would require the President to release this information in the future.
Here are some highlights from the declassified portion of NRO’s 2014 request.
Who works at the NRO?
According to the 2012 workforce numbers:
- Military personnel comprise 46 percent of the NRO workforce.
- The majority of the workforce resides in senior grades: GS-13 through senior executive.
- The NRO is a borrowed workforce, with the majority of workers directly under the Air Force, Navy, and CIA; those parent agencies execute many of the human resources functions, such as assignments, hiring and promotions.
New Grants, Contracts at NRO
The “Basic Research” subproject specifically solicits organizations not normally associated with the intelligence community for their cutting-edge methods and technologies. This includes grants to post-doctoral candidates researching relevant space technologies, and cooperative research contracts with industry, academia and laboratories. For those selected, it affords access to NRO’s revolutionary and classified R&D concepts.
Interested? The NRO is looking for expertise on everything from microelectronics to the innovative adaptation of video game and IT technologies.
Real-Time Intel for Combat
The “Mission Support” project supplies warfighters who are directly in harm’s way with real-time access to overhead surveillance data, tailored data processing, and information fusion tools for mission planning and execution. These capabilities are being used to pursue and capture high-value targets.
“Patterns of Life” Technology
This intriguing project focuses on technology capable of processing massive data sets, multiple data sources to identify patterns (without advanced knowledge or pattern definition). These patterns are developed into visualizations and presentations for human identification of normal and abnormal behaviors for elusive targets.
To the Cloud
The NRO joins the Information Community’s IT Enterprise initiative (ICITE) – a formal, interagency transition effort toward the common community desktop environment and integrated hosting environments (e.g., community clouds). According to NRO, “These efficiencies cannot be achieved through IT solutions alone and must be accompanied by fundamental changes in IT business/service models.”
