NGIC: Penetrating the fog of war - National Ground Intelligence Center

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, April-June, 2002 by Robert O'Connell, John Steven White

The National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, and constitutes the Department of Defense's primary producer of ground forces intelligence. The NGIC is in Charlottesville, Virginia, housed in a new 260,000-square-foot facility specifically designed for the organization's mission needs. We dedicated this facility to the memory of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur D. Nicholson, Jr., the U.S. Military Liaison Mission member killed in the line of duty in February 1982 in Pottsdam, East Germany.

The NGIC's capabilities primarily lie in the skills and corporate knowledge of its unusually well-educated and experienced work force, normally numbering around 850 full-time scientists, engineers, intelligence analysts, and soldiers. (Since September 11, our work force and our mission have expanded, as you will see later in the article.) Formed in July 1994 from two highly respected Army organizations, the U.S. Army Intelligence Threat Analysis Center and the U.S. Army Foreign Science and Technology Center, the NGIC constitutes a true synthesis of general Military Intelligence (GMI) and scientific and technical intelligence (S&TI), a one-stop shopping experience for the ground forces intelligence consumer, including those in echelons above corps (EAC).

NGIC's Mission

"Produce and disseminate all-source integrated intelligence on foreign ground forces and supporting combat technologies to ensure that U.S. forces have a decisive edge on any battlefield." Think of this twenty seven-word mission statement as a "burst transmission," not encoded but radically compressed. Nevertheless, we can unfold this message to provide an accurate roadmap of what we do, where we are going, and how we do business. Take for example the phrase "produce and disseminate all-source integrated intelligence"; this says a lot about us. It means that when you get an NGIC product, you can rest assured the analysts responsible have searched the U.S. Government's intelligence holdings from top to bottom, from open source to the most sensitive classified information, brought that data together, weighed it, cross-checked it, considered it in light of their own professional competence and experience, and then put it together in a product that makes sense in a military context readily accessible by those wit h a need to know. That is the NGIC guarantee, one we stand behind with an audit trail and analysts ready to collaborate with customers and provide follow-up material.

The second portion of the statement, particularly the terms "forces," "technologies," and "on any battlefield," also provides important cues to the NGIC organization and how we approach our mission. Armies take a long time to build. Because the NGIC plays a unique and critical role in the application of U.S. Code: Title 10, Armed Forces, the responsibility to organize, train, and equip the nation's primary ground component, we must address the threat not only in terms of its human and weap ons capabilities on the contemporary battlefield but also on battlefields stretching across the future.

Inside NGIC

If you were to dissect the organization, you would not only find that we have an unusually high "tooth-to-tail ratio" but also the guts of NGIC relate directly to the words and "technologies." This is captured in the roles of our two main production directorates, the Forces Directorate and the Ground Systems Directorate. Additionally, NGIC has a large foreign materiel exploitation program and an Imagery Assessments Directorate.

The Forces Directorate represents the human element with civilian and uniformed staff members; a combination primarily made up of area and military specialists studying foreign ground forces from the operational level down through the small unit level. They maintain detailed knowledge of current foreign ground force capabilities as well as a future focus on a time horizon with niches at 5,10, and 20 years into the future. They examine foreign armies in the context of demographic and budgetary constraints to generate indepth portraits of the ground forces threat in both conventional and unconventional combat environments from a perspective that includes:

* Battlefield operating systems (BOSs).

* Doctrine.

* Tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP).

* Training.

* Maintenance.

* Logistics.

* Order of battle (OB).

This work is in collections of modules that comprise comprehensive battlefield development plans, conceptual portraits of foreign armies that focus on current and future doctrinal, operational, and tactical planning for combat. Additionally, in the more numerically oriented country force assessments, these modules' orientation is on specific tables of organization and equipment (TO&Es) and modified TO&Es as well as modernization projections tailored to support wargamers, modelers, and force developers. In addition to these very comprehensive roll-ups of ground forces of major interest, forces analysts maintain a regional perspective and are continually conducting research and producing products on a variety of topics, states, and transnational players. By inclination, they are generalists, analytic "Swiss Army knives" packed with practical tools enabling them to size up any ground force and project its fighting capabilities in ways that are eminently usable to those plotting the course of future U.S. ground f orces development.