The Pentagon's new strategy for global control is being tested around the world from the Persian Gulf to the Huallaga Valley. A new agency, NIMA, is advancing plans for future wars by helping to fuse high tech surveillance and weaponry.

by Randy K. Schwartz

Randy K. Schwartz is chair of the Mathematics Department at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan.

Reprinted with permission from CAQ (CovertAction Quarterly) No. 59 (Winter 1996-97) Single issues send $6. One year subscription: US $22; Canada/Mexico $27; Latin America/Europe $33; Other areas $35. Please send check or money order in $US to: 1500 Massachusetts Ave. #732 Washington, DC 20005, USA Mail, phone or fax Mastercard or Visa with address info and expiration date to CAQ: Phone: 202-331-9763 Fax: 202-331-9751 E-mail: caq@igc.apc.org

CAQ SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION CAQ (CovertAction Quarterly) has won numerous awards for investigative journalism including 5 of "Project Censored"'s top 25 stories for 1996. CAQ is read around the world by investigative reporters, activists, scholars, intelligence buffs, news junkies, and anyone who wants to know the news and analysis behind the soundbites and headlines. Recommended by Noam Chomsky; targeted by the CIA. Each article in the 64-page magazine, which is in its 19th year of publication, is extensively footnoted and accompanied by photographs and graphics. CHECK OUT OUR WEB SITES: http://www.worldmedia.com/caq http://mediafilter.org/caq

Throughout the Cold War, the two nuclear superpowers -- dug in across long-standing battle lines -- pointed satellite sensors and other reconnaissance assets toward hardened military installations. The list of targets changed relatively slowly. Today, Washington sees its security interests -- i.e., its ability to impose its will on a world scale -- threatened not by an entrenched superpower, but by local and regional crises that erupt seemingly out of nowhere. In a world in which the perceived threat could be Iraqi mobile tactical missile launchers one day and rebellious peasants in the US "backyard" the next, instant, accurate information is crucial. As former National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Director Jeffrey K. Harris put it, "silos don't move very far once they have been dug," while "mobile missiles and guerrillas are -- no kidding – very hard to locate. And once you do locate them, they're gone in a flash and locating them again means starting all over." 1

So far, in the "battle for information" the US -- with its superiority in satellite surveillance and mapping capability, along with its ability to target and rapidly deploy weapons from a safe distance -- is the clear winner. But if the US is to sustain military pre-eminence and achieve "battlespace dominance," it must combine surveillance and reconnaissance with precision weaponry and with the infrastructure of command, control, communications, computer processing, and intelligence (C4I). This "system of systems" would give US war fighters access to real-time information from all sources at the touch of a button.

This October, the US military and intelligence establishment created the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to grapple with this new challenge and create a seamless national imagery system. The new agency absorbed the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), Central Imagery Office, and CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), along with the the imagery interpretation units of the NRO, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, and Defense Intelligence Agency. More than 7,000 of NIMA's 9,000 employees once constituted DMA.2

As a single unified agency, NIMA will be able to exploit the entire range of imagery collection assets, commercial processing resources, computer archives, and on-line distribution channels. Where most of the 20 million maps and charts DMA produced annually were paper, NIMA anticipates that within a few years 70 percent of its images will be digital. This innovation will allow field commanders to access maps on-line, anywhere in the world, instantaneously. New technology also makes it possible to fuse imagery and mapping data.

Battle Tested

The concept of surge -- the ability to pounce on a hotspot at short notice anywhere in the world -- is a central component of the Pentagon's new planning. It requires instant detection of security threats and the battlespace awareness to target them and strike quickly. Because satellites do not require air supremacy, they will probably remain the most reliable way to gather overhead intelligence. A web of dozens of satellites and other spy vehicles will patrol vast stretches of the planet around the clock. Computers -- which sift the deluge of real-time, as well as archived images and maps -- will then be able to aim and cue weapons automatically.

