Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [61]
Infrared imagery (IR) produces an image based on the heat reflected by the surfaces being recorded. IR provides the ability to detect warm objects (for example, engines on tanks or planes inside hangars). Some systems, referred to as multispectral or hyperspectral imagery (MSI and HSI, respectively), derive images from spectral analysis. These images are not photographic per se but are built by reflections from several bands across the spectrum of light, some visible, some invisible. They are usually referred to as MASINT.
The level of detail provided by imagery is called resolution. Resolution refers to the smallest object that can be distinguished in an image, expressed in size. Designers of imagery systems must make a trade-off between the resolution and the size of the scene being imaged. The better the resolution, the smaller the scene. The degree of resolution that analysts desire depends on the nature of the target and the type of intelligence that is being sought. For example, one-meter resolution allows fairly detailed analysis of man-made objects or subtle changes to terrain. Ten-meter resolution loses some detail but allows the identification of buildings by type or the surveillance of large installations and associated activity. Twenty- to thirty-meter resolution covers a much larger area but allows the identification of large complexes such as airports, factories, and bases. Thus, the degree of resolution has to be appropriate to the analyst’s need. Sometimes high resolution is the correct choice; sometimes it is not.
During the cold war it was often popular to refer to the ability to “read the license plates in the Kremlin parking lot”—a wholly irrelevant parameter. Different collection needs have different resolution requirements. For example, keeping track of large-scale troop deployments requires much less detail than tracking the shipment of military weapons. The U.S. intelligence community developed the science of crateology, by which analysts were able to track Soviet arms shipments based on the size and shape of crates being loaded or unloaded from Soviet-bloc cargo vessels. (This analytical practice was subject to deception simply by purposely using misleadingly sized crates to mask the nature of the shipments.)
Several press accounts say that U.S. satellites now have resolutions often inches. Commercial imagery is available at a resolution of 0.5 meter (or just under twenty inches), meaning that an object half a meter in size can be distinguished in an image. (By agreement with the U.S. government. U.S. commercial vendors are subject to a twenty-four-hour delay from the time of collection before they can release any imagery with a resolution better than 0.82 meter, or just over thirty-two inches.)
Imagery offers a number of advantages over other collection means. First, it is sometimes graphic and compelling. When shown to policy makers, an easily interpreted image can be worth the proverbial thousand words. Second, imagery is easily understood much of the time by policy makers. Even though few of them, if any, are trained imagery analysts, all are accustomed to seeing and interpreting images. From family photos to newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts, policy makers, like many people, spend a considerable part of their day not only looking at images but also interpreting them. Imagery is also easy to use with policy makers in that little or no interpretation