Oct 25, 2023. Posted by Balkan Periscope - Hellas
In today’s pop-culture-driven world, most people tend to think the American
Defense and Intelligence apparatus has spy satellites silently monitoring every
square inch of the globe, collecting data from on high to take out threats to
American sovereignty or interests as they emerge.
by Alex Hollings
Of course, despite how pervasive this belief is, news stories regularly
refute the premise, with the Marine Corps losing a crashed F-35 in South
Carolina for nearly 24 hours last month, and Hamas managing to launch a
large and well-organized surprise attack against Israel in just the past few
weeks.
The truth
is, despite the incredible intelligence value spy satellites can offer, they
are also extremely limited. Today’s spy satellites are exceedingly predictable,
and are often relegated to their orbital paths. They are also vulnerable to a
variety of ground and space-based attacks – all of which can limit their
efficacy in supporting any sort of operation against a near-peer opponent.
THE MYTH OF
CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE
The notion
that spy satellites can meet all of America’s intelligence-gathering needs may
be the result of a combination of the popular culture of recent decades (see
1998’s Enemy of the State film) and world-renowned intelligence
agencies not going out of their way to dispel rumors about their alleged
capabilities. This topic even came up in a discussion held last year on an
episode of the Modern Warfare Institute’s Irregular
Warfare podcast
between Dr. James Kiras, a professor of Strategy and Security Studies at the
U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS), and former
SOCOM commander, Retired Lieutenant General Thomas Trask.
“Unfortunately,
public perception is driven sometimes by news coverage, but also by modern
movies,” Dr. Kiras said about partner forces. “And the idea that somehow we
can’t maintain persistent coverage, that a cloud – for example – moving between
you and a target could allow you to lose coverage for a critical period just
seems completely inconceivable to them.”
That lead
does give Uncle Sam the leg-up in terms of total satellites, but even if every
one of them was similarly equipped to gather useful photographic intelligence
of the surface of the Earth (which they are not), it would mean every U.S.
government satellite would be responsible for keeping tabs on more than 406,000
square miles of the globe. Even with the most advanced 21st-century sensors at
their disposal, that simply wouldn’t be possible… but to make matters worse,
satellites almost never have the most advanced technology onboard by
the time they reach orbit.
America’s
most capable spy satellites tend to be large, billion-dollar platforms that
often take as long as a decade to go from design to orbit.
These exceedingly expensive systems need to function for years on end, which
requires a great deal of resilience and reliability, both things that are not a
given when it comes to fielding advanced technology. As a result, spy satellite
designs incorporate the latest proven systems of their day – often made up
of technology that’s been around long enough to be proven – before
progressing through another decade of design and development work leading up to
launch.
By the day
of the launch, the systems onboard could be considered pretty dated as compared
to the latest and greatest tech available. This is a problem the United States
has been working on for years with programs like Blackjack and later, Tranche 0 – both efforts aimed at
rapidly fielding an array of lower-cost satellites to support combat
operations. While these and similar efforts do have promise, even at their
best, these constellations of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites would not be
able to blanket the world in coverage.
Other
efforts, like the U.S. Space Force’s X-37B reusable space plane, can offset
these timeline issues by landing and having a more modern payload swapped in
before launching the platform back into whatever orbit is necessary. Though, to
date, the United States has only two of these highly specialized spacecraft and
each long-duration flight is said to cost around
$200 million to
execute, making it impractical as a general-purpose intelligence-gathering
asset at scale (at least with the current state of technology).
IT ISN’T
HARD TO HIDE FROM SPY SATELLITES
Even the
most advanced spy satellites come with some serious limitations, and over the
decades, many governments have perfected the art of hiding secrets from the
leer of orbital eyes in the sky. Perhaps the best example of this comes from
the secretive confines of Groom Lake – a dry lakebed that falls under the
administrative control of Edwards Air Force Base in Nevada and is commonly
known as Area 51.
Area 51
(which goes by a variety of other names) was first established in 1955 by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works. The
remote location and runway-flat terrain gave Skunk Works founder Kelly Johnson
all the privacy he needed for the development and testing of what would become
the U-2 Spy Plane. As the years wore on, Lockheed’s meager facilities swelled
to include larger hangars and other permanent structures needed to operate an
entire clandestine installation. In the years since, Area 51 has seen the
testing of some of the most prolific aircraft in aviation history, like the
SR-71 Blackbird and F-117
Nighthawk, as well
as countless lesser-known but arguably even more exotic airframes like Boeing’s
YF-118G Bird of Prey, which was designed, built, and tested entirely within the
windswept confines of the covert installation.
The United
States didn’t officially acknowledge Area 51 even existed until 1998,
but personnel working within the installation have always known that its
existence was something of an open secret. In 1961, the Soviet Union launched
its first spy satellite – Zenit-2 – and very soon thereafter, American
intelligence agencies began notifying the personnel of Area 51 that they were
being watched from on high.
But because
satellites carry very limited fuel onboard, they’re often stuck traveling along
predictable flight paths. By tracking these satellites as they circled the
globe, Area 51 personnel would simply make sure there were no exotic aircraft
visible when the Soviet satellites (often called “ash cans” by insiders) were
zooming overhead.
“In our
morning security meetings, they’d give us a roster of the satellites that the
Soviets had in the air, and we’d know the exact schedule of when they were
coming over,” T.D. Barnes, a former hypersonic flight specialist who
specialized in electronic countermeasures at Area 51 in the 1960s told National
Geographic in
2011. “It was like a bus schedule, and it even told us whether it was an
infrared satellite or what type it was.”
If a
satellite somehow managed to take them by surprise, they initially had to rush
the aircraft back into a hangar, but they later developed lightweight sheds
(they called them hoot-and-scoot sheds) they could quickly pull out and
cover the aircraft with. This method is still in use today and can be seen in
commercial satellite photos of Area 51 taken as recently as last year.
As Soviet
spy satellites matured, Area 51 crews had a new challenge to contend with:
Infrared photography. Planes baking on the tarmac in the Nevada sun cast
shadows on the blacktop beneath them, creating a disparity in temperature on
the runway that remained visible for some time via infrared imaging.
“It’s like
a parking lot,” Barnes told National Geographic News. “After all the cars have
left you can still see how many were parked there [in infrared] because of the
difference in ground temperatures.”
In order to
prevent Soviet analysts from gleaning valuable intelligence from the shape of
these shadows, Area 51 personnel turned to… cardboard.
They would
cut out unusual aircraft shapes and leave them sitting on the tarmac, sometimes
with portable heaters placed where turbojet or turbofan engines would be to
replicate how their heat would impact the infrared shadow left behind.
Of course,
modern spy satellites do have far more capable sensors onboard, but for the
most part, they remain largely as predictable as they were all those decades
ago – and as such, just as easy to hide secrets from.
BUILDING GLASS HOUSES
The United
States’ commanding lead in fielding advanced spy satellites has given it a
distinct advantage in recent decades, but today, the relative age of America’s
satellites has created a problem: Many of these satellites were designed and
built when the United States did not have a peer on the world’s stage, and as
such, they were not built to withstand concerted kinetic or even cyber attacks
from adversary nations.
The
National Interest
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