Commercial Imagery's Growing Role in National Security

In this special session of Project Geospatial our guest is Rob Zitz who helps us dive into the discussion of Commercial Imagery's role in national security. A few topics we hit on:

• Why US government should flip the paradigm, and only build classified collection systems to fill gaps in information that US commercial companies cannot collect (versus viewing commercial as an augmentation of classified systems)

• How US government past decisions allowed foreign countries to nearly corner the market on SAR and why we need to see USG investment in commercial SAR satellites

• The need to press forward on more advanced commercial remote sensor satellites and avoid a repeat of the SAR debacle (e.g., hyperspectral, RF and LiDAR commercial satellites) * How COVID-19 can help us break the “if it isn’t classified, it isn’t worth looking at” culture in the Intelligence Community