Scaling Intelligence, Building Resilience: Geospatial Readiness in the Defense Enterprise

As global competition intensifies, defense mission velocity depends on rapid decision-making powered by secure, real-time geospatial intelligence. They are largely ready to meet the moment, leading the nation in both adoption and integration of geospatial capabilities. Newly available data from a cross-government survey of federal leaders found that twenty percent of defense respondents report their agencies are “very or fully ready” to scale geospatial integration.

Defense leaders also demonstrate a strong understanding of geospatial value, data integration across systems, and readiness to scale. But even with these advantages, agencies face significant obstacles: real-time data feed gaps, workforce training challenges, budget constraints, and uneven leadership prioritization. These barriers slow the very outcomes that geospatial intelligence is designed to accelerate.

The data paints a clear picture: Defense respondents are aware of the power of geospatial tools, but not yet where the mission demands. Bridging this gap requires scalable platforms that unify disparate datasets, integrate with AI-driven analytics, support field operations, and deliver real-time situational awareness.

 The Strategic Context

Defense agencies operate under a rapidly evolving threat landscape characterized by contested environments, dispersed operations, and an enormous volume of sensor-derived intelligence. In this context, geospatial data is not a niche analytical tool—it is a foundational component of modern command and control operations.

Survey data reflects this urgency clearly. Defense respondents were the most likely of any government group to classify geospatial data as “critical” to their work, and 46% say that it is very important or 

critical. This finding aligns with the operational reality: accurate geolocation, mapping, visualization, and spatial analysis underpin targeting, logistics, force movement, ISR, and emergency response.

Across all groups, improved decision-making emerged as the most widely recognized benefit of geospatial tools. Among sectoral-specific benefits, defense benefits (unsurprisingly) are critical for defense respondents, alongside a government-wide greater demand for the application of geospatial data in emergency response, including real-time operational awareness and rapid field-level decision-making. Defense respondents were also most likely to rank environmental factors, such as weather forecasting and wildfire management, as high-impact outcomes, indicating the importance of reliable, real-time environmental data in decision-making. Taken together, these findings illuminate an environment in which geospatial data is not simply informing decisions—it is actively shaping the speed, accuracy, and confidence with which those decisions are made.

Current Landscape

The survey results place defense agencies at the leading edge of geospatial adoption. Defense respondents were more likely than any other group to report using geospatial data “to a great extent”, reflecting the breadth of applications across the defense enterprise.

Crucially, defense respondents also reported the highest levels of geospatial integration with other systems—including ERP platforms, case management systems, and AI tools. One-third of defense respondents describe their geospatial data sharing as “very” or “extremely effective”, compared with just one-fifth of federal civilian or state/local respondents. This higher baseline suggests that defense agencies have made notable progress in overcoming interoperability constraints that have historically slowed joint operations. Integration is what transforms geospatial data from a specialized capability into an enterprise-wide operational asset. The more geospatial data is connected to logistics systems, personnel platforms, or intelligence pipelines, the faster defense leaders can make crucial decisions.

The types of geospatial data used by defense agencies further underscore this profile. Global positioning systems (GPS) and location tracking, tools that support everything from troop movements to asset monitoring,rank as the most frequently used data type among defense respondents. GIS data also remains foundational, supporting command and control, route planning, and intelligence preparation.

Mission Efficiency, Innovation Drivers

The defense community’s appetite for innovation is clear within the dataset. When asked which advancements would produce the greatest mission impact, defense respondents highlighted two areas: enhanced field capabilities and integration with AI/ML systems.

These findings reflect a broader shift in warfighting doctrine. Defense leaders increasingly rely on distributed operations in disparate environments, where personnel at the tactical edge need near-real-time geospatial intelligence to maintain situational awareness. This is both a push and a pull – respondents identified real-time data feeds as both a top modernization driver, and as their single biggest capability gap. Unlike civilian agencies, who focus on training to improve their AI adoption capabilities, defense agencies emphasize the need for faster, more dynamic, and more continuous data streams.

AI/ML expectations also mark a point of differentiation. Defense respondents reported higher expectations for AI integration than civilian or state/local users, indicating a readiness to transition from static geospatial tools to predictive and automated geospatial intelligence. This aligns with broader modernization efforts to harness next-generation capabilities across the defense ecosystem – human-machine teaming, sensemaking at scale, and interoperable data architectures.

Barriers to Full Scale Adoption

Despite strong demand and advanced utilization, defense agencies face persistent obstacles that prevent full-scale integration of geospatial capabilities. Budget constraints, a consistent pain point, rank as the top challenge across all agency types, outpacing the next challenge by nearly 30 percentage points. However, when asked about the greatest barrier to implementation, defense agencies unusually diverge: training gaps represent a larger challenge than cost (45% of respondents versus 39%, respectively). This suggests that the complexity of geospatial tools, combined with rapid technological evolution, is outpacing workforce readiness.

Leadership understanding also shows mixed results. While leadership understanding is stronger in defense than in their FedCiv counterparts (39% versus 27%, respectively), leadership prioritization still trails behind mission urgency. Awareness does not always translate into sustained investment or policy alignment.

Finally, integration challenges persist despite defense’s relative advantage. Agencies acknowledge that their systems are not yet fully interoperable (34% report interoperability as a major challenge) —and that the ability to ingest, process, and analyze real-time data at enterprise scale requires more robust digital infrastructure.

Scaling Readiness

Despite these challenges, the survey’s most significant finding may be the one that best captures defense’s strategic position: defense agencies are more than twice as likely as civilian agencies to report being ready to scale geospatial integration. With one in five defense agencies “very” or “fully” prepared, the defense community is positioned to lead the federal enterprise in transforming geospatial capability from a patchwork of applications into a unified operational asset.

This leadership carries responsibility. Defense agencies lead in maturity, adoption urgency, and operational awareness required to model best practices for scalable geospatial architectures. That includes demonstrating how interoperable systems, real-time data flows, and AI-enabled analytics can accelerate decision-making across all government missions—from emergency response to homeland security to disaster preparedness.

Defense’s readiness advantage should be viewed not as an endpoint but as a launchpad for building the next generation of geospatial intelligence capabilities.

Strategic Recommendations

1. Institutionalize geospatial integration: Make geospatial data a baseline capability across command, logistics, and readiness operations.
2. Close the real-time data gap: Prioritize solutions that enable high-frequency, high-resolution data streams in austere or contested environments.
3. Strengthen the workforce: Expand training pipelines for data and field personnel to operationalize AI-geospatial tools.
4. Build for interoperability: Adopt platforms that connect legacy defense systems with emerging AI, visualization, and data-sharing frameworks.
5. Lead the federal model: Leverage defense’s advanced readiness to create scalable frameworks other federal domains can emulate.

Conclusion

The survey results reaffirm what defense leaders already understand: future success hinges on how effectively agencies capture, integrate, and operationalize geospatial intelligence. Defense agencies are ahead of their federal peers in utilization, integration, and AI readiness, but growing threats demand even greater speed, scale, and resilience.

Achieving this next level of capability requires infrastructure that unifies disparate datasets, automates complex workflows, enhances field performance, and delivers trusted real-time insight. It requires understanding that geospatial data is not simply a layer of information—it is the connective tissue of modern operations.

Defense is poised to lead the next decade of geospatial transformation. The question is not whether the mission demands it. The question is how quickly agencies can turn readiness into reality and capability into decisive advantage.

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