Analytic innovation in national security isn’t born in isolation. It’s forged through partnerships, refined through peer engagement, and tested in real-world problem sets. Institutions like USGIF, the Global SOF Foundation, and DEF CON—and the events they host such as GEOINT, SOF Week, and DEF CON—play a critical role in advancing the field of national security analysis. Combined with close collaboration across academia and industry, these engagements sharpen tradecraft, expose new methodologies, and create space for candid dialogue. In a discipline where the stakes are high and the tools are constantly evolving, continual learning, real-world validation, and shared problem-solving aren’t just helpful—they’re essential.
Table of Contents
- Professional Communities Driving Analytic Innovation
- Partnerships that Expand Analytic Perspective
- Emerging Approaches in Analytic Innovation at 3GIMBALS
- The Future of Analytic Innovation in National Security
Professional Communities Driving Analytic Innovation
The work of national security analysts doesn’t evolve in a vacuum. It advances through active engagement in communities of practice—places where ideas are stress-tested, tradecraft is challenged, and emerging methodologies are debated in the open. That’s why professional forums like the GEOINT Symposium, SOF Week, and DEF CON are far more than annual milestones on the calendar. They are proving grounds, pressure valves, and idea engines for the future of analytic innovation in national security.
GEOINT Symposium: Building a Foundation for Insight
At the heart of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s GEOINT Symposium is a shared commitment to modernizing how we see and make sense of the world. GEOINT 2024 provided a particularly striking example of this dynamic in action, when 3GIMBALS’ analysis of China’s dual-use port strategy in Djibouti was highlighted during the opening ceremony by Robert Cardillo, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. That moment wasn’t just a recognition of a single product—it was a validation of how unclassified, shareable analysis can shape strategic conversations across the U.S. intelligence community.
Beyond the keynote stage, GEOINT was a space for practical application and cross-sector experimentation. In a series of lightning talks, 3GIMBALS analysts showcased how cyber threat mapping could be enhanced with geospatial data, offering fresh perspective on APT infrastructure analysis. Other sessions dug into the mechanics of uncovering Russian information operations through forensic timestamp analysis, exposing the geographic origins of coordinated inauthentic behavior. These case studies provided operationalized examples of how integrating domains and methods drives more agile, mission-aligned intelligence.
Just as important was the interaction with the next generation of analysts. Through USGIF’s student outreach program, 3GIMBALS met with high school students from intelligence-focused schools in St. Louis and Orlando. We discussed the mechanics of AI-driven insight through OMEN™, our open-source data fusion solution, and shared real-world use cases. These conversations reflected a key value of analytic innovation: preparing the next generation of national security experts to think broadly, experiment boldly, and execute with rigor.
Spatial Edge Miami: Advancing GEOINT Innovation in the Western Hemisphere
In addition to the flagship GEOINT Symposium, 3GIMBALS proudly sponsored the inaugural USGIF’s Spatial Edge Miami alongside Esri, emphasizing the operational realities of geospatial intelligence in the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) area of responsibility (AOR). Hosted at Florida International University (FIU), the gathering brought together defense, academic, and industry leaders to tackle some of the most pressing regional challenges, including counter-narcotics, disaster response, illegal fishing, and transnational criminal networks.
As the lead sponsor, 3GIMBALS helped shape the conversation around data fusion, automation, and mission-driven AI, particularly in environments where unclassified, shareable intelligence is critical. Our CEO, Terry Dyess, moderated a panel of senior leaders from SOUTHCOM, NGA, and the DoD focused on how geospatial enablement is transforming everything from threat anticipation to operational execution. The panel didn’t dwell on future hypotheticals—it addressed the now: how to integrate commercial GEOINT tools, how to define “good enough” data in time-sensitive missions, and how policy often lags behind what technology can already deliver. These discussions reinforced a core tenet of analytic innovation: insight is only as valuable as its ability to inform national security action at speed and scale.
SOF Week: Testing Tradecraft Under Operational Pressure
Hosted by the Global SOF Foundation, SOF Week serves as a uniquely focused environment for special operations and national security professionals to push the limits of what’s possible. For 3GIMBALS, SOF Week 2024 was a chance to engage directly with those on the front lines of global security, presenting a slate of lightning talks that addressed both conventional and unconventional threats.
In sessions spanning from Chinese counterintelligence risks at overseas bases to the geospatial analysis of cyber campaigns, the emphasis was always the same: innovation must serve operations. One session traced the link between illicit Russian drone assembly and everyday commercial supply chains, highlighting a surprising logistics vector that originated in a nail salon. Another focused on the creative use of AI to spatialize disparate datasets, underscoring the growing imperative to connect data across silos and domains.
What made SOF Week stand out was the directness of feedback. Presentations didn’t live in the theoretical—they were challenged in real time by decision-makers and practitioners who needed to know, “Can this help solve the problem I have right now?” It’s in this crucible that analytic innovation is tested and refined—not by awards or press releases, but by how well it adapts to mission need. Those discussions continued beyond the lecture halls in bilateral meetings with international SOF partners, where shared challenges around force protection, information operations, and regional stability took center stage.
