St. Louis stands to benefit from $5 million in additional federal defense funding aimed at supporting the region's geospatial workforce, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt said Monday.
Schmitt announced the National Geospatial Innovation Hub Advancement Act at a roundtable meeting with defense and intelligence officials at the T-Rex co-working space in downtown St. Louis.
“[In St. Louis], we have a tendency to look backwards and lament losses, things that went away, or talk about the 1904 World's Fair. It was great. The Olympics were here. That was great,” he said. “But there's a lot of opportunities. ... We have an opportunity to make, I think St Louis, the defense tech capital of the United States.”
The act, included in the 2025 defense funding bill, has cleared the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees, a spokesman for Schmitt said.
The senator is confident that means the act, which funds the educational initiative for five years, will receive full congressional approval.
Military personnel, airports, local governments and other professionals use geospatial renderings of Earth for mapping, defense and planning. Employees are needed to depict and analyze those renderings.
The act is authorized and funded and will be administered through the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s St. Louis location, NGA West. The Department of Defense would use the money to work with local universities and private organizations including the Taylor Geospatial Institute to develop geospatial training skills that meet current needs of the defense industry, Schmitt said.
The NGA is building a large-scale $1.7 billion facility just north of downtown at Jefferson and Cass avenues to house its more than 3,000 St. Louis-based employees. The current location is near the Anheuser-Busch brewery.
There’s more geospatial data than ever before, thanks to private commercial satellite imagery, NGA West Executive Bill Caniano said. More people are needed.
“The issue is the proliferation of imagery,” he said. “The amount of images we get is exploding.”
Artificial intelligence can assist in analyzing that data, said John Donovan, program manager at Boeing Intelligence and Analytics. Supporting a workforce that’s fluent in tech and AI could also grow the region’s economy.
“I think there is a real strong argument for putting those jobs supporting those key AI applications here in St Louis,” he said. “One of the big challenges we have with staffing those AI programs in the capital region is you're also competing with other agencies ... [and] competing against the likes of Amazon and Google.
“I think it does make a lot of sense to advocate to have that work performed here with the geospatial group and efforts,” Donovan said.
For the workforce to grow, students need to know what geographic information systems engineers do at an early age, said Brian Monheiser, founder of GEO 261, a St. Louis-based geospatial information firm.
Most people don’t grow up wanting to work in geospatial intelligence, he said. Exposing students to the field early could grow interest in the field.
“I think we also need to demystify that you have to be some sort of STEM savant in order to get in,” he said. “Lots of kids look at science and math, and I'm not good at that, so I don't belong in that.”
Roundtable participants also brought up that local organizations should build institutional knowledge to faster complete contracts and focus on recruiting people from all levels of expertise, not just entry-level jobs.
