Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [59]
In 2007, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, noted that commercial imagery and online mapping software allowed anyone detailed knowledge of potential targets. Deptuta also acknowledged that this capability could not be controlled or reversed. A sense of the power of these commercially available capabilities can be had from the August 2007 announcement by Digital Globe, a U.S. commercial system, prior to the launch of its WorldView-1 satellite. This satellite will be able to revisit a site every 1.7 days and will be capable of taking images of up 290,000 square miles (750.000 sq. km) a day, with a resolution (see below) of 0.5 meters (roughly 20 in.). Interestingly, WorldView was developed in cooperation with NGA to ensure continued access to high quality commercial imagery. Shutter control (that is, who controls what the satellites will photograph) is already an issue, for example, between those in the U.S. government who seek to limit photography of Israel and those who own the satellites. Dramatic changes occurred in the U.S. use of commercial imagery during the Afghanistan campaign (2001- ), affecting each of these issues and perhaps suggesting a new relationship between the intelligence community and these commercial providers.
Finally, open-source information is growing rapidly. The collapse of a number of closed, Soviet-dominated societies drastically reduced the denied targets area, that is, target areas to which one does not have ready access. One intelligence veteran observed that during the cold war 80 percent of the information about the Soviet Union was secret and 20 percent was open, but in the post-cold war period the ratio had more than reversed for Russia. Theoretically, the greater availability of open-source intelligence should make the intelligence community’s job easier. However, this community was created to collect secrets; collecting open-source information is not a wholly analogous activity. The intelligence community has had difficulties assimilating open-source information into its collection stream. Moreover, the intelligence community harbors some institutional prejudice against open-source intelligence, as it seems to run counter to the purposes for which the intelligence community was created.
SATELLITE VULNERABILITY. As much as technical collection satellites are national assets, they also represent points of vulnerability. During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union both considered deploying antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, and both nations tested ASATs. There were efforts to negotiate a specific ASAT arms control treaty but these did not prove productive. However, in a series of treaties limiting or reducing strategic nuclear weapons [the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) agreement, Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, SALT I and II Treaties, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)] both nations agreed not to interfere with one another’s “national technical means” of collection (NTMs), a euphemism for the satellites. Both nations appeared to agree that strategic stability depended on knowing what the other state was doing, rather than operating blindly in a crisis.
In the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union there were frequent press reports that an apparently impoverished Russia had, at best, only a few operational imagery satellites. Some reports suggested that, for periods of time, the Russians were “blind.” This could be seen as dangerous not only by Russia but by other states as well, again fearing miscalculations during a crisis.
The United States is extremely dependent on satellites for intelligence collection, for communications, and for a host of