Initial operational capability, GeoEye-1

Congratulations to the GeoEye team for a successful flight and successful first light. We hope their bird will fly for years to come, and peer deep into the shadow which surrounds our enemies.

We recall waiting anxiously for news of earlier payloads carried aloft for the old Orbview constellation, and the bitter shock of the failures which only contributed to the phantoms of the imaginary constellations. We are glad to see that this time around there appear to have been no mishaps.

We do find the initial target selection amusing, and we are sure that there is a backstory there somewhere waiting to be told. There is something about small, out of the way Pennsylvania colleges and the intelligence community, isn't there?

We also continue to be impressed by the rate at which spatial resolution capabilities continue to advance within privatized capabilities, which at 16 inches is certainly nothing to disregard. (By way of comparison, this is roughly the equivalent of published resolution figures for the KH-8 GAMBIT series, active in the early 1980’s).

We are pleased to note that far from arguing that commercial capabilities have nothing to offer the intelligence community, a substantial part of the mere $502 million price tag – including satellite, launch, insurance, financing and four ground stations – was paid by the National Geospatial Agency. The fact that additional funding was provided by Google – no doubt to improve the future of its Earth application series and the advertising revenue stream provided thereof – merely reinforces the fact that the commercial satellite imagery industry has certainly come a long way in the past decade. Much of this progress is due to the impact of the Long War, but equal credit is due to the fundamental changes in the way the average consumer now uses overhead imagery derived geospatial products.

Imagine what kind of constellation could have been orbiting, however, had even half of the $18 billion or so publicly reported to have been wasted on the disastrous Future Imagery Architecture instead been allocated towards a common architecture populated by Space Imaging, Orbimage, and Earthwatch / DigitalGlobe in the late 1990’s. It is the ghosts of these constellations which might have been that will most haunt us in the coming decades, we should think.

So as the engineers, mission specialists, and managers of the GeoEye program continue their celebrations in the coming days, we hope they will also lift a glass to the the birds who didn't make it, and those that never were. We certainly shall.

Applications in commercial overhead imagery for stability and support operations

We continue to be impressed with the uses for commercial overhead imagery which the private sector now increasingly relies upon in an astounding array of situations. While none of these applications are new from the perspective of an intelligence community which has been employing national technical means to similar ends for decades, their independent re-discovery in the outside world, and operationalization in support of crisis situations, remains fascinating from the perspective of intelligence studies scholarship.

The most recent example comes from the conflict in Chad - which provides an excellent and evolving unclassified teaching case to explore the issues involved in small wars and destabilizing countries, particularly for the unique kinds of intelligence support required in noncombatant evacuation operations and other stability and support missions. UNOSAT has recently released a series of products derived from commercial satellite data which attempt to estimate the scale of urban evacuation of the capital of N´Djamena.

In the long ago forgotten history of commercial satellite imagery in the 1990’s, many early papers were written describing the potential impact that the availability of these then futuristic capabilities would have on the international community’s attempts to assess these kind of crisis events – which were frankly the dominant mission of the day. While many crises have come and gone since then, we have seen only a few efforts truly utilize open source imagery analysis during such events to produce truly effective intelligence support. This is a fundamentally different order of thing than how most NGOs and press organizations have attempted to use imagery, and the team which generated it is to be commended for their work. It should also be held up as a model to be emulated in future crisis situations by both the NGO and the PMC sectors; and as such studied by future generations of analysts that may find themselves employed as intelligence professionals in those sectors.

h/t War and Health

Implications of publishing open source IMINT analysis

Some time ago, we added the excellent IMINT & Analysis blog to our sidebar for further watching. The effort is a superb example of the quality of contributions that can be made from unclassified, open source research through the application of basic analytic tradecraft. It pains us that this was not more routinely done by others in the space years ago. The technologies have been in place for some time – all that was lacking was the right mind and a willingness to devote the energies such a project would require.

To be sure, individual findings from selected research – such as Chechen urban battle damage assessments, PRC submarine activities, and the recent destruction of the Syrian suspected nuclear facility have all been chronicled using imagery. But the systematic assessment of multiple imagery sets in order to produce and publish something akin to finished geospatial intelligence is another matter entirely. Frankly, all that is lacking is cross reference to BE numbers, else one could easily mistake this as the output of a government system stripped of its markings and logos.