The result, said one analyst, will be:

"a world in which the many kinds of sensors, from satellites to ship-borne radar, from unmanned aerial vehicles to remotely planted acoustic devices, will provide information to any military user who needs it. Thus a helicopter might launch a missile at a tank a dozen miles away based on information derived from airborne radar or satellite imagery. In this view, the revolution in military affairs consists of the United States' astounding and unprecedented ability to amass and evaluate enormous quantities of information about any given battle arena ... and make near-instantaneous use of it." 7

"Control from Outside"

The Gulf War demonstrated how pilots, with very little risk of ending up in politically troublesome body bags, could rain down death and destruction. The conflict gave a taste of the precision bombing that will be made possible by the fusion -- then still in an early stage -- of imagery data with smart weapons and suggested areas for improvement.

The conflict also gave the Pentagon the opportunity to battle test pilotless surveillance drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The Navy had begun pushing hard for the development of Pioneer, a 16-foot drone, after Syrian missiles downed two of its warplanes over Lebanon in 1983. The drone was jointly developed from 1985-86 by Israeli Aircraft Industries, Tadiran (owned by the Israeli Labor Party) and AAI Corp. (Baltimore, Maryland). Flying at 15,000 feet, it can beam back images to a receiver more than 100 miles away while a soldier on the ground remotely controls bearing and camera angle. During the Gulf War, in 307 combat flights, the Pioneer UAV searched out Iraqi troop concentrations, artillery and missile sites, and mines, and assisted in targeting tanks, trucks, and bunkers.8 Marine Corps Commander Lt. Gen. Boomer called it the single most valuable collector of intelligence in the war.9

Buoyed by this success, the US military is gradually replacing many of its old piloted spy planes with a fleet of drones procured by the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO). Some models under development will have infrared sensors for nighttime use and the ability to detect the launch of enemy missiles -- and intercept them with missiles of their own.10

The Middle East has been key not only to the trials and development of UAVs, but as a testing ground for the Pentagon's new war strategy. Since 1989, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), for example, have used Pioneer drones to secure its occupation of Palestine. The drones located mass uprisings, beamed down real-time images of riots to security forces, and patrolled border areas in search of guerrilla movements. 11 The information they provide has made possible a new form of occupation which the Rabin government dubbed "control from outside." Now, even without an IDF presence in urban areas, troops can redeploy on short notice. This capability was vividly demonstrated in September 1996, when Tel Aviv rushed Israeli tanks and Cobra helicopters into Ramallah and other Palestinian "autonomous" areas to quell an uprising sparked by the Israeli tunneling near the Al-Aqsa mosque.

It was in relation to the Middle East conflict, too, that mapping expertise proved its usefulness to policy makers and the military. "It is no secret," observed one Palestinian, "that the map of Oslo II, with its delineation of the three zones, had been designed by the Israeli military according to a clear military plan." 12 The Israeli-drawn maps, not shown to the Palestinians until nine days before the accord was signed, identify one zone under Palestinian autonomy, a second zone under Israeli security control with minor Palestinian administration, and a third (about 70 percent of the land) under full Israeli sovereignty. By controlling the second and third zones, and key settlements and bypass roads, Israel controls the Palestinian "autonomous" areas.

For several years, Israel has used jets, helicopters, and drones for round-the-clock surveillance of southern Lebanon, part of which it occupies. In April 1996, during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" operation, a UN soldier in Lebanon took a video which was broadcast on BBC-TV. It showed an Israeli drone flying over the village of Qana before, during, and after the savage bombardment that killed 102 refugees at a UN base. 13 An Israeli general had first claimed that a drone, sent to scout the target area, had been turned back because of clouds and had left Qana well before the shelling. The video exposed this lie, and proved that the drone had helped Israel carry out a deliberate attack on the UN compound. 14

Grapes of Wrath drove home how quickly Israel could spring into Lebanon and sent a powerful message to Syrian President Hafez Al Assad to "get with the program" of US-brokered peace treaties. It also demonstrated that surveillance, mapping, and other assets have made it militarily feasible, for the first time, for Israel to pull its troops back and dictate a tripwire "peace" with Arab forces. The Pentagon plan for global surge capability is essentially Israel's "control from outside" writ large.

