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.

Novel underground facilities revisited

We had previously covered the kind of unusual civil construction which makes for good unclassified teaching examples in consideration of the intelligence challenges posed by hard and deeply buried targets. Thus we thought it appropriate to also note the excellent example surfaced by the fine gentlemen over at Coming Anarchy, which appropriately notes the difference between the uses to which sophisticated underground construction techniques are put in an oil rich democracy versus its kleptocratic and autocratic counterparts in other places also graced with the geologic accident of such resources.

More importantly, the site also demonstrates the difference between construction at a true civil site – extensively documented, widely discussed, and exceptionally transparent – vice that of the kinds of subterfuge that can be observed at other suspected dual use or known bad actor facilities.

While we are not fond of the political purposes to which the seed vault itself has now been put – the issues of exceptionally long term climate change being the least of our worries in futures scenarios; we cannot argue with the idea of a genetic Ark as insurance against a future Black Swan event. However, our thinking on the matter trends much more towards concerns regarding the other high consequence / low probability events that may occur with far less warning, such as pandemic multi-crop agricultural disease.

We also note that this particular underground facility does indeed perhaps now truly merit our earlier erroneous application of an acronym drawn from the same convention as that of the Dining FACility (DFAC). Bon Appetite.

Understanding the village

The following piece from Marginal Revolution catches our attention as yet another example of the growing utility of interdisciplinary approaches to those aspects of the intelligence that have not been traditionally served by the national and technical collection apparatus.

The tool is strikingly simple – a piece of software designed to ease data collection and processing burdens for studying epidemics in developing nations. The package will run on common mobile phone platforms, typically ubiquitous in such environments – or otherwise exceptionally cheap to obtain and circulate. Strategic communication branding, anyone?

The potential applications however go far beyond epidemiology – or even other aspects of medical intelligence. We can immediately see a use for such a tool in a number of information operations, civil affairs, and cultural intelligence settings – not to mention any of the political intelligence activities that require survey information. Less obvious mechanisms for overt human derived reporting also suggest themselves, given a degree of preparation and planning.

There are distinct limitations to what might be accomplished using this approach, but with those limitations in mind it is quite possible to develop new and innovative collection programs leveraging this capability against the kinds of questions it may suitably answer. This is precisely the kind of experimentation – and extensible designs – that ought to be coming out of the intelligence studies academia, in support of forward deployed intelligence professionals.

Once and future NIE’s on space programs

One of the great benefits to intelligence scholars in recent years has been the great number of declassified documents released from the archives, carrying significant – if often obscure – historical value. We speak not of the too common game that attempts to use such releases to catch out some supposed error of process or embarrassment of policy from decades past, revived into the current political debate. We feel such shallow attempts serve only to discredit too much of what real history can be pursued using these unique primary documents. Unfortunately, too many of those now writing on intelligence are not interested in history or tradecraft, but rather sensationalism and agenda. Despite this unhelpful trend, there are many fascinating elements to be found in the old documents for those truly interested in the study of intelligence.

Among these items, we often find surprising parallels that help to instruct perspectives on current situations through the examples of the craft of an earlier time. Our case study today comes out of our continuing interest in the development of non-state space programs, and the intelligence challenges and opportunities that these programs represent.

We note the recent news that low cost private space launch will feature prominently in the international scene during 2008 with new initiatives by a major corporate player. The news itself is interesting for those grappling the questions of assured orbital access and space control – something that the industry investment analysts are no doubt covering to a far more comprehensive degree than the intelligence community itself at this point. (After all, even NASA is seeking to leverage private sector capabilities in this area.)

Yet historical synchronicity comes when one reflects upon the older (and now declassified) National Intelligence Estimates discussing the Soviet space programs of the earliest generations in the 1960's, through the late stages of the Cold War in the 1980’s. (Many of these products may be found at the Federation of American Scientists site.)

One cannot help but be struck by a sense of having seen this before, in slight variation. While any estimate of current and future commercial space operations would certainly not be in itself a threat assessment, the framework from which most analysts would begin to approach the questions of dual use and non-state capabilities begins to hint at the what might emerge in the long out years given the inevitable involvement of other, less reputable firms as the industry matures and barriers to entry decrease. We think such an assessment – from a notional futures scenario perspective – would make for an excellent student exercise aimed at encouraging more creative, imaginative, and strategic intelligence analysis.

