National Public Radio (NPR) TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY
(3:00 PM ET) April 13, 2001, Friday
TECHNOLOGY USED ON THE EP-3 AND WHAT THE CHINESE MIGHT LEARN ABOUT OUR SPYING CAPABILITIES FROM THE PLANE ITSELF
IRA FLATOW, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
Later in the program we'll be talking with industrial ecologist Jesse Ausubel about the rejuvenation of our forests.
But first, the big news this week, of course, is the return of the crew members of that Navy spy plane that remains in China. But in this age of out of this world spy satellites which can eavesdrop on phone calls, they can see objects on the ground only a few inches in size, have you been saying to yourself, 'Why do we need these spy planes? Why don't we just use those big, expensive spy satellites that are orbiting around the Earth?' Well, this hour we're going to be talking about the technology of spying, what do spy plane photos tell us that satellite images--maybe they can't do that. What about the intelligence gathering equipment on board a spy plane? What can it do that satellites can't? And possibly, what will the Chinese learn now from studying this plane as it's there in China.
We'll also be talking about the next generation of spy satellites estimated to cost about $ 25 billion. That's more expensive than the Manhattan Project and these satellites reportedly can be trained on hot spots around the world within a couple of hours. And we'll be talking with two experts on US military intelligence. Taking your calls. What would you like to know about the inside of an EP-3? Maybe we can answer it. Give us a call. Our number is 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. And as always, you're invited to surf over to our Web site at sciencefriday.com.
Let me introduce my guests. John Pike is the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area private military analysis group. He joins us from our NPR studios in Washington.
Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
Mr. JOHN PIKE (Director, GlobalSecurity.org): Glad to be here.
FLATOW: You're welcome.
David Fulghum is senior military editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology. He has flown on an EP-3 surveillance plane similar to the one that's grounded in China. And he joins us by phone from his office.
Thanks for being with us.
Mr. DAVID FULGHUM (Senior Military Editor, Aviation Week and Space Technology): Yes. Hi, Ira. Hi, John.
Mr. PIKE: Hi.
FLATOW: All right. So let's back up a little bit. The EP-3 is on the ground in China, as we know. But before that it was flying off the coast of China. What kinds of things--why do we need a spy plane off of China, David Fulghum?
Mr. FULGHUM: Well, first of all, you want to have a very clear picture of what's going on electronically in any area in which you may some day be militarily active. You want to know what kind of equipment they're using, whether it's high frequency, low frequency. You want to know what the communications paths are. You want to--and you can also get a lot of insight into who the commanders are, how they would respond to any given provocation or incident. You can get a sense of their doctrinal issues. So you can find both their strengths and their weaknesses.
Now I suppose one of the things you're going to get at is what's the advantage of an airplane? And it's persistence. John can probably explain the satellite part of it better than I. But the point is EP-3 can look in an area for six hours or eight hours and you can have another airplane right behind it that will look at it continuously for another six or eight hours. So you can get a very intensive analysis--thorough analysis of a given place and often with a satellite that time of exposure would be far less. And you'll have holes in between that, you know, the Chinese know with a great deal of accuracy how often the satellites come by. And they will utilize those gaps if you don't have something else there looking at the picture.
FLATOW: So we're not talking about satellites that are the geosyncronous, the kind that we use for telephone conversations. These are satellites that are flying in lower orbit, John Pike, and have their--and they're not staying in one spot very long.
Mr. PIKE: Well, the low Earth orbit satellites are used both for imagery intelligence--taking pictures--and signals intelligence--eavesdropping--and the ARIES aircraft that we're talking about now is an eavesdropping, signals intelligence satellite. Of course, there are also high-altitude geostationary signals intelligence satellites that are picking up signals from all around the globe. One of the challenges they face, however, is that they are much further away from the targets on the ground than the airplane is. Airplane would be intercepting targets at ranges of a couple of hundred miles. The geostationary satellites are at an altitude of about 20,000 miles. And the way that the high-altitude satellites are able to pick up these signals is by focusing on one area for a brief period of time and then moving on to another area. Of course, they can stay focused on a particular area, say watch a military maneuver off the South China Sea, but that basically means they will give up global coverage for much of the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.
