SATELLITES: KEY TO VICTORY?

Since the fall of Baghdad, just about every media out­let has anointed a tech­nol­ogy as the deci­sive fac­tor that “won the war.” The Los Angeles Times takes its turn today, nom­i­nat­ing mil­i­tary satel­lites as the gee-​​whiz key to vic­tory.
“Though over­shad­owed by headline-​​grabbing pilot­less drones and 21,000-pound MOAB bunker-​​buster bombs, the quick, quiet, almost mun­dane flow of elec­tronic infor­ma­tion — whether from polar orbit­ing weather satel­lites 23,000 miles above Earth or school bus-​​sized KH or ‘key­hole class’ spy satel­lites keen enough to read large news­pa­per head­lines from space — proved one of the U.S. military’s most pow­er­ful weapons (in Gulf War II),” the paper says.
“If you ask what was the dif­fer­ence between Iraq’s army and America’s army, the big dif­fer­ence was satel­lites,” John Pike, direc­tor of GlobalSecurity​.org, told the Times.

Allen Thomson, a retired intel­li­gence ana­lyst now liv­ing in Texas, said the most impor­tant satel­lite assets in this war were “the unglam­orous ones” that sup­ported com­mu­ni­ca­tions, nav­i­ga­tion and mete­o­rol­ogy. These include the military’s star per­former: the Air Force Space Command’s behe­moth “Milstar” satel­lites, 10,000-pound switch­boards in space that pro­vide secure voice and data com­mu­ni­ca­tion around the world. The num­ber of satel­lites of all types used in the war is esti­mated to be nearly 100.
While allied forces were flush with data com­ing in day and night, Iraqi offi­cers appeared to be oper­at­ing with very lit­tle good infor­ma­tion, experts said. At times, the Iraqi lead­er­ship was send­ing orders to units that no longer existed.
“Our side knew where all of our forces were at any given moment and the other side did not,” said Steven Aftergood, a senior research ana­lyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “It sounds sim­ple, but it’s actu­ally a sig­nif­i­cant tech­no­log­i­cal achievement.” 

In January, I wrote about the military’s grow­ing depen­dence on satel­lites for Wired News. That reliance will only increase, as the Pentagon con­tin­ues to add to its satel­lite array. The mil­i­tary recently launched three birds in about a month, from March through early April.
THERE’S MORE: Aviation Week has its own ideas about what brought down Saddam.
According to the mag­a­zine, “The star of the war… was a ‘ruth­less, star­ing con­stel­la­tion look­ing at Baghdad’ made up of UAVs, U-​​2s and other intel­li­gence gath­er­ing air­craft that blan­keted Iraq for weeks before the actual fight­ing started.“
The relent­less attacks before the war’s offi­cial start on Iraqi anti-​​aircraft sys­tems didn’t hurt, either. A month of strikes — more than 4,000 sor­ties — left Iraq’s air defense radars “silent for the most part.“

“We spent a lot of time tak­ing out SAMs and radars and break­ing open fiber-​​optic vaults, try­ing to make [Iraqi] com­mand and con­trol more dif­fi­cult and vis­i­ble to us so we could hear what they were say­ing and suck up the infor­ma­tion that we needed,” said a senior Air Force offi­cial. That effort resulted in the tip-​​off about Saddam Hussein’s where­abouts that launched the con­flict with a raid on Iraq’s senior lead­er­ship. “Within 4 hr., we had four bombs down in the bunker,” he said. 

April 24th, 2003 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.