On May 19, 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard addressed the GEOINT Symposium 2025. Her remarks as prepared for delivery are below.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

Remarks As Prepared for Delivery

GEOINT Symposium 2025

St. Louis, Missouri

May 19, 2025

Aloha. It’s a privilege to join you here today. The work you do is essential to ensuring our nation’s security and liberty, and I am grateful for your commitment to this critical mission.

Geospatial intelligence is not a topic discussed by most Americans around the dinner table or the proverbial water cooler. It’s a highly complex and specialized field that even many who benefit from your expertise probably couldn’t articulate anything beyond superficial level of understanding. But when we take a step back, we understand geospatial intelligence is at the heart of American military history. Forgive me for being Army-centric, but there is a reason Thomas Jefferson established the United States Military Academy at West Point: not to train infantrymen, but to train engineers. He understood war requires battlefield leaders, to be sure, but it would specifically require engineers and surveyors, the makers of maps and the works upon them, to come into being.

Today, your challenges and tools are profoundly different, yet your role and importance to the American people is precisely the same. There is a direct line from George Washington surveying the green frontier of wild Appalachia, to pioneers and explorers charting westward paths, to you and your colleagues integrating data and analysis on a distant land — and delivering it to policymakers and our military, at operational speed.

We look back, for an example, over four decades ago for an example — prior to the United States invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, the Army operational planners at Fort Bragg discovered that there were no maps to be found. The historian Sharon Tosi Lacey recounts that “a division staff officer headed for downtown Fayetteville, where he procured tourist maps of the island. Planners superimposed a military grid atop the map and distributed copies to the invading troops before they boarded their aircraft.”

Once the battle kicked off, the various services learned that coordination of fires was exceptionally difficult, because there was no common map or locational reference to be had. This moved the problem of inadequate geospatial intelligence from the realm of planning absurdity to the sphere of life and death. What we see in this is the indispensability of your effort and your professionalism.

President Donald J. Trump has made clear he views the world through a lens of realism, and within the context of what is in the best interest of the American people. The goal is peace, while maintaining a state of readiness should war as a last resort to defend our nation be required.

This readiness is what geospatial intelligence enables — doubling down on your work — to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people. The President has made it clear, America cannot, will not, and should not be the world’s police. We are rooted in American history, learning from failures of the past, and focused on the American interest. We take to heart the wisdom of John Quincy Adams when he said that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” lest she "no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

Our generation has lived through what happens when that wisdom is discarded.

However, this should not be mistaken for being isolationism. We must act within the best interest of our nation, engage in diplomacy with friends, allies, partners, and yes, adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and prosperity. The Intelligence Community at its best plays an important role in ensuring our nation’s leaders are best informed in making decisions. You are who enable not just American policy, but strategy. Nearly a century ago, the scholar Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase, “the map is not the territory” referencing the perennial challenge of matching observation and orientation — and therefore representation — to reality. It is a challenge that American geospatial intelligence meets better than ever.

Now you face an array of challenges and opportunities, many of them to be discussed in depth at this Symposium, with innovators joining you with the latest tools and methodologies to support your work. Thomas Jefferson’s first corps of engineers out of West Point, ready to survey a virgin continent, would have looked upon it all with awe — and also with recognition, because they would have seen at once the fundamental continuity between their mission and yours. The tools at hand for the general public, not just their government, are also extraordinary, and surpass those available even via classified means a mere generation back. A civilian with a laptop can now call up detailed and commercially available imagery and mapping of the world’s most-distant corners — an access and availability unthinkable even a handful of years ago.

So can our adversaries.

With all this at hand, how do we maintain our excellence and our competitive edge in geospatial intelligence? Ronda (Schrenk) and I will be discussing this in a few minutes, but I want to note two major things here that inform the rest.

The first is that the advancements of America’s innovative, and dynamic commercial sector are indispensable to the retention of American dominance in geospatial intelligence. Within this is the advent of artificial intelligence, which is already transforming nearly every sphere of endeavor. This becomes especially clear when we look at the synthesis between intelligence domains: between human, signals, and geospatial, which when combined can generate awareness well beyond what could be achieved with each pillar in mere isolation — and well beyond what the unaided person, restrained by man-hours and individual expertise, could plausibly achieve. There is no replacement for the human bearing in life or work, including in geospatial intelligence, but there is a change in roles at hand: the analyst of the very near future must add to his or her toolkit the ability to understand, engage, and direct AI for the amplification of their own work.

The second thing I want to emphasize is that we never stop asking ourselves: how do we maintain our qualitative edge, and in seeking the answers we fulfill our mission — our charge to keep — of defending the American people.

There’s a popular quote, erroneously attributed to Churchill, or Orwell, depending on the source, that reads: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because tough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Whatever the attribution, it expresses a truth that we who wear the uniform understand well — and voluntarily accept. But the reality is that by the time violence is required, there is by definition a failure at hand. The true success of a policy is when the American interest is met, and American liberties are secured, and no violence is necessary. As the Director of National Intelligence, answerable to the President who is answerable to the American people, our mission focus for the IC is this: our work is not, first and foremost, the winning of conflict, but the prevention and deterrence of it.

Thank you.

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