Blinded panopticon

Continuing the weekend’s brief examination of the more public aspects of operational tradecraft, we briefly wish to touch upon the growing phenomena of surveillance cameras in the UK.

The Ring of Steel has been heralded as the most significant implementation of ubiquitous imaging in an urban environment ever created. However, its effectiveness for primary anti-crime purposes has been questionable given the continuing increase in all manner of offenses, against the backdrop of an ever less engaged policing strategy and an increasingly dysfunctional justice system.

Nonetheless, such as system creates clear difficulties to clandestine operations in London and environs – as do less sophisticated implementations throughout Europe. But it is these program’s lesser cousins that draw our attention now – the automatic speed camera, as they have apparently also drawn the attention of less than happy local residents.

The revenue generation purposes of speed cameras and red light cameras have been debated against their efficacy in reducing traffic accidents and fatalities. However, there is definitely something highly intrusive in the state’s constant, automated presence in even the remotest parts of the countryside. This has clearly produced a significant reaction, as documented in a number of attacks designed to disable these surveillance systems.

We find it even more significant that the most effective attack is apparently a variant of necklacing, in which a subject is imprisoned within a tire doused in gasoline and set aflame. The tactic was most famously applied to human victims in South Africa and Haiti, particularly in cases where the individual was suspected of informing to authorities.

We would venture to guess that there is a psychological message here, above and beyond the practical considerations of effective TTP for attacking such installations. No doubt we will see other attacks against future autonomous capabilities also modeled on such resonant histories. (Perhaps this is an area to be further explored through efforts such as Mountainrunner’s research into the psychological impact of unmanned systems in the battlespace.)

There are also lessons here for any designer (or collection manager) responsible for large scale imaging (or biometric) installations, particularly for counterinsurgency applications and other situations where the communities under observation may share cultural commonalities to such reactions – and especially if a mediated reinforcement mechanism is developed to popularize and celebrate the results of successful attacks.

Case studies with enduring legacy

There is much to be thankful this holiday season, and it is natural at such a time to reflect back on the conflicts past, and those lost in the course of these conflicts. It is also a time to reflect upon history within the intelligence community, as our first – and for nearly 60 years, our most severe – intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor falls within these months.

Recently, new allegations have surfaced regarding what some consider to be another greater intelligence failure – the Allied ignorance of the machinations of death that were the Holocaust. This has long been an area of immense historical controversy, and present a number of opportunity to examine intelligence / policy relationships, the effects of cognitive bias, the questions of imagination (in thinking about the unthinkable), and (due to the importance of ULTRA decrypts in the overall reporting stream) decision-making in the SIGINT environment.

In short, the new claims put forth in the Hebrew language book Pazner: The Man Who Knew, are centered around supposed HUMINT reporting containing explicit discussion of the construction of camps intended for extermination operations in German occupied Eastern European areas. The reporting, alleged to originate in July 1942 from an unidentified German officer source with what was claimed to be good access, was passed through a Swiss intermediary to a Jewish Agency official. This reporting was subsequently provided to Allied intelligence, and may have even made its way to the highest echelons of the British government.

If true, it is an interesting addition to the historical case study of the Holocaust warning problem. One raw report does not warning make – particularly third-hand HUMINT from unevaluated sub-sources. However, a HUMINT source would have been encumbered by only a fraction of the difficulties of dissemination that the information provided by the ULTRA channel would have imposed. It is possible that such reporting could indeed have been the best “public case” material that could be used to support strategic communications and information operations pressure against the Nazi regime. Indeed, the source is alleged to have even proposed such a use of the information himself, recommending daily BBC broadcasts warning against the commission of war crimes. A later very similar reporting stream, which surfaced through the Riegner telegram, did become the basis of the US acknowledgement of the genocide in November 1942. Public diplomacy at the time had impact on the Nazi pogrom - and given modern experience in Bosnia, Darfur, and elsewhere - it is indeed questionable how effective even widespread public knowledge would have been in halting evil intent.

The handling of this information joins the already extant list of intelligence controversies from other collection disciplines – from the ULTRA COMINT to strategic air IMINT. The ultimate questions that are invoked, however, are ones of policy and operations – not merely intelligence. And these all continue to be well worth study – particularly in the face of the continued threat of genocide throughout the world.

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.)