The continuing legacy of space and transformation - Peter Teets - Transcript

Peter Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force

Remarks at the National Space Symposium, Colorado Springs, Colo. April 8, 2003

Good evening to all of you. I am genuinely pleased to be here tonight as your guest at this corporate partnership forum. I would like to take a moment to congratulate (General) Lance Lord (Commander, Air Force Space Command) and (Lt. Gen) Brian Arnold, (Commander, Space and Missile Systems Center) and the entire Milstar launch team in Florida for their fantastic accomplishment today!

Also today, I had the good fortune to visit the very talented people at Army Space Command. I am enormously pleased with what they told me about their important contributions in communications, Blue Force Tracking, and space control. I wish them well.

I understand last year in this same forum, David Thompson, CEO of Spectrum Astro, gave an interesting talk about his views of the National Reconnaissance Office. Now, through undisclosed sources and methods, I got wind that this group was going to invite David back for a re-run, so I quickly volunteered to be your speaker tonight! Frankly, I did have the opportunity to read David's speech. While it may have been a bit uncomplimentary, I read it in the spirit that there may be a grain of truth there. This is a great compliment to the NRO. We spent some time at a recent CEO conference talking through some of his points. We always look for ways to improve our operations because we are certainly a learning organization. I am proud and pleased to be the Director of the NRO and believe we can continue to do our jobs better as we proceed into the future.

Before I launch in to my theme for tonight's talk, I'd like to take a moment to recognize that we as a nation find ourselves engaged in combat. I am pleased to say that our national security space assets are performing really well, and our support to combat operations and intelligence collection is better that it ever has been. National security space assets are giving our forces a significant warfighting advantage. It is appropriate for us tonight to recognize the enormous sacrifice our fighting forces are making-and they deserve our very best efforts and support in every way possible.

The theme of this conference is "Transforming the Future." Transformation has been a buzzword around Washington for a couple of years now, but what is it, exactly? You could probably ask 10 different defense analysts what "transformation" means, and get 13 different answers. It may not be easy to define, but it calls to mind what Justice Porter Goss once said when asked to define pornography: he replied "I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it." Tonight, I'd like to talk to you about transformation, and our National Security Space efforts to achieve it in the future. But first I'd like to reflect a little bit on the past, because, in the spirit of Porter Goss, if we know transformation when we see it, it's because we've seen it before.

It was not too long ago--recent enough that at least a few of us in this room can remember--that our nation faced a new and terrifying threat against our very homeland. In the 1950s, the world was a fairly frightening place. We were in the initial stages of the Cold War. We knew the Soviets had the hydrogen bomb--they tested their first one 50 years ago this year. We also knew, thanks to a small but very transformational object called Sputnik, that they had the means to deliver these bombs upon our homeland. This was a new and very frightening possibility.

We tried desperately to assess their level of capability with secret aircraft reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, but, after Gary Powers' shootdown in 1960, this means was denied us. Fortunately, an alternate solution was already in the works. It would operate in the new medium of space. It would transform the national security environment of the day. It was called Corona.

The NROs' first satellite program, Corona truly shocked the world of reconnaissance, and, with the completion of the second successful Corona mission in December of 1960, the Corona program imaged 3.8 million square miles of denied area, more than the coverage provided by all 24 U-2 missions conducted between 1956 and 1960. By June 1964, Corona had photographed all known Soviet ICBM sites. Corona regained for us our strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, eliminating the need for sensitive aerial overflights. But most importantly, Corona transformed the national security landscape, demonstrating that satellites could push beyond the limits of what we could achieve with traditional means.

Other examples soon followed. The NRO's early SIGINT satellite program, know as Galactic Background Experiment, or GRAB, provided an unprecedented means to map Soviet air defense radars and other systems. Also, the Air Force developed and deployed its Missile Defense Alarm System, or MIDAS, the forerunner of today's Defense Support Program missile warning constellation. These satellites, capable of detecting ICBM launches, further denied the Soviet Union the element of surprise. Collectively, these first National Security Space efforts turned the tide of the early Cold War.