Sentient (intelligence analysis system)

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Sentient, sometimes reported on and referred to as the Future Ground Architecture program, is a heavily classified artificial intelligence satellite intelligence analysis system of the United States Intelligence Community, operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and developed by their Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate (AS&T), with the United States Air Forces Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Department of Energy's National Laboratories. [1] [2]

Contents

Sentient has been described as a "classified artificial brain." [3] [4] Available information describes it as a complex automated system that allows intelligence agencies of the United States and the United States Armed Forces to use artificial satellites in Earth orbits to track in real time any objects detected or photographed, and to automatically repurpose with artificial intelligence and machine learning the tracking of targets, and to even decide which targets are worth tracking. [5] [6] [1] [7] One NRO document detailed Sentient as a system able to "automatically fuse multi-[intelligence] 'big data' in context to understand current activity, predict new activity, and discover unknown activity." [3]

Known public records of Sentients development programs and process date from 2009-2010 onward, as highlighted by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). [8] [9] [10] 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. [11] Former NRO Director Betty Sapp disclosed that Sentient is also known as the agency's Future Ground Architecture program. [2]

History

Prior to Sentient, NRO had involvement with the CORONA program of satellite systems. [12] : 25–28  [13] 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. [12] : 25–28  A 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 as reported by the FAS. [14] [9] These earliest known public references to Sentient date to 2010, when the NRO additionally 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] The Federation of American Scientists noted this NRO description: [8]

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. [8]

The NRO continued to explain to Congress the AR&D activities (research and development) goals of its Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate related to GEOINT, SIGINT, and Multi-INT collection of intelligence data. [15] Their areas of focus were detailed as monitoring any target across wide areas on-demand, including new phenomenological models for detecting non-traditional observables from targets of interest; geolocating them; increasing performance for collection against weak signals and low reflectance targets in dense clutter and co-channel interference backgrounds; and improvements in Phased Array technologies. [8]

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)". [7] NRO documents detail the Sentient program was in some form of initial development from 2013 through 2016. [16] One of the first public disclosures about Sentient as a full program involving the NRO was in a 2014 edition of NRL Review, published by the United States Naval Research Laboratory. [17] In a profile of retired Air Force colonel Thomas Nix, former technical lead and Sentient Operations Branch Chief at the NRO in the Ground Enterprise Division, the American Nuclear Society noted that the annual budget of the Sentient and National Overhead Systems Future Ground Architecture program at the time was $238,000,000 per year in USD in the 2015-2017 period when Nix was involved. [18] The National Reconnaissance Office revealed in 2022 that the Sentient program had involvement with the United States Department of Defenses Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) in tracking and research of unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or unidentified flying objects. [11] 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. [5] [6]

Sentient and Future Ground Architecture features

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. [19] 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 2015, Sapp and NRO were cited in Signal Magazine as Sentient being the center of a NRO Future Ground Architecture program. [2] 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.' [2] In 2019, a declassified National Reconnaissance Office document detailed Sentient as: [10]

Sentient collects vast amounts of complex information, buried in noisy data, and extrapolates the relevant pieces. What once required teams of analysts now uses automation to speed the information flow, enabling quicker, well-informed decisions. Analysts can focus on situational understanding instead of sifting 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 predictive analytics and 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). [7] [22] 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. [23] [19] [24] 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. [25] [11] 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."

According to Robert Cardillo, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the system is intended to use "automated inferencing" to aid intelligence collection. [26] 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." [26] [27] 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. [28] 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." [28]

Program future

Speaking at the 39th Space Symposium in April 2024, principal deputy director of the NRO Troy Meink emphasized NRO's plans to diversify this satellite fleet, and to increase the volume of satellite assets in various unique orbits for more complete coverage of Earth, highlighted the expansion of its AI-based ingestion of data, and further integration of Sentient-type systems and their ground systems. [29] Joshua Perrius of Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor involved in the ground systems modernization, also emphasized the increased reliance over time in AI-based data exploitation models will increase over time, decreasing commensurately human activities in such data analysis. [29]

Academic and media reporting

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. [23] Writing for Grey Dynamics and analyzing NRO declassified collateral, Alec Smith noted Sentient's ability to increase "situational awareness based on observed activity and historical intelligence to model and anticipate potential courses of actions of adversaries". [27]

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 Central Intelligence Agency 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 authoritarian nation-states. [30] Sarah Shoker noted in Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare that Sentient and comparable systems like automatic target recognition (ATR) can remove human limitations from time-sensitive intelligence analysis, highlighting that past behavioral and tactical patterns interpreted by these systems can forecast similar future actions. [31]

In his book The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, Andrew Krepinevich highlights the same remarks from Furgerson, and notes that the "avalanche" of data available from intelligence, military, and commercial sources would overwhelm human staff attempting to analyze it all. [32] Krepinevich provides details on some of the commercial sources of data the NRO has contracted with to provide intelligence services and data for the Sentient program. [32] Among these are Maxar Technologies, Planet, and BlackSky; Krepinevich notes that BlackSky "hoovers up" materials from dozens of satellites, over one hundred million mobile devices, and similar numbers of ships, planes, social networks, and environmental sensors as raw collateral for big-data analytics to assist Sentient and its machine learning operations. [32] Maxar specifically noted themselves that they provide "90 percent of the foundational geospatial intelligence used by the US government". [13] In The Future Digital Battlefield and Challenges for Humanitarian Protection: A Primer, Henning Lahmann of Leiden University noted that Sentient has the ability with detections of anomalies found in such data to predict the behavior of "model adversaries". [4] Henning also observed that initial generation systems like Sentient and similar data fusion approaches would lead to real-time automated analytics of battlespace. [4]

Known US Government stakeholders

Declassified government documents have detailed that United States Government stakeholders involved in Sentient include the: [22] [33] [11]

See also

References

PD-icon.svg This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Government .