And so it appears that in the mid-1990s, late 1990s, the National Security Agency, which is in charge of all of our signals intelligence operations, made some basic decisions about how collection activities were going to be allocated and said that some targets are going to be covered by global systems, our high-altitude satellites, and other targets are going to be covered by regional systems, which would include things such as the ARIES aircraft, the rivot joint airplane operated by the Air Force and a lot of ground collection stations that we have scattered all around the world.
So the short answer is that in principle, we could be collecting this information simply using satellites, but when you sit down and look at what the cost would be of doing so, it appears the US government decided that it would be less expensive to collect a lot of this information using airplanes.
FLATOW: Of course, if you wanted to upgrade the equipment, too, that would be cheaper, right? You don't have to go launch something.
Mr. PIKE: Well, that's one of the really amazing things about this ARIES airplane that even though the air frame itself is based on a design that was originally developed in the 1950s, the ill-fated Lockheed Electra passenger plane which had a disturbing habit of the wings popping off, the inside of this airplane has been continually upgraded since the early 1980s. The program is currently in the middle of one upgrade and has yet another upgrade planned for later on in this decade. And you do have a real problem with satellites that once the satellite is launched, it's up there. You can't modify it. They generally last for about a decade and then you're sort of stuck with a capability for a period of perhaps two decades. Whereas the airplanes can be upgraded every few years.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And, David Fulghum, give us an idea--you've been inside this EP-3. From the pictures we've seen in magazines, it looks like a huge nerve center. Of all these people there--there were 24 crew members, including the pilots. Exactly what are they tuned in to?
Mr. FULGHUM: Well, let me break down the crew for you a little bit. There's usually four to six people on the flight deck. There'll be a pilot and co-pilot, flight engineer and perhaps a navigator, relief pilot and co-pilot. And then down the center of the aircraft are all the ELINT people, the people who gather and analyze the signals intelligence--I mean, the electronic intelligence like radars and the non-verbal things. And then in the back are the people who do the communications intelligence. They listen to--they will each have a number of frequencies assigned to them that they will listen to, and listen for key words and phrases.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And what is compromised? What are they going through now, if they had time, and we know what a horrendous trip this plane had to land?
Mr. FULGHUM: Yes. There was--well, I've been talking to my old friends in the community and they said there is a switch at every operator's position that when you flick it, it will degauss all the software. So that was not compromised. And virtually all the written communications were on water soluble paper. So it was put in the water cooler or in the toilet and was destroyed that way.
It's the electrical--it is the hardware itself that they got, but that has its own value. The Chinese are trying very hard to buy that first from the Israelis and then from the Russians as part of their AWAC package. It would have been included SIGINT package as well. Now they essentially have for free what they were trying very hard to buy.
FLATOW: Couldn't they destroy that with any hammers or staplers on board or something that they might have hit it with? I know there are plans, you know, to destroy that. Did they not have enough time to do that?
Mr. FULGHUM: That's a pretty cramped airplane. I'm not sure how much you could really do.
FLATOW: Yeah.
Mr. FULGHUM: You know, the equipment is in racks. And I think they were pretty worried about staying alive at that point, too. I don't know how much they would have been actively out of their seats moving around the airplane trying to destroy equipment.
FLATOW: And what happened to the nose of the plane? We didn't hear anything about the Chinese jet hitting the nose, but only the wings and propellers.
Mr. FULGHUM: I thought the--well, the radome was missing.
FLATOW: Yes. What...
Mr. FULGHUM: And it's a Fiberglas piece, so they said that--well, given the way that the airplane hit--the Chinese airplane hit them, it could have--pieces of it could have struck that or it could have been damaged enough they took it off to get a look at the radar.
FLATOW: So they might not have popped off during the encounter that...
Mr. PIKE: My understanding...
FLATOW: Some intelligence in there they wanted to drop over the ocean or something.
Mr. PIKE: No. My understanding that it did...
Mr. FULGHUM: No.
Mr. PIKE: ...that it was broken off during the course of the collision. And basically it was a clean break, because when you look at the picture of the aircraft on the ground...
FLATOW: Yeah.
Mr. PIKE: ...the place that the radome came off was the place it would normally come off if you were servicing ...(unintelligible).
Mr. FULGHUM: Exactly. Yeah.
FLATOW: John Pike, there have been newspaper articles about the Pentagon, the National Security Agency upgrading the satellite systems, sinking $ 20 billion, $ 25 billion approximately, in something even bigger than the Manhattan Project into creating a whole new slew, a whole new bunch of spy satellites. I guess, none of them would be out of position so that you wouldn't have to depend on an airplane to do the surveillance. Is that...
