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Satellite Access in Time of War
miladus writes "Interesting report in the Washington
Post this morning about how the Pentagon is buying access to commercial satellites to meet its bandwidth needs. Most of the commercial access will be used for backup to the military satellites and for non-military tasks. And the Pentagon has to compete on the market with all the news organizations trying to cover the conflict in Iraq."
It seems more likely to me that they'd be given carte blanche out of either patriotism, or the desire to capitalise on same ("Hey look, we gave more than anyone else to the War Effort").
Find public companies that own satellites inolved in this and invest heavily for one to three weeks.
Deep pockets are going to fight over limited resources - which means a lot of money is going to be exchanged in the short term.
Assuming that they satellite companies don't offer some sort of bargain deal or preference to the military/gov't, then they are looking to make a metric crapload on this.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Somehow the constructive side of the Pentagon's use of these satellites eludes me :-)
If you're the biggest customer, you would have the added benefit of being able to task sats not only to cover what you want, but also to *not* cover areas you'd just as soon commercial services not have access to.
The Pentagon "is hoovering up all the available capacity," said Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association, a trade group.
I can't tell if he's amazed or excited. Chances are DalBello is calculating his stock options as we speak. War will always make some people millionaires.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
It looks like the Govt. is not only buying up bandwidth, but also commercial satellite photography services.
I don't htink USA has any shortage of imaging tech., most probably trying to stop Saddam from buying the images
How are they going to stop bin Laden tho. , how long can they monopolize commercial satellites?
Scary.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Silly. The military has plenty of bandwidth, they buy up commercial bandwidth during conflicts to keep bad guys from using it. They probably buy up bandwidth and then sell it back to CNN and other friendly services, maybe at a loss, but it's just another mechanism for controlling information in the battlefield.
I merely said bias.. few, if any simply REPORT the news now, its all commentary based interpretation of the news.
Thus why I said biased. I'm not making judgments of which side is right or wrong.. Only that its no longer simple news reporting.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
*lol*, yes, it was an amusing choice of words :)
But seriously, having a large technological edge over your opponent allows you to reduce civilian casualties in war.
Suppose satellite (GPS) guided bombs and satellite (spy) pictures relayed by satellite (communications) allowed us to whack Saddam last night and to prove we'd done so to the world - including Iraqi soldiers. The war could be over by this time tomorrow.
(In fact, based on what I saw on the news and the blogs overnight, even if half of it eventually turns out to be disinfo/psyops, I'm still just about ready to wager that this war will be over by this time next week.)
Time when data is valuable is probably quite short. And decrypting and analyzing data may take quite long.