Bird's-Eye View Not So Rare

"The unique space-borne advantage that the U.S. has enjoyed over the past few decades is eroding as more countries including China and India field increasingly sophisticated reconnaissance satellites," CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a recent Senate hearing.

Tenet said adversaries are quickly learning how to take advantage.

"Foreign military, intelligence and terrorist organizations are exploiting this along with commercially available navigation and communications services to enhance the planning and conduct of their operations," he said.

In the past, only Moscow had satellite capability approaching that of the United States.

Now, with its own spy satellites, China would be able to learn of the location and composition of a U.S. carrier battle group dispatched during a potential dispute over Taiwan.

Eleven years ago, the United States threatened an amphibious assault on Iraq from the Persian Gulf before hitting Iraq's army with a "left hook" from the western flank. If Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had had access to the kind of commercially available satellite imagery now for sale, it's conceivable he could have moved his troops to meet the coalition's surprise land assault.

The latest advances in foreign countries are largely the result of their research rather than technology purchases or espionage, experts said. The United States pioneered much of the technology; now, other countries are replicating it.

"We're losing our monopoly," said James Lewis, a former Commerce and State Department space policy expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "After the war in the Persian Gulf, other countries figured out it was really good to have space capabilities."

U.S. military satellites remain the best -- they can discern far more detail and collect more images. Their numbers allow them to take pictures more frequently of a given area. A new generation of spy satellites, part of a project called "Future Imagery Architecture," is planned.

But now that other countries have access to high-resolution imagery, they can count tanks, track fleets and acquire other information useful in predicting U.S. military moves.

That means the military will have to practice the same "denial and deception" techniques adversaries have used to avoid detection by U.S. reconnaissance, experts say. Tanks are camouflaged under trees. Secret projects are hidden in buildings when a reconnaissance satellite is overhead.

During the first months of the Afghan war, the United States simply bought exclusive access to the right parts of the orbit of the Ikonos satellite, then the best commercial satellite in the skies. This prevented anyone else from having a look at Afghanistan, and the U.S. company that runs Ikonos, Space Imaging, was happy to sell.

It's unclear if the U.S. government will do that in future wars. While it can exercise "shutter control" over U.S.-owned satellites, foreign-owned satellites are under no such restriction. Foreign companies also may not want to sell imagery solely to the Americans.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who has studied these issues, suggested the military develop ways to jam satellite transmissions and prevent ground stations from receiving the pictures.

"The more information an adversary has, the more vulnerable we are," he said. "We have to think about jamming and other capabilities at the appropriate times."

Both the United States and the former Soviet Union worked on weapons that would bring down spy satellites in the event of a major war. But interest in those technologies has waned.

James also said he worries that the United States is losing its edge in building the best satellites. New restrictions on exports of satellite components, while slowing the transfer of sophisticated technology, have also caused U.S. manufacturers to close, he said. These rules were enacted after an investigation into the Clinton administration's decision to let two U.S. aerospace companies export satellites to be launched atop Chinese rockets.