Known public records of Sentients development programs and process date from 2009-2010 onward.[6][4][7] NRO emails from 2021 disclosed that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), which later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was involved with the NRO and the Sentient program.[8]
History
A later declassified May 2009 report to the United States Congress, "FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification, Volume IV," contains details about the National Reconnaissance Offices plans for real-time and updated satellite signals intelligence, providing context on NROs space-based missions and programs to collect data, such as Sentient, which would initially begin soliciting defense and related industry feedback in 2010.[9][6]
The US is arguably more reliant on overhead collection than ever before. To a large extent, satellite reconnaissance is the foundation for global situational awareness, and as such, it is an essential underpinning of the entire US intelligence effort. Space collection provides unique access to otherwise denied areas to provide persistent and responsive collection; and it does so without risk to human collectors or infringing upon the territorial sovereignty of other nations. It is also enables users to quickly focus on almost any point of the globe to rapidly respond to emerging situations or to monitor ongoing events. The NRO provides direct support to the war on terrorism, deployed military forces, and other IC and DoD activities requiring near real-time situational awareness and sustained high resolution/high sensitivity collection capability 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-per-week.
The earliest known public references to Sentient date to 2010, when the NRO put forward a public request for information (RFI) requesting white papers on the concepts that would become Sentient, including user interaction technology, computing self-awareness and cognitive processing, and automated system processing.[1][9] Official NRO documents from 2012, declassified in 2019, describe it as "an on-going Research and Development (R&D) program, which is managed and operates out of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)".[4] NRO documents detail the Sentient program was in some form of initial development from 2013 through 2016.[11]
Public details
In 2019, a declassified National Reconnaissance Office document detailed Sentient as:[7]
Sentient collects vast amounts of complex information, buried in noisy data, and the relevant [sic] What once teams of now uses automation to the information flow, enabling quicker, well-informed decisions. Analysts can focus on situational understanding instead of through data-working smarter, not harder. Sentient will continue to investigate various alerting schemes and tasking methodologies for improving overall employment of NTM imaging capabilities. Through and [sic] machine learning, Sentient will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of NTM collections.
The program architecture was developed to demonstrate advanced technologies and techniques to revolutionize the then current intelligence analysis process across the Intelligence Community (IC).[4][12] Sentient utilizes "tipping and queueing", described as a method to coordinate multiple discrete sensor systems to optimize real-time monitoring over large areas from multiple systems; coordinating in effect multiple satellites to hand off and coordinate tracking of targets as the target leaves the area of one set of satellites and enters new areas.[13][14][15] A principle purpose of the Sentient system is described by the NRO as compiling at machine, versus human speed, synthesis of complex distributed data sources for rapid analysis faster than humans can manage.[16][8]
The Rand Corporation in 2016 summarized a major benefit of Sentient as allowing humans performing intelligence analysis to focus on the "so what?" aspect of analysis, while the Sentient automation would handle the details of "what", as automation may be better suited for the data collection role.[13]
According to Robert Cardillo, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the system is intended to use "automated inferencing" to aid intelligence collection.[17] Cardillo summarized Sentient in 2017 as "...a research and development effort, conducted jointly with NRO, to experiment with automation that ingests data, makes sense of it in the context of an intelligence problem, and then infers likely future intelligence and collection needs... The approach is to continue to introduce automation in the processing arena that will support automated inferencing, and therefore, faster tasking for future collections."[17]
United States Army Captain Anjanay Kumar proposed in 2021 that should the United States Joint Forces Command engage in conflict with China over Taiwan, Sentient would be a likely target of Chinese forces.[18] Kumar described the scenario as, "While the Sentient program itself may be secure, the contractors and infrastructure associated with its hardware are not and present a weak point for the PRC to exploit. Before the data moves from the servers, malicious software will attack the servers and causes their physical destruction."[18]