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Scoles, Sarah (2019-07-31). "Meet the US's spy system of the future — it's Sentient". The Verge . Archived from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Ackerman, Robert K. (2015-04-01). "The NRO Looks Down to Look Up". Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, SIGNAL Magazine . Archived from the original on 2022-09-30. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  3. 1 2 Deeks, Ashley S.; Mobley (2023-10-24). The Double Black Box: National Security, Artificial Intelligence, and the Struggle for Democratic Accountability. Oxford University Press. pp. 85–86. ISBN   9780197520901 . Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  4. 1 2 3 Lahmann, Henning (2022-04-20). "The Future Digital Battlefield and Challenges for Humanitarian Protection: A Primer". Social Science Research Network : 10–11. Retrieved 2025-03-13.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. 1 2 "((S//REL)) Sentient Operations Highlight:   Detection of Possible UAP near   6 May 2021" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2022-06-02. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-03-21. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  6. 1 2 "(S/REL) Recent Sentient Highlights 6 May 2021" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  7. 1 2 3 "Sentient Program" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2012-02-13. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-08. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Federation of American Scientists (2010-07-01). "A GLIMPSE OF THE 2010 NRO BUDGET REQUEST (REDACTED)". Federation of American Scientists . Archived from the original on 2021-09-18.
  9. 1 2 "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2009-05-01. p. 1. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  10. 1 2 "SENTIENT" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-01-22. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  11. 1 2 3 4 "NRO Official declassified release June 2022" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2022-06-22. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  12. 1 2 Paglen, Trevor (February 2009). Blank Spots On the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. New York: Dutton.
  13. 1 2 Steele, Anne Lee (Spring 2022). "Omnivorous Analysis". Logic Magazine, issue 16, spring 2022. Archived from the original on 2022-05-16. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  14. ↑ "Sentient Enterprise (Request for Information)" (PDF). System for Award Management sam.gov (formerly fbo.gov), on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2010-10-20. Archived from the original on 2019-09-14. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  15. ↑ "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2009-05-01. p. 215. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  16. ↑ "Sentient Overview 2017" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2012-02-13. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  17. ↑ NRL Review. United States Naval Research Laboratory. 2014-08-01. p. 21. Archived from the original on 2025-03-13. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  18. ↑ American Nuclear Society (2023-11-06). "Lt. Col. Thomas "Tommy" Nix, United States Space Force, Space Nuclear Power Lead and Senior Military Advisor, Spacecraft Technology Division (RVS), Air Force Research Laboratory( AFRL)". American Nuclear Society . Archived from the original on 2025-03-24.
  19. 1 2 Sapp, Betty (2017-05-09). "Director National Reconnaissance Office, Statement for the Record" (PDF). Betty J. Sapp on the United States House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces archives. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-09-23. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  20. ↑ "The GEOINT 2013 Symposium, Day 4" (PDF). United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation via Trajectory Magazine. 2013-04-13. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-06-10. Retrieved 2024-06-04.
  21. ↑ Gruss, Mike (2019-07-31). "NRO planning shift to smaller satellites, new ground system". SpaceNews . Archived from the original on 2024-06-06. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  22. 1 2 "NRO Campaign Plan For Sentient" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2019-02-19. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-20. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  23. 1 2 Alkire, Brien; Tingstad, Abbie; Benedetti, Dale; Cordova, Amado; Danescu, Irina Elena; Fry, William; George, D. Scott; Hanser, Lawrence M.; Menthe, Lance; Nemeth, Erik (2010-10-20). "Leveraging the Past to Prepare for the Future of Air Force Intelligence Analysis". Rand Corporation, Defense Technical Information Center : 44. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  24. ↑ Ali, Muhammed Irfan (2021-01-28). "Tip and Cue Technique for Efficient Near Real-Time Satellite Monitoring of Moving Objects". ICEYE . Archived from the original on 2024-06-04. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  25. ↑ "SENTIENT Challenge Themes" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2019-02-09. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  26. 1 2 Cardillo, Robert (2017-03-16). "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love our Crowded Skies". The Cipher Brief. Archived from the original on 2019-05-15. Retrieved 2024-02-07.
  27. 1 2 Smith, Alec (2024-02-16). "The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO): Watching From Above". Grey Dynamics. Archived from the original on 2024-03-13. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  28. 1 2 Kumar, Captain, Anjanay (2021-04-19). "The U.S. Joint Force's Defeat before Conflict". United States Army, Federal government of the United States . Archived from the original on 2021-04-19. Retrieved 2024-06-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  29. 1 2 Erwin, Sandra (2024-04-09). "NRO eyes diverse satellite fleet and AI-powered ground systems in modernization push". SpaceNews . Archived from the original on 2025-02-16.
  30. ↑ Wege, Carl A.; Mobley, Blake W. (2023-10-24). The Fragile Dictator: Counterintelligence Pathologies in Authoritarian States. Lexington Books, Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 95. ISBN   978-1-6669-3813-5 . Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  31. ↑ Shoker, Sarah (2020-09-20). Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare, Palgrave Macmillan. Lexington Books. p. 167. ISBN   978-3-0305-2473-9 . Retrieved 2024-06-13.
  32. 1 2 3 Krepinevich, Andrew F. (2023-03-21). The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers. Yale University Press. pp. 91–92. ISBN   9780300234091 . Retrieved 2024-10-25.
  33. ↑ "National Intelligence Program, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Volume IV" (PDF). National Reconnaissance Office, Federal government of the United States . 2009-05-01. p. 217. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
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