Mr. PIKE: Well, actually, the new signals intelligence satellite network, the integrated overhead signals intelligence architecture is actually moving us in the direction of being even more dependent on aircraft in the future than we were during the Cold War. Back during the 1980s, the National Security Agency was, in a sense, trying to target everything with everything where the satellites were going after all sort of different targets. The airplanes were going after all sorts of different targets. And I think in the early 1990s, they came to the realization that you might have been able to try to do that when you were mainly focused on the Soviet Union, but with the end of the Cold War and the growing diversity of targets that they were going after, it didn't seem to make much sense to try to have that sort of overlap in coverage. So actually, paradoxically, in the future we're probably going to be even more dependent on these airplanes than we were 10 or 15 years ago.
FLATOW: But does that make sense, to create a situation where you have an international incident like this where if you had more satellites you might not have to?
Mr. PIKE: Well, obviously, that's part of what the debate is going to be about, and if folks haven't taken a look at it, they should look--certainly look at James Bamford's op-ed in USA Today because Jim Bamford probably knows more about the National Security Agency than anybody else who can talk about it does. And he makes a persuasive case for pulling back on this type of surveillance activity.
On the other hand, I think that if the United States government were in this case to stop doing something that's legal under international law simply because one country objected, that that would create some very difficult precedence when North Korea objects to our guard-rail flights monitoring their military activity or Iraq objects or Serbia objects when we're flying the same type of aircraft off the Adriatic.
Mr. FULGHUM: Or also, there's...
FLATOW: Yeah.
Mr. FULGHUM: You just might open the way for the introduction of more extensive use of unmanned aircraft like Global Hawk, which could probably fly higher than the Chinese interceptors could and they could perhaps with that--a bit more altitude would have a larger footprint and perhaps might not have to go quite as close to the Chinese coast.
Mr. PIKE: That's certainly the direction that the intelligence community is going to be moving in the longer run because even though one of the big attractions of an aircraft like the ARIES is that it can remain aloft for 12 hours at a time. If you get the crew off there and are flying an unmanned air vehicle, they can remain aloft for days at a time and maintain a continuous presence in a way that even these aircraft with the crew on board can't because the crew eventually is going to want to go home.
FLATOW: All right. We're going to take a quick break. And we're happy that the crew is on its way home. So stay with us. We'll come back and talk lots more about spy satellites, spy airplanes and the trade-off between the two. So don't go away.
I'm Ira Flatow, and this is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
FLATOW: Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
We're talking this hour about spy satellites and spy planes with my guests, John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area private military analysis group; David Fulghum, senior military editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology, and he has flown on a EP-3 surveillance plane similar to the one that's grounded in China.
Our number: 1 (800) 989-8255. Let's see if we can take a call right now, and let's go to Mark in Jacksonville, Florida.
Hi.
MARK (Caller): Hi, Ira. It's a great show. Two quick points: How difficult is it to change a spy satellite's orbit once it's in orbit? I know getting there is the difficult part, but isn't changing orbit relatively easy and it doesn't cost much fuel, or am I mistaken?
Mr. PIKE: Basically the satellites that we have in orbit today essentially never maneuver. The idea is to have the constellation set up in such a way that it has regular, predictable and frequent coverage so that you don't have to maneuver. The geostationary, high-altitude satellites would occasionally, every other year, maneuver to swap out the area of the Earth that they're covering. The low-altitude satellites, the ones that are a few hundred miles up, would maneuver maybe once a year in order to maintain properly aligned orbit. But basically, these satellites do not maneuver in response to tactical situations because the problem is, you get them into position so they'll have real good coverage and one pass and you've gotten them out of position to have that sort of coverage in the next pass. The main maneuvering that they do is basically to keep them lined up with each other. You don't want to get them out of line.
FLATOW: One of the things that the public doesn't talk about or actually know about very much and it comes out when you have stories about spy satellites and spy planes is the amazing wealth of--I mean, so much information that comes out of spy satellites and even out of the planes and how they're integrated to form pictures, correct? I mean, how you make these three-dimensional pictures of the areas and the fly-bys and create all kind of incredible graphics.
Mr. FULGHUM: They can do that to some degree right now. But there's going to be a heavy, heavy push in the near future to do that on a much grander scale. And the whole idea--what they're calling predictive battle space awareness, they want to have so much information about a given subject that they'll be able to predict when something is going to happen and then they'll be able to do something to affect the outcome before it happens without the opponent ever knowing they've been manipulated.