Deliberate Force

The pacification of former Yugoslavia was a NATO operation to help make Eastern and Central Europe safe for Western, and especially US, financial and strategic interests. As early as 1994, US spy satellites and drones were urgently expanding the imagery archives of the region. The drones, deployed in Albania, were long-range "endurance" models called Predators, manufactured by General Atomics (San Diego). Flying at 25,000 feet, Predator's synthetic aperture radar captured live video of the Bosnian terrain at one-foot resolution-- even through clouds. 17

As Adm. William Owens, then vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said after a demonstration of Predator in 1995, you could see the city below, and you could focus in on the city, you could see a building, focus on a building, you could see a window, focus on a window. You could put a cursor around it and [get] the GPS latitude and longitude very accurately, remotely via satellite. And if you passed that information to an F-16 or an F-15 at 30,000 feet, and that pilot can simply put in that latitude and longitude into his bomb fire control system, then that bomb can be dropped quite accurately onto that target, maybe very close to that window, or, if it s a precision weapon, perhaps it could be put through the window... I'd buy a lot of unmanned aerial vehicles in the future.

The Defense Mapping Agency carried out a massive effort to upgrade more than 100 different topographic maps of Bosnia. The US later distributed nearly 3 million paper and 300,000 CD-ROM versions of these color maps in support of NATO forces. 18 The Central Imagery Office deployed local area computer networks so that field commanders wouldn't have to wait days and weeks for archived images. 19

In August 1995, when NATO unleashed the air strikes of Operation Deliberate Force, US pilots led 20-plane attack groups that also included British, French, Dutch, German, and Turkish pilots. "American air power was at the forefront of the NATO effort," wrote one military reporter, "with more than two-thirds of the 3,515 allied sorties being flown by US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft." 20

US pilots based at Aviano Air Base in Italy were at a distinct advantage. They could rehearse their individual bombing runs in virtual reality with a state-of-the- art simulator, PowerScene, from Cambridge Research Associates (McLean, Virginia). Before an actual run, pilots used the toggles, joysticks, and video monitors of a PowerScene workstation for lifelike practice. The software relied on an archive of DMA maps to identify cities, targets, and other features allowing pilots to pinpoint their coordinates simply by touching the screen.

"PowerScene helps us recognize the target better," crowed a US F-16 pilot who flew over Bosnia. "It gives the angle we'll be looking from and makes us faster at identifying targets. That can make the difference between dropping and not dropping. We come at some targets at six to seven hundred miles per hour. We have seconds to identify the target or we don't drop. The bottom line is a higher percentage of our bomb runs have been successful." 21

Brought to the table by Deliberate Force, the key powers gathered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio. DMA set up Building 834 as a map room and began working round-the-clock. As soon as a negotiator proposed a new boundary-- say the Posavina Corridor linking Serb-held areas -- the change was incorporated into a quickly printed map and displayed on PowerScene monitors. Within three weeks the negotiators drew new boundaries, imposed a constitution on Bosnia, and set up a government with links to the US and to Western financial institutions. Nine months later, President Clinton was able to call for the admission of Central and Eastern European nations to NATO by 1999.

Remote Sensing for Counterinsurgency

The Peruvian Army has received substantial help from US programs to surveil remote areas used by guerrillas. Here, troops hold people who lack proper identification.