DEF CON: Where Tradecraft Meets Adversary Mindset
No conversation about advancing tradecraft would be complete without DEF CON, the world’s largest and longest-running hacking conference. 3GIMBALS’ participation at DEF CON 31 and 32 wasn’t symbolic—it was strategic. With a presence across Capture the Flag competitions, Recon Village talks, and workshops on AI system vulnerabilities, our team immersed itself in the mindset of those who break systems to understand them better.
One particularly well-attended session traced the structure of a Russian information operation targeting Western audiences via fabricated media outlets. This was more than a reverse-engineering exercise—it was a live case study in how to detect, attribute, and counter malign influence with open-source tools and geospatial forensics. These insights weren’t developed in isolation—they emerged from collaboration with academic partners at Clemson University, who contribute cutting-edge research on coordinated inauthentic behavior through their Media Forensics Hub.
Beyond the stage, DEF CON offered something else: perspective. From conversations with peers in government, academia, and industry to chance encounters with students and independent researchers, the event fostered the kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. In a field that constantly faces new and unconventional threats, this exposure to alternative approaches and adversarial thinking sharpens our ability to anticipate what’s next.
Partnerships that Expand Analytic Perspective
Innovation in national security analytics depends not just on technology, but on people—on shared purpose, outside perspective, and real collaboration. At 3GIMBALS, partnerships with academic institutions and private sector leaders have become an essential part of how we refine methods, challenge assumptions, and scale insight. These collaborations do more than extend capacity; they help keep our tradecraft honest, iterative, and grounded in the operational problems we’re collectively trying to solve.
Clemson University: Bridging the Gap Between Tradecraft and Talent
Our long-standing collaboration with Clemson University reflects what’s possible when academic expertise and national security missions align. Through the Media Forensics Hub, students and faculty work alongside 3GIMBALS analysts on real-world problem sets—investigating information operations, building toolkits to track coordinated inauthentic behavior, and prototyping analytic techniques that blend geospatial forensics with open-source signals.
This partnership isn’t theoretical. It has produced insights that have been briefed at events like GEOINT and DEF CON, where Clemson-supported research helped reveal timestamp manipulation patterns used in Russian campaigns. These efforts weren’t just novel—they provided operational value. In one instance, analysts used timezone discrepancies in WordPress metadata to geolocate campaign origin to Moscow Standard Time, strengthening attribution and deepening understanding of adversary techniques.
Clemson’s impact also extends beyond research into talent development. By sponsoring Clemson students to participate in professional events and competitions, we’re investing in a future workforce that understands both the promise and the pressure of mission-driven intelligence. These students aren’t just watching innovation happen—they’re helping shape it.
Florida International University: Operationalizing Unclassified Intelligence
FIU’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy has emerged as a crucial partner in helping develop open-source tools that support SOUTHCOM’s regional mission. Through its student-driven Security Research Hub, FIU has delivered dashboards that monitor Chinese investments in Latin America, map illegal maritime activity, and visualize critical mineral supply chain vulnerabilities—all in unclassified, shareable formats designed for coordination across borders and agencies.
This model—bridging academic inquiry with mission requirements—offers a glimpse of what’s possible when universities move beyond traditional research roles and engage directly with operational communities. The Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing Dashboard, for instance, has become a resource for regional enforcement and intergovernmental partners. Similarly, research on migration flows through the Darién Gap and Chinese involvement in Latin American infrastructure has informed both analytic workflows and policy discussions.
3GIMBALS’ collaboration with FIU underscores a broader shift: the recognition that unclassified intelligence, when built right, can move faster, reach farther, and connect more stakeholders than legacy models ever could.
CrowdAI: Merging Computer Vision with Data Fusion
On the industry side, our formal partnership with CrowdAI brings the power of no-code computer vision into the heart of mission analytics. During the Trident Spectre exercise—one of Naval Special Warfare’s premier technology proving grounds—3GIMBALS and CrowdAI deployed models that combined full-motion video, satellite imagery, and open-source signals to enable automated tipping and cueing of significant activity.
The value of this collaboration wasn’t just in the speed of deployment. It was in how it freed analysts to focus on synthesis, not just collection. With CrowdAI handling the detection layer, 3GIMBALS teams could concentrate on identifying patterns, correlating across domains, and producing insights that supported special operations forces on the ground. In an era of data deluge, partnerships like these are essential to scaling analytic throughput without compromising depth or context.
Emerging Approaches in Analytic Innovation at 3GIMBALS
Our emerging tools and models don’t just respond to shifting analytic needs—they’re built on the kinds of interactions that surface those needs in the first place. From field conversations to academic exchanges, the real-world tensions in our work constantly inform how we build, iterate, and refine.
