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around Moscow during parades so they could be repeatedly counted by U.S. personnel in attendance, thus inflating Soviet air strength. The use of decoys or dummies to fool imagery, or false communications to fool SIGINT, also falls into this category. In World War II, the Allies exploited these techniques prior to D-Day to raise German concerns about an invasion in the Pas de Calais instead of Normandy. The Allies created a nonexistent invasion force, replete with inflatable dummy tanks and streams of false radio traffic, all under the supposed command of Gen. George S. Patton. In August 2006, the British Ordnance Survey, which is responsible for all official British maps (and traces its heritage back to 1791), announced that it would end an 80-year program of falsifying maps. During World War II, sensitive sites had been deleted from official maps to thwart German bombing targets. The British government noted that this deception policy had been made obsolete by high resolution satellite imagery and sources available on the Internet.

The intelligence community has devoted ever-increasing resources to the issue of denial and deception, also known as D&D. Intelligence officials seek to know which nations are practicing D&D, determine how they may have obtained the intelligence that made D&D possible, and then seek to design countermeasures to circumvent D&D. As more information about U.S. intelligence sources and methods becomes publicly available, D&D is an increasing constraint on U.S. collection.

However, D&D is also a complex analytical issue and must be approached carefully. Assume, for example, that a potentially hostile state, which has practiced D&D, is believed to be fielding a new weapons system. Collectors are tasked to find it, if possible, but they cannot. Why? Is it a case of D&D or is there no system to find? One cannot simply assume that failed collection is a result of D&D. The completely innocent state and the state with very good D&D both look identical to the observer. Thus, within D&D analysis lies the potential pitfall of self-deception. (One intelligence community wag put it this way: “We have never discovered a successful deception activity.”)

RECONNAISSANCE IN THE POST—COLD WAR WORLD. The U.S. intelligence collection array was largely built to respond to the difficulties of penetrating the Soviet target, a closed society with a vast land mass, frequent bad weather, and a long-standing tradition of secrecy and deception. At the same time, the primary targets of interest—military capabilities—existed in extensive and well-defined bases with a large supporting infrastructure and exercised with great regularity, thus alleviating the problem to some extent.

Does the United States require the same extensive array of collection systems to deal with post-cold war intelligence issues? On the one hand, the threat to the United States has lessened. On the other hand, intelligence targets are more diffuse and more geographically disparate than before. Also, some of the leading intelligence issues—the so-called transnational issues such as narcotics, terrorism, and crime—may be less susceptible to the technical collection capabilities built to deal with the Soviet Union or other classic political-military intelligence problems. Many of the current collection targets are nonstate actors with no fixed geographic location and no vast infrastructure that offers collection opportunities. These transnational issues may require greater human intelligence, albeit in geographic regions where the United States has fewer capabilities. At the same time, nation-state problems remain in North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Thus, it does not make sense to abandon entirely the old method of collection, and doing so would be fiscally impractical as well.

Commercial overhead imagery capabilities can be used to augment national systems. Systems such as IKONOS, LANDSAT, SPOT, a have ended the U.S. and Russian monopoly on overhead imagery. Any nation—or transnational group—can order imagery from commercial vendors. They may