In 1992, at then-Sen. Al Gore's request, the CIA began making satellite images for "environmental monitoring." In its new guise as nature lover, the agency formed MEDEA, a group of 60 scientists with security clearances, and asked it to advise on monitoring endangered Mojave Desert tortoises, Costa Rican rainforests, etc. 22 For about a decade, the Defense Department (DoD) has been sponsoring computer projects to automate the inspection of mammograms for the onset of breast cancer; the same technology will be useful in automating the inspection of overhead reconnaissance images. 23

An early example of how a seemingly benign project ended up serving a very lethal purpose was Landsat. When the image gathering program began in 1972, technicians at NASA and the other research labs who developed it were told that its goal was to use satellites to monitor crops, forest and water resources, survey land usage, and explore for oil and other minerals. Those scientists may be surprised to learn that the largest government user of the imagery was not the Department of Agriculture or Interior, but US intelligence agencies.24

Landsat imagery has been widely used in US-backed counterinsurgency warfare. For more than 15 years, for example, the Peruvian armed forces have used maps based on Landsat imagery in a war against the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), also known as Shining Path. When the US Agency for International Development (AID) funded the first accurate maps in 1975-78, it awarded a $20,000 grant to Peru's National Office for the Survey of Natural Resources (ONERN). The stated goal was to locate stands of aguaje palm, a potential source of palm oil, in the rainforests on the eastern slopes of the Andes. Few roads penetrated the region and cloud cover and dangerous terrain impeded aerial surveys. The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) in Ann Arbor -- which had invented the multispectral scanner technology aboard Landsat -- administered the grant. ERIM and ONERN processed Landsat images into a digital map of large sections of the jungle. 25

Work by ERIM and others to build up Peru's mapping capabilities became more urgent after 1980, when the Shining Path launched guerrilla warfare against the US-backed regime. Under the banner of "fighting cocaine trafficking," the Belaúnde government put much of the Amazon basin under martial law, bringing the army into combat against the Maoist insurgency. The US State Department set up and funded Peruvian "cocaine eradication units," actually counterinsurgency battalions, called CORAH and UMOPAR-- the latter a special new branch of the national police. 26

Helicopter-based warfare against the highly mobile Shining Path required a precise knowledge of terrain and villages, air and land routes. AID gave ONERN a $1 million grant -- many times the 1975-78 level -- to exploit Landsat images of Peru. By 1983, the first nationwide topographic map of the country was completed and by 1985, CORAH alone employed 16 topographers making detailed maps of the Upper Huallaga Valley where the guerrillas had a stronghold. 27 ERIM had a long history of counterinsurgency support. In the 1960s, it had developed surveillance systems used by US forces in Southeast Asia to detect enemy field concentrations.28

The new maps of Peru were also used for "development." AID granted $70.1 million to plan roads, bridges, power lines, and crop tests for the Upper Huallaga Valley Development Program. Designed to "win hearts and minds," such "development" schemes play an important role in US doctrine of"low-intensity warfare."

Uncorking the Genie

The captain was endorsing a trend that has reshaped everything from welfare to prisons -- the transfer of formerly public functions to corporations. In military matters as well, private industry's expertise and economy of scale often exceed those of government. Increasingly NIMA will rely on private firms producing items with dual civilian/military uses, such as flat panel displays and geographic information systems. But experts worry that in "contracting out" parts of the national security apparatus, the imagery system and other intelligence data might leak out of their control.

As one analyst put it: "The proliferation of high-resolution satellite imaging is as much a national, regional, and international security issue as the proliferation of weaponry."30 During the Gulf War, the French company SPOT suspended sales of satellite imagery except to the Allied armies, but was the only such company to do so.31 More recently, with the US decision to sell its oldest spy satellite photos for commercial and scientific use, Congress barred release of images of Israel more detailed than those available commercially. 32 That is gradually becoming meaningless as commercial imagery improves and several firms plan to launch imaging satellites and distribute their products on the Internet. As one congressional report concluded, "Where imagery is concerned the technology genie is clearly out of the bottle."33 In a 1995 case that fed such worries, the government won convictions after a graduate student stole classified mapping data from a Cornell University computer and sold it for commercial uses. The data, which were on restricted loan to the Geological Sciences Department's Andes Project, had passed through several hands by the time federal officials were alerted. Prosecutors focused on a map vendor, Bill Stewart of Cartographic Imports (Ann Arbor, Michigan). Despite his claim that he had no idea the data were classified, he was convicted for felony conversion of information, conspiracy, mail fraud, and wire fraud, and sentenced to 30 months in prison.34