The Verge described Sentient as “an omnivorous analysis tool, capable of devouring data of all sorts, making sense of the past and present, anticipating the future, and pointing satellites toward what it determines will be the most interesting parts of that future.”[1] Quoted in the Verge, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and the Project on Government Secrecy, said of Sentient, "It could include electronic intercepts of international communications; it could include prior imagery; it could include human sources."[1] In the same report, retired CIA analyst Allen Thomson stated, "As I understand it, the intended — and aspirational — answer is ‘everything,’" and said that in "addition to images, that could include financial data, weather information, shipping stats, information from Google searches, records of pharmaceutical purchases, and more."[1] In The Fragile Dictator: Counterintelligence Pathologies in Authoritarian States by Wege and Mobley, they compared the NRO's Sentient program to the commercial Blacksky Global geospatial intelligence service offered by Spaceflight Industries, and noted that Sentient-type tools can increase "intelligence equities" in regard to oceanic shipping and "sanctions busting" attempts by authoritariannation-states.[19]
The National Reconnaissance Office revealed in 2022 that the Sentient program had involvement with the United States Department of DefensesUnidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) in tracking and research of unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or unidentified flying objects.[8] In June 2022, the NRO declassified and released two unique and redacted reports on Sentient activities related to a UAP sighting of what was described as a "tic tac" shape, and other successes at detecting UAP.[2][3]
NRO Office of Public Affairs official Karen Furgerson reported to The Verge in 2019 that:[1]
"The NRO has not said much about Sentient publicly because it is a classified program and NRO rarely appears before Congress in open hearings. It ingests high volumes of data and processes it. Sentient catalogs normal patterns, detects anomalies, and helps forecast and model adversaries’ potential courses of action. Sentient is a thinking system. Sentient aims to help analysts ‘connect the dots’ in a large volume of data."
Betty J. Sapp, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office from 2012 to 2019, described the Sentient program to the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces as "...a 'thinking' system that allows automated, multi-intelligence tipping and cueing at machine speeds-has been focused against many of our most challenging mission sets, resulting in new intelligence information that human-in-the-loop systems would have missed. Our Future Ground Architecture will leverage Sentient, and create an integrated cloud-based enterprise that will share tasking and intelligence products quickly across each of our ground sites, increasing both performance and resilience.[14] At the 2013 GEOINT Symposium held by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, Sapp said of Sentient, "The ground needs to be a very capable orchestrator to realize the full potential of multi-INT overhead space architecture," and that Sentient will 'will allow NRO to be not only responsive, but also predictive, with where it aims spaceborne assets.'[20] In 2016, Sapp discussed the application of using cubesat systems for NRO work, which were tested as part of the Sentient program.[21]
According to Sapp, the NRO has been asked to give more demonstrations to observe Sentient and its capabilities in demonstrations to the defense and intelligence communities than 'any other capability since the beginning of the organization’s history.'[22]
A reconnaissance satellite or intelligence satellite is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications.
The Corona program was a series of American strategic reconnaissance satellites produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directorate of Science & Technology with substantial assistance from the U.S. Air Force. The CORONA satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union (USSR), China, and other areas beginning in June 1959 and ending in May 1972.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a member of the United States Intelligence Community and an agency of the United States Department of Defense which designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. federal government. It provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the NGA, and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the DIA. The NRO announced in 2023 that it plans within the following decade to quadruple the number of satellites it operates and increase the number of signals and images it delivers by a factor of ten.
The KH-11 KENNEN is a type of reconnaissance satellite first launched by the American National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in December 1976. Manufactured by Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California, the KH-11 was the first American spy satellite to use electro-optical digital imaging, and so offer real-time optical observations.
ISTAR stands for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. In its macroscopic sense, ISTAR is a practice that links several battlefield functions together to assist a combat force in employing its sensors and managing the information they gather.
