Defense Week June 10, 2002
Space Imagery Challenged By Concealment, Terrain
BY NATHAN HODGE
At the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, the agency that collects satellite intelligence for the military raced to update its geospatial images of the region. But it had one key advantage: Afghanistan is a relatively sparse, open country that makes the task of capturing overhead pictures much easier.
The United States may not have that luxury in the next phase of its war on terror. In a discussion with reporters last week, the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) acknowledged that U.S. satellites and reconnaissance aircraft have a more difficult time operating over places like the Philippines, where clouds and dense jungle foliage obscure the ground. "The challenge posed in the Philippines is very different" from places like Afghanistan or Iraq, said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the director of NIMA. "That's why you need other forms of sensors to compensate for that."
Clapper had in mind MASINT, measurement and signature intelligence, a new set of technologies that allows sensors to pick up things- thermal images, acoustic signatures, seismic data, chemical emissions- that traditional visual sensors cannot.
Given the limitations of space imagery- and the lessons learned by potential U.S. adversaries- NIMA is examining other kinds of sensors that can pierce through clouds and foliage as well as battlefield haze.
"That's why, because of the differing climatology and weather, terrain conditions, we try not to depend on any one source." Clapper said. "So obviously, depending on the type of sensor you're using, weather cloud cover, vegetation, multiple-canopy [jungle], that all has a bearing. That again is back to your question about the importance of MASINT and applying other more exotic applications that, in simplistic terms, help you see through clouds and vegetation."
U.S. military advisers working in the Philippines have already confronted the technical difficulties of working in mountainous jungle terrain. Late last year, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command told Defense Week that satellite communications links can often have difficulty penetrating thick jungle canopy. That same problem might also apply to collecting visual imagery.
Hard targets
The focus on MASINT also comes in response to moves by other militaries, particularly Iraq's, to move military assets underground into hardened bunkers.
"Foreign potential adversaries went to school on this after Desert Storm, seeing the impact of precision guided munitions, which of course ... depends heavily on what I'm calling geospatial intelligence information," Clapper said.
NIMA wants to compensate for that by finding new ways to gather geospatial intelligence.
"We need to, and we are, pursuing other techniques, other signatures, other sources and methods to compensate for and overcome the trend globally towards denial, concealment, camouflage," he said. "And the other trend, of course, is the increasing focus on going underground, the manifestation of which in Afghanistan has been caves, the poor man's version, I guess, of the elaborate underground complexes you can find in other places."
New toys
John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said one thing NIMA and other agencies are interested in is things like foliage-penetrating radar, which can pierce jungle cover.
"I would assume that would be one thing, to the extent that they want to trot out some new toys," he said.
But Pike also suggested that some of those technologies might not fall under NIMA's direct purview.
"The director of NIMA is the single manager for imagery intelligence, so in principle, anything that NIMA thinks is imagery intelligence, they would stake a claim to getting their fingerprints on," he said. "But the director of NIMA is dual-hatted as being both director of NIMA and being in charge of imagery intelligence, and so there are a lot of imagery intelligence projects that NIMA has intelligence and standardization authority over but that they do not directly manage."
Pike said different kinds of foliage-penetrating sensors would probably not fall under NIMA's direct management, but the agency could develop interoperability standards for systems that the Air Force or other organizations would actually manage.
However, some organizational changes are in the works at NIMA. Clapper said he wanted to reorganize NIMA to "capitalize the basic the geospatial intelligence infrastructure." Essentially, that means combining the activities of NIMA analysts dedicated to mapping with those who perform geospatial analysis. Clapper said the restructured agency might be called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, although the exact name has yet to be agreed upon.
Copyright 2002 King Communications Group