FLATOW: Give me a for instance.
Mr. FULGHUM: If they watched very carefully and knew that a certain airplane carrying a certain general flew from point B to point C every Thursday, they could either do something to him very crude, like shoot him down, or perhaps they could put data into his airplane to make him confused about what was going on or present him with a picture that would cause him to react in a given away.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. But don't they also have the ability now with the information to create landscapes. You know, we've seen these wonderful pictures of--John Pike, of, you know, missiles going over landscapes and things and having soldiers already virtually be in the place they're going to be by looking at all the data that comes from the satellite picture.
Mr. PIKE: Well, this is increasingly one of the applications you're seeing for satellite imagery in conjunction with the signals intelligence that you also get from satellites and from airplanes, is mission rehearsal. So that when a pilot goes out to fly a mission, this isn't the first time that they have flown the mission, but rather, like an astronaut would rehearse a flight dozens of times on the ground before they go into space, pilots would rehearse a specific mission a number of times using satellite imagery and then you'd have computer graphics overlaying where all of the air defense radars were so that they would see very clearly exactly what valley they had to fly through and how low they would have to go in order to stay out of sight of the air defense radars. And it's basically this fusion of imagery intelligence with signals intelligence with whatever additional human intelligence that you get that is at the core of American military planning today. And one of the reasons that I think the Chinese are very nervous about these surveillance flights because these are very distinctive things about American military capabilities that the Chinese are decades away from being able to match. And it makes them justifiably nervous.
Mr. FULGHUM: And not only the Chinese are nervous, much of the Third World lacks that kind of capability and the people I've been talking to the last few days indicate that they think if the aircraft comes back at all, it won't be for a year or two. And what we will see is the Chinese and probably with the assistance of some Russian technology teams will analyze the equipment. Much of it is set up to use off-the-shelf equipment and we will see versions of this both operational in the Chinese and for sale in the international arms market to the Third World.
FLATOW: And the Chinese are very good at making copies of technology.
Mr. PIKE: But I think it's important to understand, though, as Dave pointed out, an awful lot of the hardware that is on the airplane is off-the-shelf, generic computer hardware. And without the operating systems, without the application software and particularly without the threat libraries that enable you to sort of rapidly channel surf and decide whether or not you have previously detected this particularly emitter, that general purpose hardware is probably not going to be nearly as useful as it would have been if the software on board had not been destroyed, which apparently it has been.
FLATOW: So software is everything in this.
Mr. PIKE: Well, I think that it's basically the same with a desktop computer; that simply having desktop computer with a blank hard drive really doesn't tell you very much about what sort of novel could be written with the word processing software or what sort of image could be created with image processing software if you had it, which you don't.
FLATOW: What about sensors, you know?
Mr. PIKE: Well, the sensors--the most obvious part of the aircraft, and they would certainly tell them some things about the capabilities of it. The airplane is just absolutely bristling with all kinds of antennae on the outside. They're under the canoes on the top and bottom of the airplane. But, again, that's only going to tell you sort of the most basic fundamental airplane is capable of monitoring radio or radar at the following frequencies. The thing that they have increasingly focused on in upgrading the aircraft is the ability to rapidly sort through the bizarre number of signals that you're capable of intercepting and figure out 'Which one have I seen before? Which one do I not need to worry about? Which one is a stranger that I want to spend a lot of time collecting additional data on?'
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. But we're also in an era of spy vs. spy, here, you know, where you do something, we do something better. We change this, we change that around.
Mr. PIKE: That has really been the focus of these continual upgrades that you've seen on this airplane--this class of airplanes, generally, because with the growing number of air defense radars around the world, the increasing number of new tactics and wave forms that are being used with those radars and you're seeing the same thing with communication networks as well, that the signals intelligence community is always concerned about falling behind and not being able to keep up with all this innovation because the pace of information technology innovation in the military world is running about the same as it is in the dot-com world.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FULGHUM: I mean, in particular, picking up a little bit there, the new generation of surface-to-air missiles like the SA-10s, 12s and 20s, operate at a much higher frequency than they used to. Also, you want to know where all the very low frequency radars are because if you ever want to employ a stealth aircraft there, those are the radars that can pick up stealth.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Denise in Jacksonville, Florida. Hi, Denise.