On the one hand, this is an unprecedented teaching opportunity for new analysts coming out of the academic side of the house. Geospatial intelligence has long been among the hardest of disciplines to inculcate within the student cohort, and many promising analysts have no doubt been steered in other directions simply by the lack of availability of resources and expertise to inspire them to pursue the path.

However, the wider availability of such products does raise concerns regarding the potential to feed adversary denial and deception efforts. High resolution commercial imagery has long carried the risk that adversaries without access to, or understanding of, the true nature of imagery collection would evolve more rapidly means to defeat such systems based on new commercial products. These risks are magnified when one can begin to glimpse the thought processes and tradecraft applied to imagery intelligence problems over the course of the production cycle.

We believe that the publishing of these kinds of finished products on an open blog such as IMINT and Analysis is not itself the problem. The real challenge arises out of the changing nature of the information environment itself. When the potential for such developments exist, they will inevitably arise in one form or another. It is better to consider their implications from a perspective of open discussion, than to attempt to second guess the effects of such activities in another context – for example perhaps that of an adversary’s intelligence service’s open source unit conducting their own version of a Red Cell assessment.

There will never be another day in the 21st century when the adversary will have less access to what was once the most sophisticated of the 20th century intelligence technical collection techniques than they do at present. The means by which such technical means may be defeated will only be easier as time passes, technology grows more common and less expensive, and the understanding of these systems from civil applications and open sources grows more sophisticated. The denial and deception problem - applied in the context of national technical means - will only get harder. The challenge to the Intelligence Community is to accelerate the pace of innovation in order to overcome the adversary’s attempts no matter how much easier the deceiver’s task may become in the future. Towards that end, we strongly suspect that the robust discussion of analytic tradecraft – including counter-deception – will do more to advance that innovation within the intelligence profession than in a closed and narrow conversation from a limited range of perspectives.

OXCARTs and ARCHANGELs in the night

With the installation of the new display up at the main campus, there has been a lot of interest and discussion of the old OXCART program. We think this comes about not only from the inherent technical coolness of the aircraft and its mission, but from the deep desire of the new generation to connect with their Cold War predecessors – and the more recognizable operations of the past. Today’s activities, even those conducted in the far flung corners of the globe, are more likely to involve commercial off the shelf items and kludged and duct-taped solutions than the things of precision and beauty that were the bespoke instruments of the community’s past.

To be sure, there is still – and always will be – a certain amount of specialized hardware, and a few new cutting edge platforms. But this new age is a very different one – dominated by Small Stuff, and dual use. The community as a whole has not yet figured out how to build monuments to those efforts. We do frequently wonder, for example, how the historians of tomorrow may look back to commemorate the major events of the present day, such as the detention and rendition program. But those are questions that can only be answered by another generation.

We have no doubt, however, that the historians – at least those inside the community - will do so to their usual standard of excellence. Thankfully, great efforts are being made to ensure the preservation of unique history regarding programs such as OXCART, including the recent release of an excellent study looking at the trials and successes of the unique aircraft, its designers, and its crews. In addition, we look forward to the eventual product of the oral history program that has been diligently recording the memories and observations of those that were there at the beginning.

There remains yet plenty of research for those in academic intelligence studies that would seek to assist the current generation in finding its roots in the community’s history. We hope to see more work soon emerge to serve this need – and particularly in the areas where there might not be a large or photogenic monument with which to start a story.

A glimpse of Porter’s Five Forces at work in the commercial imagery industry

Not so long (chronologically) but an eternity (in terms of privatization concepts) ago, the first generation of high resolution commercial space based imagery systems for intelligence came into existence. These architectures – and their operators – spent far longer than they ever should have needed to in fighting for their rightful place at the intelligence table. The very idea of private sector capabilities usurping the government monopoly on overhead systems was so unthinkable for many within the community that had the Long War not gone hot and every second of imaging capacity been desperately needed, we might never have seen the development of the industry – let alone the remarkable directions that it has trended towards in the hands of the Google / Keyhole team.

