Michele Weslander

Trailblazer

Michele Weslander is blazing trails where few women have gone before. As Deputy Technical Executive of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), she is currently one of the top women involved in national security, and one of the youngest people—male or female—ever appointed a senior executive in the U.S. government. Her career track record shows a history of industry and government appointments as the “youngest ever” to serve in what have often been “first ever” executive level positions.

“I attribute this to being a visionary with the ability to work with people and take the initiative and responsibility follow through on implementing that vision—someone who is not bound by the way things are today, but has a vision for how they could be,” says Weslander. “As an agent for positive change, I see the art of the possible and ask, ‘why not?’ This energizes me, and I find it both exciting and fulfilling to take that vision of the future and help to make it a reality…to go where no one has gone before, and looking back, to see that we are better for it.”

As the Deputy Technical Executive of NGA, she is a member of the Executive Committee working for the director on his staff with purview across the agency. Weslander spearheads one of the major tenets of the Director’s Strategic Intent, serving as the visionary champion and operational expert for implementing multi-discipline intelligence (Multi-INT) collaboration and horizontal integration across the National Security Enterprise. The Technical Executive charter includes cultural transformation, leadership development, rapid innovation and technology insertion, technical assistance to the military and deployed personnel, and advocacy for projects of strategic importance to the agency and the broader National System for Geospatial-Intelligence.

The road to her current position held plenty of challenges stemming from other people’s perceptions of her as young woman in the traditionally male-dominated field of science and engineering. “But I am encouraged to see more and more women pursuing these careers,” she says. “As the saying goes, whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good; that was the case when I was in college and when I entered the workforce, and though there has been progress towards equal treatment, there is still more progress to be made.” Weslander has also been told that she is too young for her rank.

Even so, she is widely recognized for her expertise and achievements in the area of Multi-INT collaboration and information sharing among the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community agencies. A few years prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Weslander was part of a grassroots effort that saw the potential value of collaboration and information sharing, and who worked to promote the practice as standard operating procedure. “We first worked to connect the intelligence disciplines of imagery and signals—America’s ‘eyes and ears’—together via collaborative capabilities on a common network. Then we expanded that to members of military, and demonstrated how having all of the key players in a collaborative environment helped to expedite processes and facilitate more informed decision making through a shared situational awareness. We demonstrated that ‘live’ via an exercise in 2000, for which the team was awarded the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation,” she says.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, many realized the potential power of that capability for war fighting and tracking terrorists. Weslander was asked to brief many senior government officials, in hopes of gaining their support and removing the obstacles to information sharing and collaboration. On June 11, 2002, she briefed the Directors of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA, now NGA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) regarding these collaborative operations and the need for the two of them to take the lead in tearing down the bureaucratic impediments. Four weeks later, she was asked to join the government executive ranks at NIMA and be the Director’s lead for Multi-INT collaboration.

 “This has not been easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it is rewarding to me because it is something I believe in,” says Weslander. “Have we come as far as I would have liked as fast as I would have liked? No. But I must remind myself, and others who have joined me in this cause, that every once in a while we have to stop, look back, and see how far we have come, for it is then that you truly realize how much progress we have made. We are doing things today that some believed were impossible.”