Turkey’s military satellite program: a model for emerging regional powers
by Taylor Dinerman

_ 74/1_
()
Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Turkey’s air force is planning to spend at least $200 million to
buy and launch an electro-optical reconnaissance satellite with
a resolution of 80 centimeters. They hope to have it in orbit and
operational by 2011. They are apparently not going to impose the
onerous "local content requirements" that have recently bedeviled so
many Turkish military procurement programs. This suggests that this
is being treated as a priority and the Turkish military is not going
to allow local industrial politics to get in the way of their need
for broad, persistent, and sovereign regional observation.

As a NATO member Turkey has some access to information from US
satellites, and they can also buy imagery on the open market from
Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, or others. In spite of this, they want to
have their own satellite and later they will surely want to have
an all-weather radar imaging system and multi- and hyperspectral
capability. Turkey is in a geopolitically rough neighborhood, and their
need to be able to keep track of what is happening throughout the
region is all too obvious. Space-based observation is one important
way that they can keep track of activities in places like Armenia,
Iraq, or the Aegean Sea, where Turkey’s national security interests
are at stake.

The lack of "local content requirements" suggests that this is being
treated as a priority and the Turkish military is not going to allow
local industrial politics to get in the way of their need for broad,
persistent, and sovereign regional observation.

For $200 million Turkey may be able to buy a satellite with the
resolution they want. However, it may not work as well as expected,
because for that price they cannot expect to buy sophisticated
pointing, maneuvering, and field-of-view technology. Effective
space-based reconnaissance, even for a medium-sized power, depends
on a minimum level of space situational awareness. Not only do they
need to know exactly where their satellite is at all times, they need
to also be able to precisely control where its sensors are pointing.

There is also the problem of communicating with the satellite. Imagery
requires a lot of bandwidth: the bigger the antenna and the more
powerful the transmitter, the easier it will be for the Turks to
download the data. This adds to the system’s complexity and expense,
and also requires one or more large ground stations. Since they will
be using it for regional monitoring they do not need the expensive
relay systems used by the US and other global powers.

They may find, though, that it will be difficult to gather timely
imagery from places like Afghanistan or Central Asia, where Turkey
has significant interests.

Turksat, a government-owned civilian corporation, owns and operates
three Alcatel-built satellites (with a fourth under construction) that
provide direct broadcast and other communications services to Turkey
and Central Asia. This has given the Turkic-speaking peoples of that
geopolitically sensitive region access to the Turkish media and helps
Ankara compete for cultural, economic, and political influence against
the other major regional powers such as Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India,
and China. The military reconnaissance program, as currently defined,
will probably not give their government much, if any, information from
these countries, but will instead concentrate on taking pictures of
nations that directly border on Turkey.

More and more nations understand that the one place from which they
can legitimately spy on their neighbors is low Earth orbit (LEO) and
they rarely hesitate to do so. No nation in a zone of conflict–or
potential conflict–can escape the need for situational awareness,
and only observation satellites supply that need. From this fact two
things follow. One is that without a highly trained and experienced
team of imagery interpreters an expensive satellite’s information is
useless. Any nation that buys a satellite without insuring that it
has at least as much money to spend on people as it does on hardware
is wasting its money and probably deluding itself as well.

For the last four years Turkey has been sending a number of experts
to the European Union Satellite Centre in Torrejon, Spain. There
they received training in satellite imagery interpretation and
management. By the time the first Turkish imaging satellite is
launched in 2011 Turkey will have a good-sized cadre of experts. Since
Turkey is already buying imagery from commercial sources, they are
building the imagery archive that is indispensable for any nation
that wants to make real use of satellite reconnaissance. This program
is obviously pragmatic and well thought out. The prestige of owning
such a spacecraft is a minor consideration compared to the overall
practical need for information.

A second issue that a nation such as Turkey has to take into account is
that, with more and more observation satellites up there, nations and
organizations will find themselves making ever greater efforts to hide
their activities underground or under the anti-satellite surveillance
systems know as "roofs" . This limitation does not mean that satellites
are useless: the same problem existed when the only eyes in the sky
were propeller-driven aircraft with " wet" film cameras. It does mean
that satellites, and the men and women who examine their pictures, are
going to be engaged in an eternal game of hide-and-seek. All-weather
radar imagery and multi- and hyperspectral data will help to defeat
some types of camouflage, but for Turkey to think that a satellite by
itself provides them with a sure and reliable source of information
on their region is to open the door to dangerous surprises.

Any nation that buys a satellite without insuring that it has at
least as much money to spend on people as it does on hardware is
wasting its money and probably deluding itself as well.

The bright hopes of the early 1990s that Turkey would be able to
provide a bridge between the newly independent nations of Central
Asia and the West have long since evaporated. The neighborhood
from the Balkans through to Chinese Turkistan and, of course, Iraq
is over-endowed with angry, violent, and well-armed groups and
governments. Turkey’s armed forces are engaged in a low-level war
against the terrorist PKK, they are committed on a small scale to the
NATO force in Afghanistan and have to cope with dangerous dictatorships
in Syria and Iran as well as with the complex struggles ongoing in
the Caucasus.

Under these strategic circumstances, Turkey’s decision to acquire an
independent satellite surveillance capability is a wise one. They do
not intend to waste their resources on a techno-nationalist prestige
program: the situation is too serious for that. Someday, no doubt, the
Turks will be able to build their own satellites. For the moment they
are using the "smart buyer" approach. If they stay on this track they
will be a model for other medium-sized nations who need the regional
situational awareness that only a LEO-based spacecraft can provide.

Taylor Dinerman is an author and journalist based in New York City.