President Barack Obama is expected to approve a new constellation of highly classified multi-billion dollar spy satellites in the next few days, injecting a major new expenditure into the Defense Department budget that was not planned when the administration began its budget deliberations.
The debate between the intelligence community and the military over this system has been particularly sharp. In the words of one Hill source familiar with the issue. A deep path has been worn between the Pentagon on this one, the source said.
Gates and Blair signed a classified memo approving the program on March 30, according to two sources familiar with the program. Details of the program are highly classified. A DNI spokesman had not responded by the time we posted this story but may provide details later.
However, we have obtained a few details in the meantime.
The system may cost $3.5 billion to get started, if earlier estimates are accurate. It may cost up to $10 billion, over the next five years depending on which technical approach was approved and on how many satellites will be built.
The Hill source said that the DNI and Pentagon would have great trouble paying for the system. I dont think they can come up with enough to pay for two-plus-two, the source said, refusing to add any details.
Read the rest of this exclusive story at DoD Buzz.
– Colin Clark
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t understand why are they continuing to push expensive and long development time sats? I thought everyone including Gates has seen that we need to go with quick deployment, short developement, easily replaced sats that would essentially network their coverage. This would lead to “graceful degradation” if systems were taken off line.
What happened?
I can see your point nick. How often are sats obsolete by the time there put up?
Though if there thinking of building upgradable ones then it can make sence companies are looking into how to do it remotly now.
pfff…3.5 to 10bil…thats nothing…but of course that is for defense…
Nick and Valcan, the reality is that we need both classes of sat, but the immediate priority should be for a rugged network of many small sats that can be rapidly launched, quickly repositioned, and (relatively) cheaply replaced.
But also, the cutting-edge super sats are great to have because of the amount of tech and size of the imaging devices you can load onto them. Fidelity is critically important in many situations, and you only get that from aperture combined with corrective, adaptive imaging adjuncts when peering down a gravity well through a turbulant atmosphere.
So while the big sats are critical to a balanced NRO *INT program, they are also a big target and significant point of failure, which is where complementary space-based reconnaissance cloud initiatives come in. But unfortunately, funding still seems to swing more in favor of the big birds and the two programs are considered to be in competition with each other rather than viewed as complementary.
I presume the reference to “Gates” is to U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates. Who is “Blair”? Generally, one makes a first reference to a person by full name or, at least, by title.
As long as we don’t pull support for Human Intelligence, I’m all for it.
Some administrations will rely more heavily on electronic or signal intelligence and pull funding for boots on the ground.
Especially now that our major threat comes from terror cells we need undercover agents more than ever…
I’m assuming you mean Dennis Blair?