As a combat support agency for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) has centers across the country to provide support to the DoD and U.S. military personnel around the world.
Support to military service members has evolved over the years, and NSA has adapted its footprint geographically across the U.S.—Georgia, Texas, Colorado, and Hawaii—to ensure the ability to deliver critical intelligence support to our warfighters.
While NSA’s U.S. locations outside of headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland are now referred to as Cryptologic Centers (CCs), their history dates back decades and each has a unique mission in addition to providing support to military operations.
Cryptologic Field Sites
When the Soviet Union dissolved, it uprooted NSA’s primary foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) mission and the people and infrastructure that supported it—leaving thousands of military cryptologists without work to do or a place to go. NSA and Service Cryptologic leadership believed that if cryptology was lost as a military career field, it would never come back.
Where would these cryptologists go? Would their expertise be utilized in some capacity? Would there be a need for new ones to be trained?
By 1994, the number of U.S. cryptologic field sites dropped to 38, the lowest number since 1951. Many of these Cold War fixed collection sites were both dated in concept and increasingly obsolete in their orientation. While the U.S. Army was the most severely affected—down to just three field sites in 1994—the Navy and Air Force also saw a decline in sites.
Regional SIGINT Operations Centers (RSOCs)
According to Bill Black, former NSA Deputy Director, the idea of RSOCs had been around since the time of Admiral Studeman, former Director of NSA, but the concept gained traction under Admiral McConnell who served as NSA Director from 1992-1996. The RSOCs were created not only to preserve cryptology as a military career field, but to provide direct support to military operations based on three principles: establish a bridge between national assets and tactical warfighters; provide near real-time indications and warning and force protection to the warfighter; and provide time-critical SIGINT to military commanders.
The RSOCs were established and activated in 1995, with each center led by a different branch of the military: the Air Force in Texas, Navy in Hawaii, and Army in Georgia.
Four years after the RSOCs had stood up and established operations, they’d also begun to attract scrutiny from NSA’s Congressional oversight. At the time, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), and the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) all expressed concerns about the operating costs associated with the RSOCs. To address these concerns, the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection was appointed to conduct a study of the RSOCs. He visited the three RSOCs that existed at the time in Texas, Georgia, and Hawaii— concluding that the RSOCs were an integral part of the U.S. cryptologic system. While the report was positive overall, it noted that the RSOCs, “must keep pace with the telecommunications revolution if their future is to be assured.” The report issued 10 judgments, among them that NSA develop an overarching strategic plan and vision for the RSOCs, including updating facilities to allow for growth.
Cryptologic Centers (CCs)
Several events led to the RSOCs being renamed Cryptologic Centers in 2005, most notably a three-day network outage in early 2000, the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the Global War on Terrorism that followed. These events brought a well-known issue at NSA into focus—NSA/CSS Washington (NSAW), headquartered on Fort Meade, Maryland, was both a target and an enormous single point of failure in the U.S. SIGINT system. The network outage revealed that the management of NSA’s IT infrastructure could not keep pace with the evolving field of telecommunications and networks at the time, and more resources were needed to ensure something like this would not happen again.
Following the events of 9/11, survivability and mission assurance were now at the forefront like never before, and these fit with former NSA Director Lt Gen Michael Hayden’s vision for a global, networked cryptologic enterprise. Having geographically dispersed centers that could independently produce foreign SIGINT and support military operations allowed for missions to move away from the NSAW area, ensuring continuity of operations in the event of war, natural disaster, or any other circumstance.
There are currently four Cryptologic Centers:
- NSA/CSS Texas (NSAT), located in San Antonio, TX;
- NSA/CSS Hawaii (NSAH), located on the island of Oahu;
- NSA/CSS Georgia (NSAG), located on Fort Eisenhower in Augusta, GA; and
- NSA/CSS Colorado (NSAC), located on Buckley Space Force Base outside of Denver, CO.
With the exception of NSAC, each Cryptologic Center is led by a military commander and is jointly staffed by both a multi-service military and civilian workforce. While each has grown to capture more of NSA’s corporate functions, the CCs still have their own unique missions and fulfill their original purpose as centers for military cryptology capable of providing direct support to military operations.
Visit NSA.gov/Locations for more information about NSA’s Cryptologic Centers and NSA.gov/Mission-Combat-Support to learn more about how the Agency supports military service members around the world.