At the dawn of its earliest, hard fought, and tentative acceptance, another new technology was emerging. Unlike the expensive and arcane world of satellites, the UAV offered an immediate, accessible, and understandable tool to the community. More importantly, it was a technology they could directly control throughout its full life-cycle – and that is critical to a certain kind of procurement and operations mindset.

Needless to say, the UAV has been a Very Good Thing for the GEOINT community – and at the same time, opened new frontiers in the mix between collection, analysis and warfighting. But these systems largely remain dedicated to looking at the battlespace through a soda straw. It is for that reason that many of the proponents of imagery intelligence continue to dismiss the idea that UAV’s will ever compete with the better resourced national technical means – or even their commercial imaging counterparts – in providing theatre-level and strategic IMINT.

The true dynamics of competition are very rarely understood within the halls of government, and too often likewise among the contractors which are ever so sensitively attuned to non-rational markets dominated by government dictum that they can no longer recognize the forces at work in the open market. (There is a reason why the Long War’s most popular acquisition programs have occurred through proponency from the ground up – often by individuals and small units voting with their feet, and government cards.)

Thus we note with interest the first indicators that the received wisdom regarding the relative competitive positioning of UAVs versus other more traditional overhead systems may soon be subject to radical change – brought on by pressures along a different axis of Porter’s Five Forces model.

The home-built UAV market is emerging in fascinating ways from a simple, if obscure, hobby, into much more sophisticated technical and conceptual approaches. Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) is doing much to advance it through his own efforts, including integration of imagery collected through these personal UAV systems into a coherent processing framework – in this case, the ubiquitous Google Earth.

In a way, it is fitting to see that private hobbyist efforts may yet open new vistas for imagery intelligence – just as they did in the earliest days of “photographic intelligence” by balloon, bird, and kite.

We certainly think there are a few lessons being taught to the community here. In our mind’s eye, we see these lectures being given by the Mechanical Turk, with texts provided by Yochai Benkler, in a classroom not too dissimilar from what one might find in Second Life.

A launch not to be missed

For those of our readers with continuing interest in space operations and GEOINT, we highly recommend the launch show for DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 tomorrow (and for those with invites, the launch party...)

Commercial imagery has come a long way indeed, largely a result of the unprecedented demand for IMINT in the post 9/11 world, but also driven by new commercial markets and unimagined systems of access and display that broke overhead systems out of the realm of the arcane and into Everyman’s reach.

These birds were a story of dot com innovation and the bruising realities of the bubble (does anyone recall how many failed to make orbit successfully? … especially those on the Russian PROTON launch vehicle… but in the 90’s, surplus Soviet ICBM boosters seemed like a cheap orbital access option. In retrospect, perhaps not so clever, but it was the era of early post-Wall globalization.)

Space operations are incredibly demanding, but those involved in birthing this amazing capability in its first private sector incarnations rose to the occasion. It is impossible now to imagine how we once taught the art and science of imagery analysis outside of the classified realm (using only the few dozen of declassified images released from national technical means, usually from air-breathing platforms and always highly obfuscated.)

The new generation of systems will offer half meter resolution – something deemed impossible (for the private sector) less than a decade ago. And most critically, commercial imagery has won over the last bastion of resistance – not the cloistered world of the IC (who at least recognized a good thing when they saw it in operation), but the insular world of the academics who are the primary users of overhead imagery for scientific research. The argument has advanced a long way from the early days of the quasi socialist impulse of free “open access” to all imagery “in the name of science”, regardless of acquisition, transmission, and storage costs. (While we support open access to publications and journals, and might have supported it for overhead imagery of scientific value, we recognized that the capabilities required a market mechanism to support its continued operation and development. Open access journals have gone much further to solving that – albeit for a function requiring smaller cash outlays.)

The continued expansion of commercial imagery constellations raises fascinating issues for space control debates, especially given the recent hostile actions demonstrating PRC anti-satellite and counterspace capabilities. The spectre of space warfare has the potential to dramatically alter the insurance implications for operating an expensive and difficult to maintain on orbit asset, complicating private sector efforts in the area. Likewise, engagements of private sector systems by nation-state offensive capabilities will raise not only the prospect of conflict initiation, but also a host of legal and financial repercussions which are difficult to predict in advance. Indeed, the prospect of court ordered asset seizures in compensation for the loss of the platform may at some point even weight into the balance of deterrence (assuming rational actors and a continued desire on the part of the hostile country to maintain ties with the global economic system.)

