Intelligence, Geospatial

Military Applications of Geospatial Intelligence

GEOINT is utilized by militaries to map terrain, follow enemy troop formations, gather intelligence on military staging, and generally inform policymakers of the activities of both friends and foes that can influence the formation and execution of foreign policy.

Since 1989, GEOINT has been used to uncover evidence of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in the late 1990s, to support the military and government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in support of cities hosting the Olympics, and to support humanitarian efforts after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan. These events highlight the dual necessities of GEOINT: both temporal and physical location. The evidence of atrocities in Kosovo came from comparing the same geographic locations over time, which revealed the presence of new mass graves. Without the temporal component in the analysis, the geographic imagery would have revealed only that gravesites of great size existed in these locations but not that they were newly created. Geographic images of postearthquake cities reveal damage to manmade objects, but it is only when coupled with the temporal placement of these images that changes to the actual geography can be understood, as was seen in Japan when the physical location of the country was shifted.

In nonhumanitarian military deployments, GEOINT is crucial for understanding the topography and geography of an environment. When, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, U.S. forces moved into Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden, GEOINT was critical in locating Taliban and al Qaeda encampments and forces, as well as in understanding the complex cave systems that were suspected of sheltering him.

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