DENISE (Caller): Hi. How you doing?
FLATOW: Fine. How are you?
DENISE: I'm great, thanks. I was just interested, with all of this being--this plane is obviously something very high-tech. You keep hearing about how important it is for our national security--doesn't discussing what it does somewhat compromise that? I mean...
FLATOW: Yeah?
DENISE: ...putting this much information out there, aren't we kind of making it worse for ourselves.
Mr. FULGHUM: No, I don't think so. I think the secret has always been not what you do but how you do it.
DENISE: OK. Well, very interesting. It's just an interesting discussion. Thanks for taking my call.
FLATOW: Are you interested in this technology, Denise?
DENISE: I just think, you know, with as much as we're saying how important this is--I mean, technology interests me, but more so just the idea we're saying this is our big secret and then to have all these news shows and magazine show exactly what the plane does, it's very interesting.
Mr. PIKE: Well, it's really not showing...
DENISE: Time will...
Mr. PIKE: Well, it's really not showing exactly what the plane does, because one of the most critical parts of the airplane, and particularly with this new upgraded version of it, is the automation of the threat library, which is basically an encyclopedia of all of the different types of transmitters that we're previously aware of. And this is basically sort of an automated channel surfer, so when you're sitting there watching television it takes you a certain amount of time to look at the program and see whether it's a rerun or a new one, and if it's a new one, it'll take you a little more time to see, well, is this show funny or is this show boring?--and go on to the next channel. The reason that this airplane is so much more capable than previous versions is because its ability to do that channel surfing has been very substantially improved. The fact that they have that improvement, I think, has been well-known in the trade press. How you go about doing it is something that the crew erased as soon as they realized that they might be landing...
FLATOW: So that's a software. That's a software.
Mr. PIKE: That's software. That's software.
FLATOW: See, Denise, where we used to think, you know, spies used these little radios and--you know, hidden little radios, now software is what's doing it.
Mr. PIKE: And knowing that the software exists is very different from being able to recreate it.
Mr. FULGHUM: And bear in mind the...
DENISE: OK. Well, thanks very much.
FLATOW: You're welcome.
Mr. FULGHUM: Bear in mind the Russians and the Chinese know very well what the airplane does, and have known for a long time.
FLATOW: And so you can say, 'We're going to do this to you, and there's nothing you can do about it,' basically, is what we're saying.
Mr. PIKE: Well, you know, that's basically what's up for grabs here. Of the hardware that the Chinese may be looking at, how much is that going to enable them to understand what the capabilities of the plane are? Probably not a lot. And then the second question is, what are they going to be able to change? Well, there are some things that they can change, and there are a lot of things that they're basically stuck with, like the frequency that an air defense radar operates on.
FLATOW: Are you saying that if we wanted to go--and you talked about a decision that was made in the early '90s about which way to go, satellites or planes, and they decided...
Mr. PIKE: And what the combination is.
FLATOW: And what the combination--but theoretically, if you wanted to go all satellite, could you do that and get the same quality of intelligence that you would get with the plane flying? If you wanted to spend--if you had an unlimited check, you wanted to put as many satellites as you could, any orbit that you wanted?
Mr. PIKE: Don't tempt the contractor community to think about that question.
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Mr. PIKE: Yeah. I have no doubt that if you put enough zeroes into the budget and waited long enough that you could do that. And exactly what the trade-off is there I would candidly admit the answer is probably classified. It is clearly the case, though, that the signals intelligence community today is focused on a much broader range of targets, much more geographically diverse targets than they were during the Cold War. And, you know, the Soviet Union was basically an easy target for the signals intelligence community. They just had to monitor the alert status of the group of Soviet forces in Germany, make sure that they weren't going to invade western Europe this morning, take a look at a couple of missile tests that afternoon and take the rest of the day off. But now, we have regional hot spots all around the world. We have drugs and thugs, Osama bin Laden. It's a much more difficult world for them, and signals intelligence has become more important relative to imagery intelligence, because there are a lot of questions today that imagery intelligence just doesn't answer very well.
FLATOW: David Fulghum, you've been on both the EP-3 and the RC-135 rivet joint spy plane. We haven't heard much about the rivet joint in the last few days. How different is it? How similar is it?