The first generation of academic papers – most out of the khaki tower of the military war colleges and service schools – helped pave the early way for what would happen when commercial imagery became operational reality. (Even if, as always, real world events progressed far faster, and far stranger, than any prediction could foretell.) Much remains to be explored in terms of how the capability might yet evolve, and the new structures and systems that might yet be forged to exploit these unique eyes to solve new geospatial problems.


h/t O’Reilly Radar

Brandy with the Mechanical Turk

We have long been staunch advocates of commercial overhead imagery systems, and from the earliest days of their uncertain launch and performance we would vocally proclaim their potential to any and all – most of whom who would darkly mutter about NIIRS, classification, and mission availability.

However, commercial IMINT has so far exceeded any hopes we could have dreamed in the early days of the 90’s, having been brought to widespread use by Keyhole / Google on a scale previously unimaginable. The resulting sophistication of new processing techniques – from humble mash-ups to the surprising benefits of the open source model of many eyes – has given us great reason to reconsider the infamous “bottlenecks” in the architecture of other national technical means. Perhaps it is not the nature of the problem that has so bedeviled those of us seeking to expand the percentages of raw take examined for interpretation and analysis, but rather the model of the solution which is defined so very much by implicit and unquestioned assumptions.

The strange case of a missing billionaire “adventurer” has given us further evidence that other production models may well exist. High resolution imagery was acquired by a private donor’s tasking of the DigitalGlobe constellation, and it has been populated into Amazon’s innovative Mechanical Turk system – a fascinating technology designed to facilitate the development of architectures of participation to effective harness ad-hoc volunteer efforts. The system’s name, of course, derives from the famous chess playing automaton of the 18th century Austria-Hungarian court.

We wish the searchers bonne chance, for we know well the damnable difficulties of wide area search problems. We would also hope that any of our readers in the professional geospatial community might consider lending their unique talents and expertise to the search. (Those wishing to do so may contribute at the Steve Fossett Missing Mechanical Turk page.) We hope that a suitable flask of good brandy – in the model of the Saint Bernard rescue dogs – is close at hand on the day of the searcher’s success.

The effort is a dramatic example of innovation, however, that will have utility to the GEOINT community long beyond this crisis. This may well be the esteemed Mr. Fossett’s greatest legacy to the intelligence community – although we do hope he returns safely to provide many more candidates for nomination. We could easily see a trial program initiated for similar analysis of open source imagery and geospatial extraction, through an albeit less public architecture. USGIF certified schools and other intelligence studies programs would be a natural first home to such an experimental platform. This may also bring IMINT and geospatial analysis instruction into the mainstream of the intelligence studies curriculi, despite having long languished in the backwater of a narrowly perceived technical corner.


h/t Slashdot

Let’s go fly a kite…

As the summer is full upon us, and we occasionally find our counterparts escaping the vault to the beaches and parks (at least in the nicer geographies of community assignments), we would reflect on a fine old intelligence tradition, the use of the humble kite for intelligence and reconnaissance applications. Unlike its more well known cousins in the balloon corps, the kite’s role is usually given short shrift in most intelligence histories.

From the humble hobbyist origins (like much of the intelligence field), the kite would become an occasional player in the early acquisition of military photographic intelligence (as it was called in the day). Frankly, the kites were probably no more or less effective than the other contemporaneous imagery collection platforms: balloons, pigeons, and compressed air or gunpowder rockets. The kite photography apparatus also provided one of the earliest examples of the use of imagery intelligence to support civil disaster response in wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Later efforts evolved in which the kite would be used as a type of manned reconnaissance platform, the Bachstelze (in English, "Water Wagtail") –towed by a submarine, no less – certainly testing the mettle of those assigned to such a unique watchstanding position.

Kite photography has returned to its civilian origins, once again a hobbyists activity. However, it is intriguing to speculate on what the history of UAV platforms might have been, had the early kite systems not been abandoned in favour of other systems, but continued to progress during the long years of WWII and the Cold War. Such thoughts are a pleasant diversion for idle summer afternoons.

