NGA Rapid Capabilities Office to embrace speed and risk-taking

DENVER – The job of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) is to “deliver disruptive capabilities to our warfighters faster than emerging threats,” NGA Director Lt. Gen. Michele Bredenkamp said May 6 in 2026 GEOINT Symposium keynote.

Achieving that goal will require the new office to “take a lot of risk in acquisition,” NGA RCO Director Chris Parrett said in a May 5 fireside chat. “We’re not going to wait on the perfect solution. That just takes way too long.”

NGA RCO will also dispense with formal contracting methods.

“I’ve personally charged Chris and our RCO team with engaging industry and using the full range of acquisition authorities, including other transaction authorities, to deliver capabilities at speed,” Bredenkamp said.

Other transaction authority agreements can be awarded far more quickly than traditional defense contracts and they allow agencies to move from prototype to follow-on production without holding a competition.

A key to long-term success of NGA RCO initiatives will be “having buy-in or at least participation from the program executive offices and specific program management offices,” Parrett said. NGA RCO will seek transition agreements with NGA program managers to ensure technologies “move into a program-management line.”

Early priorities

Moving advanced GEOINT capabilities supported by artificial intelligence to units operating in the field is a top priority for NGA RCO.

“We’ll support the warfighter by getting all of our enterprise capabilities out to the edge, into their hands,” Parrett said. “We’ll work with and alongside them to ensure that they understand the capabilities that we’re providing.”

In addition, NGA RCO is intent on finding new geospatial-intelligence products and services that can solve problems and transforming the agency’s “foundational military intelligence process,” Parrett said.

Military units in the field often employ apps designed for business automation.

“They’ve done great work to try to link them together, but it’s very tedious,” Parrett said. “It’s very error prone. I think we can do a lot better.”

Initially, NGA RCO will evaluate technology through “shorter duration pilots and prototypes,” Parrett said.

Industry days

NGA RCO is beginning to form partnerships. Within a year, the organization seeks to establish an ongoing process for sharing its capability needs with industry.

Bredenkamp said NGA will hold an industry day in July focused on advanced analytics with “classified and unclassified forums to ensure that we’re opening the aperture to the best and the brightest coming out of the defense industrial base.”

Parrett acknowledged the challenge NGA RCO faces in tackling an important mission and communicating with hundreds of potential vendors with limited resources.  The goal is “to scale up and have more of a focused dialog with industry, where it’s a two-way street,” Parrett said.

The NGA RCO was established in October in response to a Trump administration executive order that directed space agencies to reform acquisition processes to embrace cost-effective commercial technologies.

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