GEOINT Certification Accessibility Analysis

Introduction

Across the military components within the United States armed services, active-duty military personnel, particularly those assigned to intelligence occupational fields, all have professional sustainment and advancement standards within their assigned tradecraft areas. For the Marine Corps GEOINT community, professionalization is closely tied to the GEOINT Professional Certification (GPC) program GEOINT Professional Certification, n.d.). The GPC program is tailored to align with broader National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) standards, higher echelon mandates and requirements, and support broader Intelligence Community (IC) initiatives. (10 U.S.C. § 442, 2008; EO 12333, 1981; ODNI, n.d.; GEOINT Functional Manager, 2018; ICD, 2008).

Given the mandate to obtain GPC credentials for approximately 750 personnel, this project evaluates the geographical posture of the Marine Corps GEOINT workforce's access to GPC testing opportunities. By comparing personnel locations with available testing sites, the analysis identifies areas with sufficient access and those where personnel may face geographic barriers to certification. The project offers insights into methods to aid talent managers in considering how to generate opportunities to evaluate duty-station locations or implement policy changes to address identified issues arising from the project study.

Data Description

The study region for this project is globally distributed, as service members are stationed in both domestic and international assignments. Additionally, GPC testing is offered globally at various IC-supporting installations.

The project utilized two primary datasets to support the analysis. The first dataset consisted of the Marine Corps GEOINT manpower database, originally developed in GEOG655, which contained 731 records of personnel locations and workforce attribution information. The second dataset consisted of raw tabular data derived from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GEOINT Professional Certification Program Handbook (GEOINT Professional Certification Program Handbook, 2025), which identified 64 approved GPC testing-site locations and the examinations available at each site.

Several preprocessing and validation steps were required before analysis could occur. The GPC testing-site dataset required manual verification due to limitations in military installation addresses and geocoding, including non-standard naming conventions, approximate installation references, or incomplete location descriptions that did not geocode consistently using automated methods. In several cases, the installation names listed in the handbook did not reflect current naming conventions due to ongoing government renaming efforts. For example, Fort Benning was still listed under its previous designation, Fort Moore, requiring careful individual verification of each site. Additionally, several testing locations only identified a city and state, requiring manual interpretation and selection of the corresponding installation or agency location for inclusion in the analysis. Due to the nature of military installations and access restrictions, many testing-site coordinates were intentionally represented using approximate installation-centric locations rather than exact building-level positions. As a result, the same intentional vagueness was carried over into the project analysis.

Administrative boundary layers used for regional reference were derived from the open-source geoBoundaries dataset (Runfola et al., 2020). These layers were used to associate manpower locations with country and state/province regions during spatial analysis. The administrative layers used in the initial analysis and data processing were not used in the final website, as they did not directly support the resulting analysis.

Given the project relied on distance-based proximity analysis, all datasets were initially reprojected to EPSG:4087, a global equidistant projection system suitable for metric spatial buffering and distance calculations (epsg.io, n.d.; QGIS Documentation, 2026). The use of a global equidistant projection reduced the complexity associated with managing multiple local coordinate systems across globally distributed datasets while still providing sufficient spatial accuracy for evaluating generalized testing accessibility. Since both manpower and testing-site locations represented approximate access areas rather than exact travel origins and destinations, the project focused on identifying broader geographic outliers and personnel populations located outside reasonable access thresholds, rather than highly precise transportation measurements.

Methodology

The primary analytical assumption of the project was that personnel located within 50 miles of a GPC testing site had reasonable geographic access to certification opportunities. Buffer polygons representing the acceptable access threshold were generated around testing-site locations and used to identify personnel located within or outside the defined range. Spatial intersection queries and joins were then used to determine personnel accessibility relative to testing sites and associate manpower locations with administrative boundary regions.

The project relied entirely on an open-source GIS workflow to transform raw tabular workforce and testing-site data into a web-based spatial analysis application. The analysis utilized PostgreSQL/PostGIS, QGIS, GeoServer, and a web application to process, analyze, publish, and visualize GEOINT workforce accessibility relative to GEOINT Professional Certification (GPC) testing resources.

The source manpower data for evaluation, derived from GEOG655, were imported into PostgreSQL/PostGIS to support analysis related to GPC testing-site accessibility. Tabular testing-site information detailed in the data description section was geocoded and converted into spatial point features for analysis against manpower locations. QGIS was used throughout the project to validate spatial outputs, transform between projections, organize layers, and support cartographic development prior to web publication.

