For now, though, the world relies on satellite-dependent global positioning systems, which have already transformed how billions of people and things navigate their appointed or chosen paths. For better or worse, GPS and its relatives have made countless inventions possible, from America’s Predator and Reaper warrior drones to Dubai’s single-passenger driverless air taxis to the management of crops via precision farming. So, unless you hope to re-create the conjectural voyage of Polynesians to Peru a thousand years ago, you need never again consult a map or compass, let alone an astrolabe or kamal. Whether you’re in Moscow or Manhattan, rural Rajasthan or central Shanghai, global positioning will direct you to your destination—assuming you don’t mind having your whereabouts tracked by eyes in the sky.
Ease of navigation through sand and cloud was only one of the benefits that Gulf War space assets supplied to Western warfighters. Swift communication—both long haul and intra-theater—was another.
General Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War and later George W. Bush’s secretary of state, maintained that satellites were the most important factor in building the command, control, and communication network for Operation Desert Shield. From a British military point of view, satellites “brought the Coalition Supreme Commander within a telephone call of the White House, Downing Street and the Elysée Palace.”40
Not every channel on every communications satellite used during the war could be made available to the Coalition forces, so to maximize capacity, communications satellites were drawn from many sources, including the US Defense Satellite Communications System, the US Navy’s Fleet Satellite Communications System, the US Air Force’s Satellite Data System, NATO, and the British Skynet system. Also commandeered were several one-of-a-kind US military and experimental satellites as well as leased assets from the likes of AT&T, Bell, Sprint, and especially the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) and the International Maritime Satellite Organization (Inmarsat). A pioneering constellation called Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS), operated by NASA and intended to support communication with spacecraft in orbit, was also called upon. The satellites were not all tuned to the same frequency. The network was cumbersome and complicated. As the ground forces advanced, hundreds of satellite ground terminals had to move with them. Because of the diversity of hardware and the multiplicity of controlling agencies, the parts didn’t always work well as a whole. The system could be overwhelmed when communications conveyed not just words but images, which consume high bandwidth.
Yet despite the many problems, all those satellites at the military’s disposal accelerated the pace of command during the hundred-hour ground war. Information could now pass rapidly from battlefield to tactical commanders and onward to the strategists. The benefits of those communications satellites accrued to television networks, too, and thus to the public at large. CNN became the go-to place for war news. Home TV reached the troops, while TV viewers at home could watch the skies of Baghdad erupting.41
Besides facilitating communication, satellites also provided early warning of Iraq’s nighttime Scud missile launches against US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Three Defense Support Program satellites continuously scanned the skies for bright splashes of infrared, indicating the heat of a rocket plume. The DSP satellites relayed their data to US Space Command in Colorado, which would immediately confirm whether a given plume came from a Scud launch and, if so, would predict the impact zone and then rush the analysis (via satellite, of course) to Central Command in Saudi Arabia. By that time, the missile would have been airborne for about five minutes, traveling at thousands of miles per hour toward its target, leaving at most two minutes for Central Command to issue a warning and for its recipients to take action.42
Another group of satellites provided crucial data on weather. They warned of increased risk of a sudden sandstorm; determined wind direction, important for predicting the spread of any chemical agents; assessed dense coastal fogs that could drastically reduce visibility; monitored midday conditions in remote deserts that could presage evening thunderstorms, dust storms, or sandstorms; and tracked the dark smoke plumes from any of the hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells deliberately ignited by the Iraqis. Coalition forces needed to know of any weather that could compromise weapons systems or force commanders to cancel air attacks. Hence the reliance on weather satellites, not only from US military (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program) and nonmilitary sources (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) but also from the European Space Agency, Japan, and Russia. Weather imagery was “so important,” states Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon’s exhaustive final report to Congress, that the Joint Force Air Component Commander in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, “kept a light table next to his desk to review the latest DMSP data,” and the Tactical Air Command Center didn’t finalize the daily “air tasking order” until after they’d received the most up-to-date DMSP images. Out in the field, though, DMSP weather reports were harder to access. The US Army dealt with the problem by buying German commercial receivers, which supplied data directly from civilian weather satellites passing above the Middle East, while the US Air Force dealt with it by faxing DMSP images to the field via landline, which slowed down the flow of information.
