The Satellite Wars

Fahmi Rizwansyah says:

On March 19, 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair sent coalition armies, air forces and navies to liberate Iraq. Guided by GPS space satellites thousands of miles overhead, cruise missiles opened the war with a "decapitation attack" from warships in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, while stealth fighters dropped precision bombs, also guided by GPS satellites.

Space is an integral component of United States military planning. A sure sign of its essential nature can be found in the dozens of satellites from the United States and its international coalition partners that supported military campaigns in the Republic of Iraq in 2003, the Islamic State of Afghanistan in 2001, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999.

Satellites don't attack directly, but rather they offer what the Pentagon calls "force enhancement" — surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, navigation, missile warning.

The spy satellites. The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) operates satellites for the U.S. intelligence community. American reconnaissance spacecraft, including the NRO's major equipment, are launched to Earth orbit by the U.S. Air Force and are known by a variety of code names. They are spysats and they include these general types:

• optical satellites that use a large mirror to gather visible light for photography -- like a Hubble Space Telescope pointing down at Earth rather than looking out into deep space,
• infrared and ultraviolet satellites that record invisible infrared and ultraviolet light from below,
• radar imaging satellites that uses microwave signals to peer through cloud cover and scan Earth's surface,
• combo radar, optical, infrared and ultraviolet satellites that see wide areas of Earth's surface with more detail than the separate types,
• signals intercept and detection satellites that tune in on radio, telephone and data transmissions,
• ocean observation satellites used to locate and determine the intent of ships at sea.
  

One of NRO's mottos is "We Own the Night," indicating the agency's ability to collect data anytime of day in any weather anywhere.

from www.spacetoday.org
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