MSNBC.com December 10, 2002
Satellites to challenge Pentagon spin
By Michael Moran
NEW YORK, Dec. 10 —
It is February 2003, and in newsrooms around the world, the focus is on the U.S. military buildup along Iraq's southern frontier. Invasion appears imminent, and the Pentagon is saying absolutely nothing. Yet the senior producers and editors of major news outlets all over the world know the truth. Thanks to satellite imagery now widely available from commercial suppliers, the buildup of U.S. and British armor in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is clearly visible to them. More compelling still, smaller concentrations of troops are clearly visible inside the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. What is a journalist to do?
U.S. MILITARY officials, satellite imagery experts and news executives themselves insist there is no way that U.S. media outlets would broadcast satellite photos that might compromise U.S. troops. But the hard fact is, unlike previous wars - even the relatively recent Kosovo war - the Pentagon’s role as arbiter of what the media knows may be coming to an end. Further, satellite capabilities in foreign countries - France, China, India, Russia, Japan and others - mean that U.S. interests may not necessarily carry the day.
If the coming months bring a new war in Iraq, the news media may well cross a threshold once the exclusive preserve of a few powerful governments. A study by the Rand Corp. in the late 1990s concluded that the proliferation of satellites would usher in an “era of global transparency.”
That prophecy is coming true. High-resolution satellite imagery could provide U.S. newsrooms with detailed images of what is happening on the battlefield within 48 hours of the event. Already, major networks and newspapers around the world are queuing up to hire these companies, and the professional imagery interpreters they employ, to keep them one step ahead of the competition.
“I think in the long term, this scenario is inevitable,” says Bill Martel, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of “The Technological Arsenal.” “More people now fly these highly capable satellites, and we deliberately decided to democratize the satellite industry. That creates greater transparency and maybe some questions for the Pentagon.”
A NEW BALL GAME?
Since 1994, when the U.S. government officially surrendered its domestic monopoly on satellite imagery, the world has seen an explosion of independent providers and capabilities. Under that 1994 directive, the government retains the right to exercise “shutter control” on commercial satellite companies. In both the Kosovo and Afghan conflicts, the Pentagon decided against this heavy-handed approach, instead resorting to “economic shutter control” — in effect, buying up all the satellite time for the companies that could conceivably peer into the battlefield.
“It’s an elegant solution,” Martel says, “in part because all of these companies are struggling, and this way, they’re not penalized for doing something that U.S. government policy actually set out to encourage.”
John Pike, director of one of those companies, GlobalSecurity.org, concurs.
“At this point, the constraint is economic,” he says. “I don’t know a network news operation in existence willing to pay the price for true battlefield coverage” — a price Pike placed at about $100,000 for each daily snapshot of an area as large as the Iraq-Kuwait border, for instance.
“Totally apart from the news judgment at news organizations on whether they would want to publish such material, at this point it’s a matter of money.”
And, Pike adds, no company is going to turn down money from the Pentagon, which spread some $1.9 billion around to buy up satellite time over a six-month period during the Afghan campaign.
A WAR IN IRAQ?
Satellite photos are a relatively new phenomenon in the news business. Robert Windrem, a senior producer at NBC Nightly News for decades, says his first memory of their use dates from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. “Even then,” he says, “we wound up using photos from a Soviet magazine because the sat images were so poor.”
Still, like the famous U2 surveillance photos of missiles in Cuba in 1961, these images were available only if the military released them.
In contrast, most major news outlets featured commercial satellite photos of Indian and Pakistani nuclear test sites when those nations test-exploded nuclear weapons in 1998; photos of a U.S. EP-3 spy plane sitting on a Chinese air base after a midair incident heightened tensions in April 2001.
Earlier this year, photographs from another commercial provider, Space Imaging, provided hard evidence of a buildup in the Persian Gulf before the Bush administration was openly admitting it. The photograph of the previously unknown air base at Al Udeid in Qatar, in Pike’s words, was “food for thought.”
“That was on the threshold in terms of people being directly confronted with the issue,” Pike says. “It was the first image that focused attention on the fact that, yes, the United States is preparing for a war. News organizations definitely were uncomfortable with it, but most ran it.
Martel, who helped develop the U.S. Air Force’s guidance on satellite imagery, says the world is still years away from instantaneous imagery of war from space. More likely, he says, the effect will be felt in how the Pentagon handles “D-and-D,” or “deception and denial” — employed extensively in the first Gulf War.
“The presumption that we can eliminate the ability of people to know what’s going on is going to be difficult,” he says. “That’s where the real change will be.”
Michael Moran is senior producer for special reports and international news.
© Copyright 2002 MSNBC.com