Mr. FULGHUM: Well, they're virtually the same thing. At the time that they were in the Cold War, the rivet joint was used more as a strategic gatherer and worked for the national intelligence agencies, whereas the EP-3 was more of a tactical-level gatherer and was under the direct command of the fleet syncs. And that's one of the things they've been trying to solve since then, is to make them both applicable to a tactical situation, where you can gather information and get it to the war fighter virtually in real time.
FLATOW: And are there any breakthroughs, you know, that need to be done to make the ultimate--what is the ultimate spy plane or spy satellite? What do you think?
Mr. PIKE: Well, currently, the ultimate that they've been able to define is this Joint Airborne Signals Intelligence Architecture, which is a convergence of the black boxes and the software that you have on the Navy's EP-3 ARIES, on the Air Forces RC-135 rivet joint, on the Army's Guardrail, and also on the unmanned air vehicles that the services are developing, so that by the end of this decade all of these air-breathing signals intelligence platforms will be interoperable. A commander will be able to order up a product from any of them, know what they're going to get. And increasingly, you're going to be using commercial off-the-shelf hardware with specially developed software, which means that you're going to be able to upgrade it and modify it a lot more rapidly.
FLATOW: All right. We're talking about spying, the ultimate spy satellites and planes this hour on TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. David, I didn't mean to step on your...
Mr. FULGHUM: No, no. I just wanted to say one thing, though. When I was flying with the EP-3 guys, I was starting to get a sense of what you could do. We were looking at a whole--the picture of the whole hemisphere, and I could see all the other intelligence-gathering aircraft that were up in the sky and what targets they were seeing, all from the cockpit of the EP-3 that was flying off the coast of North Africa.
FLATOW: And so that would be the whole theater--Right?--up there you're looking at.
Mr. FULGHUM: We could see all of Europe, we could see a good part--we could see all of the Middle East, we could see North Africa.
FLATOW: And I guess the ultimate use of all this information would be to get that information in 3-D or real time from the airplane down to a field commander, also, so he could see what's going on in his immediate area.
Mr. FULGHUM: Exactly, and to the national commanders that have to make those kind of broad-ranging command decisions.
FLATOW: And is that possible now?
Mr. FULGHUM: They can do it a lot better than they did before. It's all incremental, but it's getting better all the time. Although as John pointed out, what happened was the target set just proliferated like crazy since the end of the Cold War. So you just have a lot more things to look at now than you used to.
FLATOW: Are we going to have...
Mr. PIKE: The haystack has gotten a lot larger.
FLATOW: Now that we have a larger haystack and now that we have a lot of attention turned to this, are we going to see the Pentagon sort of wringing its hands and saying, 'We need more, we need more of this stuff'?
Mr. FULGHUM: Yes.
FLATOW: Do they ever say...
Mr. FULGHUM: Of course.
FLATOW: Do they ever say, 'We don't need more of this stuff'?
Mr. FULGHUM: They're going to say 'We do need more,' and the administration is going to say, 'We can't afford it.'
FLATOW: Are they going to say exactly what stuff they're going to need, or just say, 'We need more of this stuff'? Anything hopeful?
Mr. FULGHUM: Well, they're certainly going to be looking for a replacement for this aircraft. They already had one additional Aries programmed to come into service next year, and I gather that the Aries community has been suggesting that 12 isn't enough, that 15 would be better.
FLATOW: And as far as the technology, are they going to say, 'We need newer, better, high-tech things'?
Mr. PIKE: Well, they're about halfway through this sensor suite improvement program for the Aries. After that comes the migration to the Joint Airborne SIGINT Architecture, which basically makes the airplane interchangeable with the Air Force rivet joint and, in large measure, the Army's Guardrail. That'll basically get them through the end of this decade.
FLATOW: All right. Well...
Mr. FULGHUM: I think they're probably looking at a common 767-type air frame somewhere in the future as a replacement aircraft for these, because they're having a huge corrosion problem with the 707 air frames. They're just old.
Mr. PIKE: Yeah.
FLATOW: Yeah. All right. We've got to wrap it up. I want to thank both of your for joining me this hour. David Fulghum is senior military editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology; John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area private military analysis group. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me this hour.
Mr. PIKE: Thank you.
Mr. FULGHUM: Thanks much.
FLATOW: We're going to take a short break, and when we come back we're going to talk about the forests. Believe it or not, they are coming back. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
I'm Ira Flatow and this is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
Copyright 2001 National Public Radio (R). All rights reserved.