Lacrosse or Onyx was a series of terrestrial radar imaging reconnaissance satellites operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). While not officially confirmed by the NRO or the Government of the United States prior to 2008, there was widespread evidence pointing to its existence, including one NASA website. In July 2008, the NRO itself declassified the existence of its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite constellation.
POPPY is the code name given to a series of U.S. intelligence satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. The POPPY satellites recorded electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) data, targeting radar installations in the Soviet Union and Soviet naval ships at sea.
Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) was a program awarded to Boeing to design a new generation of optical and radar imaging US reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). In 2005 NRO director Donald Kerr recommended the project's termination, and the optical component of the program was finally cancelled in September 2005 by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. FIA has been called by The New York Times "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects." Despite the optical component's cancellation, the radar component, known as Topaz, has continued, with four satellites in orbit as of February 2016.
KH-9, commonly known as Big Bird or KeyHole-9, was a series of photographic reconnaissance satellites launched by the United States between 1971 and 1986. Of twenty launch attempts by the National Reconnaissance Office, all but one were successful. Photographic film aboard the KH-9 was stored on RCA Astro Electronic Division take up reel system then sent back to Earth in recoverable film return capsules for processing and interpretation. The highest ground resolution achieved by the main cameras of the satellite was 2 ft (0.61 m), though another source says "images in the "better-than-one-foot" category" for the last "Gambit" missions.
Jeffrey King Harris is an American aerospace executive who served as 11th director of the National Reconnaissance Office from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he chair of the RIT Board of Trustees.
Martin Clark Faga was the tenth director of the National Reconnaissance Office (DNRO).
Joseph Vincent Charyk was widely credited as the founder of the geosynchronous communications satellite industry. He was born in Canmore, Alberta to a Ukrainian family. Early in his career, Charyk consolidated the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Air Force, and United States Navy space programs into the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He brought the first United States imagery satellite, CORONA, into operation and demonstrated signals intelligence technology from space. During his tenure, the NRO operated the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and managed development of the A-12.
Betty Jean Sapp is the former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (DNRO). She served as a United States Air Force Officer in a variety of roles, before joining the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997. She was the first female Director of the NRO, serving nearly seven years.
USA-224, also known as NROL-49, is an American reconnaissance satellite. Launched in 2011 to replace the decade-old USA-161 satellite, it is the fifteenth KH-11 optical imaging satellite to reach orbit.
The BYEMAN Control System, or simply BYEMAN, was a security control system put in place to protect information about the National Reconnaissance Office and its operations.
The 2012 National Reconnaissance Office space telescope donation to NASA was the declassification and donation to NASA of two identical space telescopes by the United States National Reconnaissance Office. The donation has been described by scientists as a substantial improvement over NASA's current Hubble Space Telescope. Although the telescopes themselves were given to NASA at no cost, the space agency must still pay for the cost of instruments and electronics for the telescopes, as well as the satellites to house them and the launch of the telescopes. On February 17, 2016, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was formally designated as a mission by NASA, predicated on using one of the space telescopes.
Aerospace Data Facility-East (ADF-E), also known as Area 58 and formerly known as Defense Communications Electronics Evaluation and Testing Activity (DCEETA), is one of three satellite ground stations operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in the continental United States. Located within Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the facility is responsible for the command and control of reconnaissance satellites involved in the collection of intelligence information and for the dissemination of that intelligence to other U.S. government agencies.
Aerospace Data Facility-Colorado (ADF-C) or Space Delta 20 one of three satellite ground stations operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and United States Space Force in the continental United States. Located within Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, the facility is responsible for the command and control of reconnaissance satellites involved in the collection of intelligence information and for the dissemination of that intelligence to other U.S. government agencies.
Aerospace Data Facility-Southwest (ADF-SW) is one of three satellite ground stations operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in the continental United States. Located within White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, the facility is responsible for the command and control of reconnaissance satellites involved in the collection of intelligence information and for the dissemination of that intelligence to other U.S. government agencies.
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