By Theresa Hitchens, Vice President, Center for Defense Information

Presentation to a conference,
“U.S. Space Operations in the International Context”

Feb. 24, 2004

Sponsored by: The U.S. Army’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Security Series and the Eisenhower Institute, Washington, D.C.       

First, I’d like to thank Susan and the Eisenhower Institute for inviting me to participate today. The topics we are discussing are critical to ensuring the continued secure use of space, whether by commercial, civil or military operators.

I’ve been asked to address what has to be one of the most vexing issues facing national security planners in the space arena: the increased availability of high-resolution imagery. Taking pictures of the Earth from space is not new: the U.S. launched its first classified military reconnaissance satellite, CORONA, in 1960; and by 1972, the U.S. intelligence community and military planners had access to images with a two-meter resolution. But in the 1980s and 1990s, space spy-cams came out from the cold. French firm Spot Image launched its first satellite, Spot 1, in 1986.  Although Spot 1’s imagery resolution was not nearly as good as that of the  spy satellites; it wasn’t much more than a decade later that Space Imaging Corp. launched the first U.S. commercial imaging satellite, IKONOS, with a resolution of about one meter. To give you an idea of what that means, a one-meter resolution image allows users to tell the difference between cars and trucks.  Today, companies from the United States, France, Russia, India, China, Japan and Israel all have commercial imaging satellites on orbit, several already providing less than one-meter images through improved technology techniques. A number of other countries, including Turkey, South Africa and the six-nation the Gulf Cooperation Council, are planning on obtaining their own imaging satellites over the next decade.

The boom in commercially available satellite images has both inherent benefits and risks for U.S. national security planners.

Since 1996, under the national space policy signed by President Bill Clinton, the U.S. government has been committed to using commercial imagery satellites to augment its capabilities, save money and help ensure the health of the domestic industry.

Support for commercial providers was reiterated and strengthened in April 2003 by President George W. Bush in a new policy specifically on commercial remote sensing. The goal of the Bush effort was: “to advance and protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by maintaining the nation’s leadership in remote sensing space activities, and by sustaining and enhancing the U.S. remote sensing industry.” Therefore, the new policy calls on all U.S. government agencies to rely, “to the maximum practical extent,” on U.S. commercial capabilities for “filling imagery and geospatial needs for military, intelligence, foreign policy, homeland security and civil users.”

NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency – now renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency – was charged as a clearinghouse for purchasing all commercial imagery to be used by government agencies, including the Defense Department. While most of the images are bought from two U.S. providers, Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe, some (around 3 percent) is obtained from non-U.S. firms to fill in the gaps.

For the U.S. government, the goal is not only one of industrial policy. The super-secret National Reconnaissance Office’s spy satellite program has suffered from high costs and delayed schedules. In addition, in wartime, limited government imaging assets were over-tasked with the high demand – indeed, the mismatch of demand to supply is a situation that today holds for almost all U.S. military uses of satellites. Commercial providers also often can get images out more quickly to users: in part because there is less red tape. Finally, the U.S. military can more easily share unclassified commercial imagery with coalition allies, or for that matter, the media.  Simply put, the U.S. military and intelligence community need commercially available imagery to do their jobs in today’s wired world.

But while the increased availability has had, and will have, significant benefits for the U.S. national security community, the proliferation of high-resolution imagery also presents potential threats.

 It should be obvious that the ability of U.S. enemies during wartime -- or terrorists at any time -- to obtain high-resolution pictures of U.S. facilities or troops on the battlefield during a conflict would most likely be dangerous.  U.S. Army commanders have long insisted that if Saddam Hussein had had access to good satellite images in Desert Storm, the famous “left hook” maneuver would never have been possible. One must caveat, however, that satellite images in the wrong hands could certainly be used to do harm, it is not that simple to just buy a one-meter picture of something and be able to immediately act on that image. Interpreting satellite images is something of art, and requires highly trained people, as well as high-tech gear to download and manipulate the satellite data. Terrorists, to be honest, might be better off with simple, but up-to-date, city maps.  Nonetheless, it is undeniable that a number of countries and militaries are increasingly able to receive and use satellite imagery – not all of those countries necessarily with U.S. or allied interests at heart.  Nor do U.S. planners necessarily even know who is receiving what.

For example, Imagesat Corporation, based in Limassol, Cyprus, but using the Israeli-built (and partially owned by Israeli companies that in turn are partially owned by the Israeli government) satellite Eros A1, boasts that one of its competitive advantages is that it sells the exclusive right to directly task a satellite camera and download the imagery data to a customer in complete secrecy, without even the company knowing what “targets” are being viewed by whom.  Imagesat already can offer below one-meter resolution images for some purposes, and is planning to shortly launch a new, improved-resolution satellite.

