Big brother is watching: the integration of commercial remote sensing satellites into U.S. defense and intelligence architectures
Date
2025-03-29
DOI
Authors
Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
In the past three decades the U.S. government has increasingly adopted commercial remote sensing and imagery satellites within its military and intelligence remote sensing operations. The commercial sector, like most sectors in space, require a heavy up-front capital investment with high risk. This poses the question of why the sector developed in the first place given these high barriers to entry, what role the government had in its development, and what specific uses the government sees in commercial remote sensing. This thesis analyzes these questions and analyzes the policy development of commercial-government interactions in remote sensing, followed by a future policy analysis and policy recommendations for the sector. I find that the sector’s development was pushed by commercial growth stemming from the creation of France’s Spot Image following successful battlefield integration of commercial remote sensing during the Gulf War, which caused heightened government demand for remote sensing capability that could only be satiated by the commercial sector. The unique benefits of commercial capabilities, such as reduced barriers to information sharing, instituting redundancies into government systems, and reduce information wait times, helps explains the longevity of their integration over the creation of traditional government systems. Following this, I analyze the historical development of policy, finding key inflection points during the mid to late 1990s and the first Trump Administration, analyzing the rationale for these policy shifts and seeing their impact today. In analyzing policy development, I outline a series of faults within the existing policy framework, such as inability to address systemic differences in perspective, lackluster focus on nascent firms, and R&D disparities. In analyzing these issues, I propose a series of policy changes to address issues stemming from both these policies and historical lapses in the sector.