But again, as with GPS, the weather satellites offered key input that was otherwise unavailable to the warfighter in 1991. Sky conditions during the entire Gulf War were the cloudiest they’d been in more than a decade, and updates on cloudiness affected daily tactical decisions. Clouds could interfere with the laser beams used to illuminate targets, causing laser-guided bombs to lose guidance. Suddenly too cloudy? Scrap today’s LGBs. Clouds could also cause a switch in targets, which is what happened because of the changes in cloud cover visible in two satellite images taken on the same January day less than two hours apart. One showed a clearing of cloudy skies over Baghdad; the other showed sunny skies in Al-Basrah beginning to cloud over.43
Now for the spy satellites. Another major enabler of the 1991 assault was the mountain of information—maps, photographs, multi-spectral images—made possible by the many surveillance, photoreconnaissance, and remote-sensing satellites that had been scrutinizing Earth’s terrain from afar for decades. Their purposes varied, but their yield was uniformly useful. Millions of dollars’ worth of images purchased from commercial remote-sensing satellites helped to track Iraqi troops, select targets, plan amphibious operations, execute aerial bombing campaigns, and establish land access routes for Coalition ground forces entering from the deserts of Saudi Arabia in the final hundred hours of the war. Today nobody has to be informed that Earth observation satellites can, as a 1992 US Space Command assessment phrased it, “show what is hidden from normal view.”44 But back then, a decade before the release of Google Earth, that was still a capability worth celebrating.
During the Gulf War, wide-field images—supplied by commercial remote-sensing satellites, both American Landsat and French SPOT—provided information on the overall lay of the land, substantial changes in terrain compared with previous images, open areas suitable for helicopter drops, and large-scale movement of troops or matériel. Landsat images showed features in both the optical and infrared bands of the spectrum, and they came only in color, with a resolution of ninety-eight feet at best—about the size of a blue whale. SPOT data came in either color or black-and-white and offered better resolution (thirty-three feet for the b & w) for making detailed maps. Arms-control specialists say those levels of resolution are fine for overall planning but insufficient to identify a military ground unit, which requires resolution of about fifteen feet, much less a tank, which requires about three feet.
Narrow-field, higher-resolution “spotlight” images—useful for planning and executing strikes against specific targets and in assessing bomb damage—came from America’s KEYHOLE photoreconnaissance satellites, the KH-11 and the Advanced KH-11, both equipped with CCD technology, and from the Lacrosse cloud-penet
rating radar-imaging satellite, which in 1991 was the sole spacecraft undeterred by bad weather 24/7. Russian and Japanese satellites also provided multi-spectral high-res images to the Coalition’s war effort.
In early August 1990, when US military forces first deployed to the region, their maps of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia were between ten and thirty years old—old enough to make them undependable. Using then-current Landsat data, the Defense Mapping Agency produced an initial batch of updated maps by early September. At that point, Saudi airfields were little more than runways in the sand, so Landsat imagery was converted into the engineering drawings used to build huge modern air bases. Also, whenever and wherever the ground was disturbed—by troop movements, road building, a jeep’s path over sand or grass—that disturbance would show up as a change in reflectivity when compared with an earlier image of the same locale. When two scenes are flashed quickly back and forth—as was done with two Landsat images of the Kuwaiti–Saudi border, the first taken in August 1990 and the other in December 1990—most of what’s there remains the same, making it possible to readily identify the site of any changes. This technique, pioneered by astrophysicists using analog photographs in the early twentieth century, was readily adapted to digital imagery in modern times, with a computer instead of a human reviewing the differences between images. It’s a simple yet potent means to discover changes from one moment in time to another. Astrophysical discoveries generated by such comparisons include fleeting supernovas in the distant universe; Barnard’s Star, the fastest moving star seen in Earth’s sky; Pluto, the first object found in what would later be called the Kuiper Belt; salty water oozing down the inner wall of an impact crater on Mars; and the rapid movement of stars at the center of the Milky Way, suggesting the presence of an otherwise undetected supermassive black hole.
A few months after the end of Desert Storm, the French minister of defense declared, “Without allied intelligence in the war, we would have been almost blind.” At that point, Europe had not a single military spy satellite, only France’s remote-sensing SPOT. America, by contrast, as described by British military space advocates in the winter of 1991, had a “multi-purpose space armada with [a] massive supporting processing and communications chain.”45 No comparison: America had put heavy resources into military space; Europe hadn’t.
By the beginning of the next engagement in Iraq, in March 2003, the US space armada was even more massive. Lessons learned from shortfalls and screwups in Desert Storm had catalyzed the creative squads at military space corporations, military laboratories, and military research agencies and had accelerated work already under way. Their varied efforts during the next decade were aimed at better connectivity; greater numbers of smaller, lighter tactical satellites to support commanders in the field; ultraviolet sensors for military surveillance spacecraft; increased numbers and carrying capacity of small communications spacecraft; better GPS, with better ground antennas and direct input to precision-guided weapons; computer networks that could fuse input from multiple sensors; electric propulsion for the transfer of high-mass payloads to geosynchronous orbit without resorting to huge rocket stages; lightweight solar arrays; a standard, all-purpose basic space “bus” to which mission-specific hardware would be attached the way a warhead attaches to a rocket; an experimental satellite to test autonomous navigation systems; infrared tunnel sensors that would be thousands of times more sensitive than piezoelectric sensors; supercomputers; a radiation-hardened, superhigh-speed integrated circuit chip set. All these and more were in the works by the spring of 1991, just months after the end of the first Gulf War.