This potential for commercial imagery to do damage to U.S. national security has not gone unnoticed by U.S. government officials; however, as of yet it seems that policy regarding how to address the problem has not yet been fully agreed or articulated.  The U.S. government long has included in licenses for commercial providers both export control restrictions (i.e. selling to certain countries or parties is banned) and the right to shut down satellite operations for national security reasons, a practice widely known as “shutter control.”  But true shutter control has never actually been implemented, for a number of reasons.  For one thing, if satellite operations are shut down over an area – then even the U.S. military would not be receiving those commercial, unclassified pictures – which might actually hamper military operations if coalition partners are involved, as well as any propaganda efforts by the Pentagon.  Further, even if the U.S. government were to pay commercial firms for imposing shutter control, the very fact that Washington had shut down operations would certainly harm U.S. companies in their future marketing efforts, branding them as possibly unreliable suppliers. (This argument has been used with success by the European countries pushing the development of the Galileo satellite navigation network as a competitor to the U.S. Global Positioning System.) 

Therefore, up to now, the U.S. government instead has chosen to use other, less drastic methods of “shutter control”– from persuasion (or pressure, if you will)  to buyouts – to prevent imagery considered of concern from being released by commercial firms.  These efforts have had somewhat mixed success.

One of the first efforts at a lesser form of “shutter control” was “resolution control” – that is preventing U.S. firms from selling images with less than a certain resolution. Such restrictions were put in place in the Clinton space policy.  One of the more interesting cases had to do not with U.S. fears, but those of Israel.  Congress in 1996 passed an amendment which prohibited the sale by U.S. firms of images of Israeli territory with less than a two-meter resolution.  This followed an effort by Saudi Arabia to buy a U.S.-made satellite for imaging the Middle East. When the United States later, in 1998, freed up general sales of images down to one-meter, Israel protested and the exception for coverage of Israel (no less than two meters) remains in place.

Most recently, as is well known, during Operation Enduring Freedom, NIMA bought exclusive rights to all images over Afghanistan from Space Image’s Ikonos, primarily to keep pictures of the operations out of the hands of the news media. In addition, the Bush administration was able to convince the French Defense Ministry to ban sales of Spot images over Afghanistan. 

What might not be as well known is that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Defense had attempted to shut down commercial imaging operations over many more geographic hot spots – but the request was deemed to broad to be legal.[1]

Another thing that may not be as well known is that Israel continued to allow the sales of 1.8-meter imagery over Afghanistan by Imagesat (as noted above, a company that boasts about protecting its customers’ identities) – despite the earlier U.S. efforts to accommodate Tel Aviv’s concerns about imagery availability.

The Pentagon took another tack in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Instead of attempting to apply shutter control, DoD invited journalists to be “embedded” with the troops – thus perhaps co-opting what images might be used.  In addition, DoD did ask U.S. commercial providers not to sell imagery to certain parties.  Indeed, a senior administration official was quoted by USA Today in May 2003 as saying that during the Iraq war, satellite firms had acted as “good citizens,” restricting sales that might have been damaging to military operations and providing timely images to the Pentagon.[2]

In future, it may well not be as easy for the U.S. government to find ways to block the transfer of commercial imagery to enemies during wartime, much less to potential enemies during peacetime – particularly considering that some 20 nations now have or are pursuing such capabilities.  It is for this reason that the U.S. Air Force is now moving forward with a number of weapon programs designed to jam, disable or destroy imaging satellites to augment traditional methods such as bombing ground receiving stations.  In the near term, the Air Force is hoping to field the Counter Surveillance and Reconnaissance System (CSRS) by 2010, which is designed to jam imagery satellite signals from the ground.  More disturbingly, the new Air Force Transformation Flight Plan (dated November 2003) foresees an array of anti-satellite capabilities. These include an air-launched missile for hitting sats in LEO; a space-based radar frequency weapon; and ground- and space-based lasers.

With the exception of CSRS, most of these anti-satellite capabilities are still on the drawing boards, projected to be available at 2015 at the earliest. At best, (although this is difficult to say for sure given the opaqueness of the Air Force space budget), technology research is now being funded.

Still, the prospect of the United States becoming the first nation to openly develop and deploy an arsenal of ASAT weapons, including dangerous, debris-creating kinetic energy systems and systems based on-orbit, is not one that U.S. policy-makers have really yet considered.  It may be that, given the costs vs. the risks of such a strategy, the U.S. government may find that despite their difficulties, shutter control and diplomatic persuasion (or perhaps even deception techniques, in that satellite images can be remotely tampered with) are the better routes.  Unfortunately, that critical debate has not yet been broached by the U.S. Congress and administration policy-makers. It is my hope that conferences such as this are able to help kick start that necessary process.