The surprisingly hardball prosecution reflected real government fears. What had been stolen were DMA level-one digital terrain elevation data (DTED-1) for various parts of the world. Essentially lists of three-dimensional co-ordinates on the earth's surface at 94-meter intervals, the information is used in cruise missile guidance systems and other sensitive military applications. DoD argues that DTED-1 could give foreign armies an offensive military capability, and that its coverage areas alone could reveal priorities of US or allied military forces. In 1993, the Joint Chiefs of Staff rebuffed a Freedom of Information Act request for DTED-1. They wrote that its release "has the potential of not only disclosing operational planning but also the potential to jeopardize or significantly interfere with military or intelligence operations."35

The government is caught in a bind: Unless maps and images are digitized, they cannot be woven into a seamless imagery system; but in that form they are more vulnerable to theft and sabotage. Predictably, everybody from hackers to spies is breaking into military computers via the Internet, once an exclusively military network. Last June, the General Accounting Office estimated more than 250,000 attempts in 1995 alone; 65 percent were successful. The DoD and CIA have launched major initiatives to develop defenses against such "cyberwar." 36 In 1995, a teenager in England tapped into a computer at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, where the CIO's Bosnian images were assembled.

Concerns about information leakage have not prompted security officials to slow their race for a national imagery system. "Information supremacy may well define the US as a superpower," noted former NRO director Jeffrey Harris. "Winning wars in the information age, with US forces potentially stretched thin, will be possible because we control critical information." 37

For people around the world, however, the Pentagon's ability to patrol their land from afar and to make war on them from a safe distance is a chilling prospect. US efforts such as NIMA to fuse a system of all-source intelligence data will no doubt continue to be cloaked as initiatives for peacekeeping, environmental monitoring, scientific research and the like, but it is sobering to realize that its prime use will be to reinforce the domination of peoples and resources on a global scale.

NOTES

1. Speech at National Space Club, June 20, 1995.

2. The outright absorption of the CIA's NPIC by NIMA-- an agency overwhelmingly dominated by military personnel -- has raised fears that it will create "bias" in the use of imagery and contribute to the "militarization" of intelligence. Some national security experts recall that in the 1960s, it was the NPIC, using photos from NRO satellites, that debunked the defense establishment's claim of a "Soviet missile gap." (See, e.g., Melvin A. Goodman, "The Road to Intelligence Reforms: Paved with Good Intentions," Unclassified, Summer 1996, p. 25.)

3. David A. Fulghum, "Key Military Officials Criticize Intelligence Handling in Gulf War," Aviation Week & Space Technology (AW&ST), June 24, 1991, p. 83; Strategic Satellite Systems in a Post-Cold War Environment (Hearing Before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the House Committee on Governmental Operations, Feb. 2, 1994), p. 246; and Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence (Report of the US Congressional Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the US Intelligence Community, GPO, March 1, 1996).

4. Department of Defense Authorization for Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1994 and the Future Year's Defense Program, Hearings Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April-June 1993, Part 1, p. 503.

5. Jeffrey T. Richelson, The US Intelligence Community, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, rev. ed., 1995), pp. 32-36.

6. Speech at Marquette University, April 20, 1995.

7. Elliot A. Cohen, "A Revolution in Warfare," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, p. 40.

8. Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), UAV Annual Report for 1994-95; and Richelson, op. cit., pp. 160-61.

