GovernmentExecutive.com

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is slated to move into a spiffy new 2.4-million-square-foot headquarters by 2011 at Fort Belvoir, Va. The relocation, mandated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, is part of a planned move of multiple Defense and Army agencies to that Army post, located 15 miles south of Washington, D.C.

The final environmental impact statement on plans to move a total of 23,324 additional military and civilian personnel to Belvoir shows that the 8,500 NGA employees will have slightly more elbow room in their new digs than the 9,263 workers from the Washington Headquarters Service. WHS, which provides overall administrative support for Defense, will occupy a new 2.2-million-square-foot building.

I guess NGA needs the additional room to roll out big maps. Or maybe the agency (which used to be known as the Defense Mapping Agency, but now does all kinds of nifty stuff with digital geospatial imagery) has an edifice complex. The new NGA HQ comes in at just under one-third the size of the Pentagon, which has a floor area of 6.5 million square feet, and slightly more than New York's Empire State Building, which has 2.16 million square feet of floor area -- a figure that does not include the dirigible mooring mast at its pinnacle.

The planned new HQs for NGA and WHS will gobble up more land than is occupied by the Pentagon's 34 acres. NGA will occupy 20.3 acres and WHS will take up 22.8 acres -- a total of 43.1 acres.

I hope NGA and WHS leave room in their new palaces for a bakery as good as the one found on the concourse in the Pentagon. It sells the best doughnuts in the Metro D.C. area.

PEO-EIS Out of the Garage at Last

The folks who work for the Army Program Executive Office-EIS, as the Fort Belvoir environmental impact statement revealed, have been laboring in World War II facilities originally built as vehicle maintenance shops. But no more.

The Fort Belvoir master plan calls for PEO-EIS, which acquires most of the computer gadgets and gizmos used by the Army, and its 480 personnel to move into a new 157,400-square-foot administrative facility, where they won't have to worry about axle grease gunking up the computers.

Oh Yeah, Traffic

What happens when you move 23,000 people to a location such as Fort Belvoir, which is far from a Metro stop and not well served by the existing road system?

The impact statement stated the obvious: The move will have a "significant impact" on traffic, but it will get better once someone spends $458 million improving public transportation, including electric bus and light rail systems. And roads.

Until those bus systems and rail lines are built, the environmental impact statement suggests the Army establish a Transportation Demand Management Coordinator (TDMC) to promote "employee awareness" of commuting alternatives such as ride sharing, compressed work weeks and flextime.

I suggest the first task for the TDMC is to establish multiple Fort Belvoir slug zones and slug lines -- and then leave it up to the slugs. They know how to handle "transportation demand" with little supervision.

Do You Need a Computer Science Degree for Tactical C2?

It sure helps, according to the July issue of the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned (MCCLL) Newsletter, a copy of which made it here to What's Central, even though I'm not supposed to have it.

When Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361 (HMH-361) deployed to Iraq last year with 12 CH-53s and 24 pilots, the MCCLL newsletter reported that "in order to maintain the communications and computer systems effectively throughout the squadron, a communication and computer support billet was created and filled by a first lieutenant who had a computer science degree."

Things sure have changed from my old Corps days when any college dropout with a 2531 MOS could be easily trained to zero beat an AN/PRC-10 radio. (Yes, I am dating myself.)

A sheepskin does nothing to help fix an endemic computer problem. The newsletter said HMH-361 suffered from a lack of parts for computer support, with parts cannibalized from one computer to repair another.

This fits under the heading of "the more things change, the more they remain the same." Cannibalization is how my pal Rex Dieterle found the parts to repair busted radios in 2nd Battalion, Ninth Marines in Vietnam.

Too Much Grunting

The MCCLL newsletter also reported that another thing has not changed: a way-too-heavy combat load for Marine grunts, who tote about 90 pounds of gear in truly searing heat in Iraq.

The newsletter said the individual combat load for grunts is too heavy and there is too much of it -- the same as in Vietnam.

Deep, Protean Thinking at ODNI

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in cooperation with the U.S. Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, has set up The Proteus Management Group to cogitate on global problem sets and scenarios, harking back to Proteus, the sea god of Greek mythology who had the ability to foresee the future.

The Proteus Project was originally established by the National Reconnaissance Office (shhh) in 1999 and since then has been taken over by ODNI to develop insights that "can be used as a set of lenses to view future issues through a different mindset, to consider issues through a different value set, and to think creatively, not traditionally."

To learn more, you might want to check out the Proteus "Futures" Academic Workshop at the War College in Carlisle, Pa., set for Aug. 14-16.

This is for Deep Thinkers who can wrap themselves around topics such as "Proteus Implications of Intelligence Scotomas in Central and South America" by Dr. John Alexander, Senior Fellow, Joint Special Operations University, and "Tigers and Dragons and the Effect on the Eagle in the Future" by Dr. Marvin Cetron, president of Forecasting International.

If anyone really understands this, please let me know. As we already have established, I'm a college dropout.

COMMENTS

• I believe your report was written very well and agree with it whole hardly. matter of fact I believe the Agency will grow at a rate that the space will not be enough in a few years. I believe that most people aren't awear of how important this new operation is. ddhorton Posted July 30, 2007 7:13 PM
• Marcus, Methinks you have a vested interest in the IC to swallow that building project whole. I am only a citizen-taxpayer. With so many of the assets and dollars hidden, and very little to show in the way of success to protect this nation, the IC should be economizing. Yes, yes, I know surely there are a lot of successes, but they just can't be spoken about. Sure. They would have leaked by now. I'm thankful for the IC, but I don't want to take it as an article of faith that it is cost-effective, because there is precious evidence that it is. BobLewis Posted July 27, 2007 4:32 PM
• Marcus, Let's get real here. Someone has gone way over board with this project. This is a clear case of "lets get a cadillac" mentality. Seriously 2.2 million square feet under one roof? What kind of excuse is there for this kind of spending? None. Don't even try. The American public will never buy it. If the NGA cannot operate without this extravagance then the NGA is not affordable in it's present form. Robert Sowders Posted July 26, 2007 7:36 PM