Final Report: National Reconnaissance Program Task Force for the Director of Central Intelligence, September 1992

The document below was obtained after a successful Mandatory Declassification Request (MDR) filed with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

The document itself had been released before, examples being here and here. Both releases had numerous redactions. The case filed in 2018 by The Black Vault, and completed in March of 2022, saw the removal of many redactions, though many still remain. In all, that is a success when using the MDR process!

From the introduction of the report:

“You have asked us to review and make recommendations to you regarding the overall direction of the National Reconnaissance Program (NRP) in time to be useful for your deliberations on the US fiscal year 1994 budget and five-year program. (The Terms of Reference are in Appendix A under separate cover.) In the six weeks available to us, we have done our best to evaluate the total system architecture for overhead imagery intelligence (IMINT) , signals intelligence (SIGINT) , measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) , and related communications as thoroughly as possible. We have outlined a strategy for overhead reconnaissance based on a reduced set of programs . Our assessment is that this reduced set will support the basic needs of the National Command Authorities (NCA) , policy makers, and several sets of operational users , particularly including military commanders , with one important exception : broad area synoptic search. We recommend an addition to this set of programs to meet this need. Throughout, we have balanced the ways in which space-based and non-space-based collection could meet our intelligence needs, considering both effectiveness and economy of effort.

Much useful preparatory work had been completed , and more was under way as a result of other reviews that the National Security Council (NSC), you, and the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have initiated . We have drawn substantially from these efforts and have been aided by a series of briefings and discussions with the key participants.

We have begun from an understanding that intelligence needs are changing substantially as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the momentous events of the last few years . The risk to the nation of failing to detect any single event will be less cataclysmic than would have been the case when our concern was focused on the USSR; most would agree that there is no single development today that would deserve the attention we once focused on potential Soviet strategic weapons breakthroughs. But this does not radically simplify the task of intelligence collection in general or of overhead collection in particular.”