5.3 The Role of GEOINT and the NGA

KEVIN POMFRET: Right now, you can track people with their knowledge or without their knowledge. But, is that really an invasion of privacy or is that just new technology?

MATT O'CONNELL:  It's important that we be able to look at any place in the world because if trouble strikes, our government has to deal with the situation.

LETITIA LONG:  We are the eyes of our nation, if you will. You need geospatial intelligence to target bad guys.

JAN VAN SICKLE:  Mapping to some degree has always been driven by conflict, shall we call or war.

ON-SCREEN TEXT (SET TO MUSIC): In the early 1990s, the Socialist Federal REpublic of Yugoslavia broke apart along ethnic lines.  War engulfed the region and the central republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina became a killing field.

UNKNOWN NEWS ANCHOR: In the face of the Bosnian Serb Offensive, another Muslim Enclave Falls. Crisis in the Balkans.

UNKNOWN NEWS ANCHOR:  The shelling continued for a second day.

WESLEY K. CLARK:  A line of siege was established on the hills around Sarajevo. There are snipers shooting people. Tens of thousands of people were killed.

IRV BUCK:  In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we had three separate groups. You had the Croatians. You had enclaves of Serbs. nd you had enclaves those Muslims. It was real mess. Finally, the West decided had to it had to iron this situation out by cutting up the country. So, this is what the Dayton Accords were all about.

IRV BUCK:  We had to figure this out so that everybody gets a fair shake here.

ALIJA IZETBEGOVIC:  I believe that he did not last for long.

IRV BUCK:  And the only way to do that was really geospatially. We brought in this thing called PowerScene. We took digital translation data and we overlaid it with imagery. They have joystick. You can fly over the train. Back down into the valley. We were able to get them to agree that, yes, this is a majority Muslim village, or this is a majority Serb village.

WESLEY K. CLARK:  Garage door was an isolated enclave, which was populated by Muslims. The Bosnian Muslims wouldn't give up this piece of ground. They demanded secure access to it. And the question is, where would the lines be drawn.

RICHARD JOHNSON:  Eventually the solution was to build a road to open a corridor to them. We used PowerScene to fly a route over the mountains that was far enough away from the Bosnian Serbs that the traffic would not be intercepted or shot at.

JAN VAN SICKLE:  We needed a wider corridor. And we had to demonstrate that to the president of Serbia.

WESLEY K. CLARK:  Milosevic was smart but he wasn't a field soldier. He never walked that terrain. Well, can't we make this more narrow? Why so many kilometers? Well, you can see right here, Mr. president. Here's the mountain top on one side. Here's the mountain top on the other. You can't draw a line down the side of a hill like this and have it defensible. They have to have the high ground on either side of this valley. He could see this with real terrain. Ultimately, he couldn't beat the argument and we had our road and that's what we needed.

RICHARD JOHNSON: This was the first successful use of deployable digital technology in diplomatic negotiations.

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC:  For the great efforts, the United States invested.

RICHARD JOHNSON:  It was hugely satisfying and emotional to know that we helped in the war.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:  After nearly four years of 250,000 people killed, the people of Bosnia finally have a chance to turn from the horror of war to the promise of peace.