As Aviation Week & Space Technology noted at the time, “The development of advanced military space technology for future defense and intelligence satellites continues to grow despite pressures on the U.S. defense budget.” The 1991 budget for the Air Force’s new Phillips Laboratory was more than $600 million, while the budget of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, was $187 million, set to jump the following year to $290 million. Money was flowing; miltech was soaring. NASA’s budget was way larger, yes—almost $14 billion—but dual-use tech was a meaningful share of that. Furthermore, as a 1992 task force on US space policy stressed,
There are not two space industrial bases, one for defense and one for the civil space program; they both draw from the same well. . . . [T]hey largely use the same industry, require virtual identical technologies, share the human skills, often use common facilities and certainly draw new entrants from the same academic institutions. Preserving the base for one helps the other, and vice versa.46
It’s no wonder the multitrillion-dollar Iraq War started off in 2003 on a better space-technology footing than had its predecessor—although it might be more correct to say a better space-operations footing.
The intervening dozen years had yielded many technology upgrades. The GPS system now had its full complement of satellites. Most cruise missiles were now GPS-guided. Crucial satellite data could now be transmitted directly to users, bypassing a time-consuming layer of analysts. At least one of the multiple surveillance satellites would now image the battlefield every two to three hours while passing overhead. Even if you had continuous video taken by a strategically positioned geostationary satellite, it couldn’t match the resolution of an ordinary surveillance satellite orbiting a hundred times closer to the ground. Plus, there were now many more, and more capacious, satellite ground terminals, with six times the bandwidth as before, and enough lightweight GPS receivers to supply the land forces with at least one per nine-person squad.
But in speaking to Aviation Week & Space Technology shortly after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom—the first twenty-six days of the 2003 invasion—the senior military space officer at the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia emphasized the organizational, not simply the technological, improvements: “Our whole intent was to bring an integrated effect to the battlespace. . . . It’s not space for space’s sake; it’s space integrated with everything else to produce effects in the kill chain.” Addressing the House Armed Services Committee at about the same time, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz agreed:
Our approach to OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] reflected the concept of the “battlespace,” replacing the concept of the “battlefield.”
On previous battlefields, we massed forces and achieved jointness by deconflicting rather than integrating forces, and conducted relatively symmetrical attrition warfare.
In this joint air, land, sea battlespace—which also includes space and the electromagnetic spectrum—we massed information and knowledge, used smaller formations that employed both lethal and non-lethal force in rapid and asymmetric ways, and conducted effects-based operations directed by flexible, dynamic command and control relationships. This synergistic battlespace makes each of our military service members more powerful in the effects they can achieve and confers greater protection from the enemy.47
There’s more than a little salesmanship in those paragraphs. Bravado aside, the interval between Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom did raise US commanders’ comfort level with space capabilities, which translated into even greater speed of information processing and even more rapid communication at all levels of the campaign. To help carry out Iraqi Freedom’s approach to warfighting, thirty-three thousand space-savvy support personnel were dispersed across the joint services and throughout the area of operations at twenty-one US and fifteen foreign sites. The combination of all those people and all that technology yielded unprecedented overall results. As summed up minus the hyperbole by Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior national-security analyst,
[T]his was the first large-scale war in which the United States could fight with 24-hour continuing intelligence satellite and sensor coverage over the battlefield, as well as the first major conflict where it could take advantage of full 24-hour coverage by the global positioning satellite (GPS) system.
The United States and Britain did not have total dominance of space. Iraq ha
d access to satellites for television transmittal[,] had purchased large amounts of satellite photography . . . before the war, and it could make commercial use of the global positioning satellite system.
The coalition had so great a superiority in every area of space, however, that Iraq’s capabilities were trivial in comparison. . . . The range of space-based communications and sensor assets, and the vast bandwidth the United States could bring to managing global military operations, allowed it to achieve near-real-time command and control and intelligence collection, processing, and dissemination. At the same time, GPS allowed U.S. and British forces to locate friendly and enemy forces and both target and guide weapons.48
Did America’s increased space power benefit the twenty-five million Iraqis left leaderless by the fall of Baghdad and the capture of President Saddam Hussein in April 2003? In the end, the second US-led rapid assault on Iraq, followed by year upon year of every kind of violence, ripped the country apart. The victory proclaimed in the spring and summer of 2003 by so many US officials and commentators, and the “government in a box, ready to roll in” touted by one US commanding general, were delusions. Cordesman cautions in the opening paragraph of his 2003 book The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons, “History is filled with efforts to make instant judgments about the lessons of war that ultimately proved to be based on false information and assumptions.” He cannot bring himself to refer to the war’s end or the declared peace without alerting his readers to the falsity, even the hubris, of using those words, and so he encloses them in scare quotes: “the cost of the fighting since the ‘end’ of the war”; “the ‘peace’ that has followed.” He warns that US operations did not succeed in reducing violence and that the scale of the fighting might well broaden.
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