9. AAI Corp. web site,>, summer 1996.

10. See AW&ST, July 10, 1995 (special issue on UAVs); David A. Fulghum, "ACC Weighs Plans for New Technology,"AW&ST, April 29, 1996, pp. 38-40; and Steve Rodan, "Eye in the Sky," Jerusalem Post International Edition, Feb. 3, 1996.

11. Jerusalem Telegraphic Agency, April 28, 1989.

12. Mustafa Barghouti, "Posteuphoria in Palestine," Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 1996, pp. 87-96.

13. BBC broadcast May 6, 1996, cited in Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Report Suggests Israeli Attack Was Not a Mistake," New York Times, May 8, 1996.

14. Ibid.

15. Patrick E. Tyler "Pentagon Drops Goal of Blocking New Superpowers," New York Times, May 24, 1992.

16. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and William A. Owens, "America's Information Edge," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, pp. 20-36.

17. Walter Pincus, "Another Intelligence Image Faces Change," Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1995; David A. Fulghum and John D. Morocco, "CIA to Deploy UAVs in Albania," AW&ST, Jan. 31, 1994, pp. 20-22; and David A. Fulghum, "Predator to Make Debut Over War-Torn Bosnia," AW&ST, July 10, 1995, pp. 47-48.

18. Defense Mapping Agency web site: 2.53/information/facts/>>, summer 1996.

19. Annette J. Krygiel, "Networks Enhance Tactical Warriors' Imagery Support," Signal, May 1996, pp. 65-67.

20. Tim Ripley, "Precision Strikers" and "On Target with Deliberate Force," United States Air Force Yearbook 1996 (Fairford, UK: The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund Enterprises, 1996), pp. 22-24, 55-57.

21. Defense Mapping Agency web site, op. cit.

22. William J. Broad, "US Will Deploy Its Spy Satellites on Nature Mission," New York Times, Nov. 27, 1995.

23. Pincus, op. cit.

24. International Implications of Proposed Sale of Landsat Satellite, hearing before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, Sept. 28, 1983, p. 4.

25. Thomas L. Wagner and Donald S. Lowe, AID's Remote Sensing Grant Program: Final Report,Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, 1978.

26. International Narcotics Control Study Mission to Latin America and Jamaica, Aug. 6-21, 1983, Report of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, pp. 22-23.

27. International Implications, op. cit., pp. 51-52, 69-71; and Latin American Study Missions Concerning International Narcotics Problems, Aug. 3-19, 1985, Report of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, p. 70.

28. At that time, ERIM was a University of Michigan unit called Willow Run Laboratory, and the target of intense student protests. When students forced the university to ban classified research in 1972, the lab became a nonprofit company under its current name.

29. Capt. Rizwan Ali, 1st AF Combat Communications Squadron, C4I Professionals Archive, message dated June 13, 1995.

30. Vipin Gupta, "New Satellite Images for Sale: The Opportunities and Risks Ahead," International Security, Summer 1995.

31. SPOTLight (SPOT Image Corp. Newsletter, Reston, Va.), June 1991, p. 2.

32. The measure was included in the FY-97 Defense Authorization Act, the same law that created NIMA .

33. Preparing for the 21st Century, op. cit.

34. The grad student pled guilty and was given probation; the university was slapped with tighter security rules. (Interviews with Lew Kidder, an Ann Arbor attorney familiar with the case, Nov. 1995 and Sept. 1996.)

35. Quoted in Jan. 5, 1994 letter from Capt. L.W. Urbik (chief of staff, DMA) to Schlosser Geographic Systems to deny appeal of FOIA request 930123.

36. See the series of articles in Signal, 50:9-10 (May and June 1996); Roger C. Molander, et al., Strategic Information Warfare: A New Face of War (RAND publication MR 661, 1996); and Tom Weiner, "CIA Director Plans Center to Protect Federal Computer Networks," New York Times, June 26, 1996.

37. Speech at Rochester Institute of Technology, Oct. 23, 1995.