Knowing indicators

It seems that commercial overhead imagery continues to change the manner in which key national security issues are examined in public debate. In the past several days, commercial imagery provided new evidence regarding the nuclear activities of two major hard targets – PRC and Iran.

This is not the first time such revelations come from open sources with capabilities previously reserved only for nation state level intelligence agencies. In many ways, this is a very good thing. We can remember a time when the discussion of, say, a new type of Soviet SSBN would have been cause for a decade’s worth of debate on whether such a platform existed or not; as many in the debate challenged the old Soviet Military Power publications and mocked its hand drawn art. (In reality, much of the old DIA art was deliberately used to depict systems which had only ever been imaged from classified sources, and therefore needed a layer of comfortable abstraction in order to be introduced into the public view.) Certain parties, no matter how little credibility their arguments might have had, still managed for years to cloud issues for which concrete evidence existed simply due to their refusal to accept its source.

A more informed discussion about the implications and consequences of these activities can now occur, given the public availability of such indicators from sources other than the intelligence community itself. But we would caution those who wish to pursue any current account through open sources alone that there is always more to the story, and that the gaps in one’s knowledge may significantly outweigh the conclusions which can be effectively drawn from limited public and gray literature information.

We also note that these types of publicly “found” indicators emphasize the traditional strengths of IMINT and overhead collection systems – military/industrial targets with larger activity and support infrastructure footprints. We would challenge those seeking to pursue commercial overhead imagery sources to search for the more elusive targets of non-state actors in the global disorder – and in so doing, hopefully to refine and present new methodology for finding and identifying such faintly visible prey that would benefit both the intelligence community and the academic side as well.

Denial and deception for beginners

In the wake of recent discussions over the future of imagery constellations, we note the following item of interest over at Arms Control Wonk. While we often disagree with the learned Herr Doktorprofesor on matters of interpretation and intent, we respect the analytic rigor with which he approaches problem sets.

It is somewhat distressing to see this same rigor applied towards determining optimal activity scheduling windows for counter-IMINT denial and deception. (We will not comment whether we believe he is right or not in his tables, but we do note there are other variables in these equations.) But, as he notes, adversaries are very much capable of accomplishing the same thing using the efforts of Western hobbyists, commonly available open source software, and myriad open source publications both online and in the gray literature.

D&D is insufficiently appreciated nor considered, especially by policymakers who, no matter how often they may be briefed, confuse “The adversary is concealing critical information” with “I don’t know” - two branches of the same tree, but with very different fruit. It is too rarely taught in the academic environment, nor introduced into exercises and simulation. It can challenge the best planned effects based operations, and frustrate every attempt at operational net assessment.

But it is never perfect, and it can be defeated by aggressive collectors and good analysis. There is quite a body of deception and counter-deception literature in the public domain, which is well worth the reader’s time.

But most importantly, it is vital that the next generation of collection programs be accelerated in order to ensure that the adversary is never able to consistently defeat US technologies and approaches. It is the intelligence version of the age of race between armor and bullet, and in this case our bullets must always be capable of piercing any shield. Too often this is forgotten in the day to day fights over acquisitions and policies, when the realities of limited capabilities and high demand / low density assets still loom large in our thinking.


h/t: Image above is from Analytical Graphic’s excellent STK product, which we highly recommend for those that have a need to do real space operations and GEOINT analysis on a more than occasional basis.)

Thinking spatially in the Parallel World and beyond

We are quite used to grappling here with the issues created by the emerging importance of the Parallel World of the nets in the consideration of current and future intelligence challenges. It is one of our enduring areas of fascination – from the conflicts to the concepts. Over at the End of Cyberspace blog, there has been an ongoing locus in the conversation for some time now on what exactly the generation after next communications technologies will look like, which we have been following based on its implications for our interests.

The fine authors there now note a particularly interesting paper by Nigel Thrift, which although burdened with a regrettable volume of academic jargon and fuzziness, raises interesting concepts regarding the conceptualization of space, time and communication.