Additional analytical views were developed within PostgreSQL to support repeatable spatial analysis and web publication. These views included fields indicating whether personnel were within the acceptable GPC testing-access range, as well as the nearest testing location for each manpower record. The resulting analytical layers supported queries related to workforce distribution, testing accessibility, and regional personnel concentrations statistics.

Following completion of the spatial analysis, all datasets were reprojected to the WGS84 geographic coordinate system (EPSG:4326) to ensure compatibility with GeoServer web services and browser-based visualization. GeoServer was then used to publish the processed datasets as WFS web services for use in the web-based visualization.

The final web application was developed using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Leaflet to create an interactive browser-based visualization. The site design applied web GIS strategies and development techniques introduced in previous coursework, including spatial data retrieval from GeoServer WFS services, map rendering, layer controls, feature popups, search functionality, summary statistics, and CSV export tools.

Results and Findings

The project analysis identified that 663 personnel were within the acceptable access threshold of a GPC testing site, while 67 were outside the suitable access range. Personnel outside the threshold accounted for approximately 10% of the evaluated GEOINT workforce. Preliminary review of the results indicates that most personnel currently maintain reasonable geographic access to certification testing opportunities, while a smaller subset of the force remains geographically disadvantaged relative to available testing infrastructure. However, given that both personnel and testing sites were derived from approximate locations and the suitable threshold was determined based on an arbitrary distance, actual acceptable considerations may vary on an individual basis, and the results merely indicate overall trends within the project.

Analysis of personnel located outside the acceptable testing access range identified that the majority were in the E-4 through E-6 ranks. This population accounted for 60 of the 67 personnel outside the access threshold, representing 90% of the geographically restricted workforce. This finding suggests that accessibility challenges disproportionately affect junior and mid-grade enlisted personnel. However, this is expected, as Marines are often involuntarily selected to serve in temporary duty billets (e.g., Drill Instructors, Recruiters, Embassy duty) at these ranks, and it is consistent with common Marine Corps trends. While the result is expected, another consideration regarding Marines in this range also supports critical technical and operational assignments associated with day-to-day GEOINT mission execution. This would be true for Marines returning from tours in temporary duty billets who need to effectively reassimilate into technically demanding GEOINT roles and responsibilities.

The analysis also identified several installation locations where accessibility limitations were concentrated. The three largest personnel concentrations outside the acceptable testing range were located at Twentynine Palms, California (21 personnel), Parris Island, South Carolina (9 personnel), and Beaufort, South Carolina (8 personnel). Together, these three locations represented approximately 57% of all personnel identified outside the acceptable testing-access threshold. These findings indicate that a relatively small number of geographic locations account for a majority of the identified accessibility gap and may provide opportunities for targeted testing support or future workforce management considerations.

Additional nearest-site analysis identified common testing locations associated with personnel outside the acceptable access range. Camp Pendleton, California, was identified as the nearest testing site for 21 personnel, while Fort Stewart, Georgia, accounted for 17 personnel, and Fort Hood, Texas, accounted for 8 personnel. Collectively, these three testing locations represented the nearest available sites for 46 personnel, or 69% of the personnel population outside the defined accessibility threshold.

Overall, the analysis demonstrated that geographic accessibility to GPC testing resources is generally available for most of the Marine Corps GEOINT workforce, while a small, but not insignificant population remains outside reasonable access to GPC testing sites. The results provide potential talent managers, supervisors, and decision-makers with informed insight into where certification support, travel coordination, mobile testing opportunities, or future testing-site considerations should be prioritized to reduce barriers to GEOINT professionalization and workforce development.

Conclusions

This project demonstrated that open-source GIS tools and workflows provide a capable and effective alternative for solving real-world spatial analysis problems. By integrating PostgreSQL, QGIS, GeoServer, and web-based technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, the project successfully transformed raw workforce and testing-site data into an interactive spatial analysis application capable of supporting GEOINT workforce accessibility evaluation.

While enterprise GIS ecosystems such as the Esri ArcGIS Enterprise suite offer many similar capabilities through streamlined workflows and broader enterprise-level technical support, the open-source workflow demonstrated significant advantages in flexibility, customization, and especially cost. The project highlighted that open-source GIS environments may require greater technical understanding and manual integration across platforms, but they also offer greater control over database architecture, analytical processing, web service publication, and browser-based visualization design.

Beyond the technical implementation, the project demonstrated how spatial analysis can support workforce development and professionalization efforts by identifying geographic disparities in access to GEOINT Professional Certification resources. The resulting analysis and web application provide a framework that can support future talent-management considerations, certification planning, and broader decision-making related to GEOINT workforce sustainment and professional development.

References

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