Throughout July, we’ve been celebrating 50 years since the creation of the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), a predecessor organization to NGA. Military mapping, charting, and geodesy have a long history. Until the creation of the DMA, the armed services pursued these activities independently, resulting in duplicated effort and unnecessary expense. For these reasons, the President’s Blue-Ribbon Defense Panel recommended creating one agency to handle these functions for all the services and other U.S