Read this in a Molly Ivins editorial the other day:
"The beauty of this, as James Bamford pointed out last week in The New York Times, is that we don’t need spy-plane flights. They’re not only dangerous – they’re dumb. You might even say they’re reckless adventurism.
“The United States has land-based listening installations that can intercept whatever a spy plane can, not to mention the equipment on our satellites, which, we used to be told, could read license plates in the Soviet Union.”
The fatuousness of Molly’s comment about satellites is pretty clear: the EP-3 Orion is for signals intelligence, not imagery intelligence like the satellites she’s describing (and even for imagery intelligence, planes can gather images that satellites can’t because of cloud cover).
But regarding the listening installations, I can’t tell whether Molly’s blowing smoke again or she has a legitimate point. And I cannot locate the Bamford article she’s talking about. What listening installations do we have near Hainan? Can their capabilities really substitute adequately for the Orion’s? Do they have Story Teller and the other goodies in the SSIP upgrade, as the Orion is believed to have? And do the listening stations really need SSIP anyway (I’ve read about the capabilities of Story Teller and SSIP about six times and I still don’t really understand how they help our intelligence people)?
From what I’ve heard the spy plane still serves a purpose.
Part of the EP-3’s mission is to get radar installations to ‘light up’ (i.e. turn on). A satellite or listening post can’t do that. How they entice these installations into turning on beyond just being there I have no idea. Either way if you ever do want to attack this particular plane flying off of your cost doesn’t raise much suspicion…it’s done the same thing daily for years.
Also, the US is very fond of exercising its right to navigate international waters and airspace. One of the surest ways for a country to get US military ships and planes off of its cost is to unilaterally extend your country’s territorial waters/airspace past the 12 mile limit imposed by international agreement. IIRC China has declared out to 200 miles to be its own private space.
You have to take into account that radio signals diminish over distance, so they’re much easier to pick up if you’re closer. Plus the U.S. is over the horizon from China, which causes problems if you’re trying to listen to most radio signals.
And remember, those fancy listening stations were placed in the optimal position to listen to the USSR, not the southern half of China. So they could do things like go over the North Pole to be the shortest distance away.
Thank you both for the info. I hadn’t even thought about the radar-probing ability of the plane. The “over the horizon” problem is interesting also; is Hainan over the horizon from Diego Garcia and Guam? We could have listening installations there, I suppose . . .
Of course, the U.S. is very big on enforcing freedom of the seas, but that doesn’t specifically have to be done with recon planes. If the recon planes are useful, by all means keep sending them; if not, let’s exercise our international maritime rights with fighters, destroyers or something else less vulnerable than an EP-3.
Big-time over the horizon. The useful horizon is about 20 miles for most installations. Towers can extend that quite a bit, and aerostats even further, but Guam is a couple of thousand miles from Hainan, and Diego Garcia isn’t even in the same ocean (not to mention belonging to the UK).
Let’s call these things what they really are - reconnaissance aircraft. Spying implies that something covert is going on - and that’s simply not true. The U-2 was a spy plane because it violated sovereign airspace, the EP-3 is a reconnaissance aircraft because it obeys international treaty.
These types of planes are good for context-sensitive intelligence. Satellites and listening posts are just buckets - they can scoop up lots of information. Finding precisely what you want can be difficult. Even if it’s tracked for a specific mission, a satellite might only be over a target area for a short period. At the listening post, unless you know EXACTLY what frequencies to listen to, you’ll just be overwhelmed with extraneous signal. Multiple reconnaissance aircraft give you the opportunity to put many people in a militarily interesting region with precise targets. They can get more detailed images and capture weak or scrambled signals that might otherwise be lost. Then there’s the human factor. Changes in activity, troop movements, unexpected developments are much more easily spotted by human observers, on-scene than some bureaucrat counting picures of docked Destroyers in a cubicle in Virginia.