http://www.msnbc.com/news/1000470.asp?pne=msntv
'Eyes in the sky' flying blind?
Experts troubled by 'too few' spy satellites to track terrorists
By Lisa Myers, Doug Pasternak and the NBC News Investigative Unit
NBC NEWS
Dec. 2, 2003 - The National Reconnaissance Office launched a
new ocean surveillance satellite Tuesday morning in California. Experts say
it's
sorely needed because there are too few U.S. spy satellites to track all the
world's current dangers. An NBC News investigation has found there are major
problems with the old satellites already in orbit.
MANY SPY SATELLITE experts fear that the planned next-generation satellite
system, which has encountered technical
troubles and massive cost overruns and is now years behind schedule, will not
be delivered before the old satellites die out.
Intelligence sources tell NBC News that the last launch of a similar ocean
surveillance satellite in September 2001 suffered from technical problems
making it much less accurate than planned. The constellation of electronic
eavesdropping satellites flies in formation tracking warships or steamers
controlled by al-Qaida, says Loren Thompson, a military space expert at the
Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank. This is merely the
latest disappointment for the nation's troubled spy satellite program, a
system mostly built for the Cold War, which is now aging and severely
overtaxed. "The United States spy satellite program is in something of a
crisis," says Thompson. "Its photoreconnaissance satellites are
having trouble keeping up with the threat, and the enemy has learned how to
hide a lot of its transmissions from the electronic eavesdropping
satellites," he observes.
Moreover, the targets are no longer static missile silos; they're terrorists
on the move. "Today we're looking for guerrillas, we're looking for
terrorists. Finding those sorts of targets with our existing satellites is
nearly impossible," says Thompson.
MORE SATELLITES NEEDED
And there simply aren't enough photographic or eavesdropping satellites up
there now to cover all the world's hot
spots. National security sources tell NBC News that U.S. spy satellites were
pulled away from tracking al-Qaida in Afghanistan because of the war in Iraq.
And, on some days, sources say the United States has no intelligence
satellites at all watching Russia's nuclear arsenal. "Our spy satellites
are so few in number," says Thompson, "that even when we have them
all trained on a single country, most of the time they're out of range and
can't see what we need them to look at." How can this happen? A
former director of the National
Security Agency tasked with eavesdropping for the U.S. military and
intelligence community blames the agency in charge of building satellites, the
National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, for squandering resources. "We're
not getting what we could get for the money and we're
probably not getting the performance we used to get." The mission
of the NRO is to develop national photoreconnaissance and eavesdropping
satellites for the U.S.
intelligence community. The agency's satellites have proven critical to U.S.
national security in the past and are crucial to the future security of the
United States, say intelligence experts. But former NSA
director Lt. Gen. William Odom and others say the NRO's focus on developing
intelligence-collection capabilities solely deployed in space has hindered the
nation's ability to gather critical intelligence. "The
NRO will spend everything it can in space at the expense of collection systems
on the ground, in the air and at sea," says Odom.
OTHER SPY TECHNOLOGIES
Satellites still have a crucial role to play, but the advancements of new
technologies are making their utility far more limited than they once were. In
order to eavesdrop on fiber-optic lines, for instance, the lines need to be
physically tapped on the ground.
These communication modes do not provide signals that can be picked up by spy
satellites lurking overhead. What's more, a scathing report by the
Pentagon's Defense Science Board warns that the program to develop the
nation's next-generation imaging satellites, called the Future Imagery
Architecture program, is "technically flawed" and "not
executable,"
plagued by inadequate testing and schedule delays. The delays are not
inconsequential. Intelligence sources and military space experts say the
delays in delivery could cause a significant satellite gap. "It would
expose us to significant risks because it would interrupt our ability to cover
most areas of the world with high-resolution imagery," says William
Schneider Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board. "And because we are
very dependent on that imagery to make intelligence assessments, it would
severely weaken the
ability of the president to have a full picture of what's going on," he
warns.
TESTING LACKING
The problems with the next-generation satellites under development, says
Schneider, were very significant. "Systems were being designed that could
not be built for the price they were estimated to cost." As a result
testing was drastically reduced on the new satellites. "The lack of
testing made it impossible for you to verify your systems design, and because
you couldn't verify your systems design, you didn't know if it was going to
work when you completed the construction of the satellite," he says.
Meanwhile, the NRO insists these problems are being corrected and that $4
billion is being poured into the $25 billion
program to get back on track. But government experts aren't certain the new
technology will be up to the challenge ahead, meaning the president may lack
crucial intelligence on some of America's most formidable adversaries.
"If we don't have better satellites and we don't have them soon, we may
not be able to see the next big danger until it's too late," warns
Thompson.