Developing better answers starts with asking better questions—and having the technical infrastructure to explore them in real time. At 3GIMBALS, our core solutions and analytic models are designed not around static products, but around adaptability: the ability to take on new problem sets, integrate unfamiliar data, and surface insight fast enough to shape outcomes. The tools we’ve built, including OMEN™ and our GraphRAG knowledge architecture, aren’t simply technical achievements—they are living expressions of a tradecraft shaped by real-world needs.
OMEN™: Turning Unstructured Data into Operational Insight
OMEN™ is our flagship analytic fusion solution, developed to meet the challenge of scale, speed, and shareability. It combines multi-sensor, multi-lingual, and multi-domain data to generate unclassified insights that inform decision-making across government, defense, and partner nation operations. From combat support in Ukraine to tracking Chinese port investments in the Pacific, OMEN™ enables analysts to move beyond single-source stovepipes and toward integrated, geospatially grounded analysis.
What sets OMEN™ apart isn’t just the data it touches—it’s the ways in which it fuses and visualizes time and space relationships, offering analysts the ability to track adversary networks, identify critical nodes, and recommend actions with confidence. Built on an open, modular architecture, OMEN™ is used to support missions ranging from sanctions enforcement to maritime awareness to countering malign influence—always with a focus on contextual precision and operational utility.
GraphRAG: Explainable AI for High-Stakes Analysis
As generative AI tools proliferate across the national security landscape, the need for explainability and provenance becomes more urgent. That’s where our GraphRAG system comes in. By fusing traditional knowledge graph structures with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), we’ve created a capability that grounds AI outputs in structured, verifiable data—ensuring analysts and decision-makers can see not only the answer, but how the system arrived at it.
Unlike black-box models, GraphRAG enables users to trace insights back to entity-level relationships, timestamps, and sources. It’s a design philosophy that prioritizes trust, auditability, and relevance, all without sacrificing speed. Whether used in courtroom-ready workflows or in dynamic field environments, GraphRAG ensures the logic behind an insight is as strong as the output itself. In today’s high-consequence environments, that transparency isn’t optional—it’s required.
Cyber + GEOINT Integration: Crossing Domains for Better Targeting
We’ve also pushed analytic innovation forward by collapsing the boundary between cyber and geospatial analysis. Our cyber team’s investigation into Russian APT activity, presented at GEOINT and DEF CON, is a clear example. By fusing infrastructure telemetry with location-based intelligence, our analysts identified unexpected geographic patterns in Sandworm’s command-and-control architecture—challenging conventional assumptions and leading to more accurate threat attribution.
This cross-domain approach reflects a broader truth: the best insights often come at the seams between disciplines. By integrating different data types, methodologies, and analytic languages, we build a more complete picture of adversary intent and behavior—one that supports both strategic policy and tactical action.
Expanding Innovation through Dialogue and Design
The insights gained through professional forums and partnerships don’t exist in isolation—they directly inform how we design, refine, and deploy our analytic capabilities. Whether it’s a field conversation at SOF Week, a classroom collaboration at Clemson, or a technical exchange with CrowdAI, these interactions shape the tradecraft that powers our work. At 3GIMBALS, we’ve internalized that feedback loop, using it to guide the development of technologies and methodologies that reflect the complexity and urgency of today’s mission environments.
We also explore these dynamics through Navigating in Balance, our podcast that brings together forward-leaning leaders across government, academia, and industry to discuss how innovation, strategy, and security intersect in a rapidly evolving global landscape. From illicit maritime activity and supply chain vulnerabilities to counterintelligence tradecraft and mapping adversarial influence, the podcast reflects the same curiosity and operational mindset that drives our analytic development—always grounded in the real-world challenges our partners face.
The Future of Analytic Innovation in National Security
For all the energy we put into building tools and methods, the real test of analytic innovation is whether it adapts alongside national security challenges. The environments our partners operate in—kinetic, political, informational—are evolving faster than any static system can track. That’s why we view our work not as a set of finished products, but as an ongoing process of refinement, recalibration, and reinvention—driven by real-world use.
The long-term contracts we’ve been awarded by U.S. government partners—like our seat on NGA’s GEO-SPI B IDIQ and our work supporting crisis insights in Europe—are less about procurement than partnership. They reflect a shared understanding: that solving today’s challenges requires capabilities that are agile, scalable, and field-tested. These contracts don’t just enable delivery—they create the space for continued R&D, operational feedback loops, and cross-agency collaboration that sharpen both our tools and our thinking.
Through these vehicles, 3GIMBALS continues to push forward the kind of tradecraft we believe the moment demands—open by design, explainable by necessity, and structured to support human decision-making when it matters most. As threats grow more multidimensional and timeframes for response shrink, our responsibility is to remain not just responsive, but anticipatory.
That future doesn’t come from a single breakthrough or dataset. It comes from staying embedded—in the community, in the mission, and in the work of iterating toward clarity. Whether we’re prototyping new AI models, analyzing shifting global alliances, or engaging in a conversation on Navigating in Balance, our approach remains grounded in this principle: the best innovations scale insight without sacrificing context.