Those that recognize our long-standing interest in the convergence of these subjects will note the similarity to the Proteus Insight of Starlight. As the original Proteus study’s authors wrote:

“Perspective is everything. Not until late in the 19th century did science discover that the night sky has depth as well as breadth, that constellations not only are in the eye of the beholder, that they are distant illusions. By the early 20th century, when quantum physics wed astronomy, the illusion became deeper. However we characterize the apparent pattern of the clusters, the light we see in Manassas or Arizona takes about 400 years to reach us from the nearest star in the group. Each night in the sky, there appears an event that is already over. We are seeing the past in the Present.
"We can think of no better metaphor than Starlight to characterize the central problem for the Intelligence Community as it looks toward the future. Whether we examined the world of a criminal mastermind, of virulent disease, or a high-technology space race, the pattern of events in that world commonly turned on three characteristics: complexity, venues, and time - all of which can be captured in the metaphor of Starlight.”
We find these mirrored in the focus of the Thrift paper, which outlines the transformative effects of technological contexts on human activities, in particular focusing on time-space, sensorium (perception), and language.

We are particularly struck by the line “Vocabularies of spatial configuration will multiply.” One of the more difficult aspects we have found in teaching geospatial and imagery intelligence disciplines to new analysts is the lack of the ability to verbalize many key concepts, except through abstraction or practical demonstration. It is for the lack of such vocabulary that we believe these particular disciplines have so long languished in the academic intelligence studies field, and that the traditional players within the intel academy have so poorly addressed geospatial and imagery education needs. (In addition to the barriers to entry posed by systems technology support requirements or access to high quality imagery sources, Google Earth notwithstanding).

The academy’s failures in the area of geospatial intelligence education are sorely in need of correction. Thankfully, it seems that hope is in the horizon, as the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation pursues its efforts to spread a model curriculum throughout the intelligence studies field. We wish them the best in their labors, and deeply hope that the increased focus in this area will yield not only new solutions to the classic real world spatial intelligence problems, but those of the Parallel World, and the interactions between the two planes as well.

He who owns the platform….

It is fascinating to watch the evolution of Google in the public consciousness. It is now considered by many, even those who should certainly know better, as a public utility. Of course, it is no such thing – as a private company, it is responsible first to its shareholders (as long as it infringes no laws) and only then – in the name of public relations, not any imposed responsibilities – should it consider other questions of corporate “social responsibility” and related questions which fall under the realm of philosophy

It is thus with grim amusement we note the recent controversy over Google’s choices in datasets populating its Earth imagery application. It is even more ironic that the furor appears to have been sparked by the use of the application by analysts who ought to have better sources at their disposal, but were apparently (surprisingly) unwilling or unable to rely on traditional government imagery product providers – even given the availability of robust support from efforts such as the National Geospatial Agency’s Commercial Imagery Program and embedded support elements throughout the homeland security and consequence management communities.

We have seen the same debates play out at the birth of the commercial imaging industry over everything from shutter control (whether out of legitimate national security concerns or over-hyped privacy debates) to scientific access "rights". At the end of the day, it is sound and fury signifying nothing – the platform is what matters, and he who controls that sensor will continue to be the defining factor.

What we find even more interesting, however, is that Google has changed the traditional view of what that platform actually itself is. Previously, we (and no doubt most of our counterparts) would have assumed that the platform was the sensor (and constellation.) After all, within the Intelligence Community it is generally the owner of the satellite or air-breather itself that has the defining throw-weight in any argument over tasking and dissemination.

Google has radically transformed the commercial imagery field, at least in its popular application. To be sure, GIS systems and finished imagery analysis still occupy their traditional market segments, but the entire market share of what one might consider “mass simple viewing” is essentially owned by the search engine – not the imagery provider. The new balance of power driven by this dynamic no doubt suits the management of the imagery collection systems well. After all, whether air-breathing or space-based, these are fields where technical skillsets predominate in order to tackle difficult technical problems that a generation ago were the sole provence of national government efforts (like many other collection challenges), and Google’s successes in popularizing imagery can only drive new innovation by non-traditional users while the providers focus on core business issues.

There are lessons here for the Intelligence Community on unanticipated higher benefits which occur when the raw material of collection is made available to a wider community, both to the substantive analysts as well as the continued success and relevance of the provider itself.

(Graphic above is of the next generation WORLDVIEW imagery satellite - courtesy of Digitalglobe).