No one expects commercials to be word-for-word accurate — not even ads from the U.S. military. But a new Air Force commercial, about the perils of an attack in space, does more than stretch the truth, a bit. It snaps the truth into tiny little pieces, experts and former officers say — violating the laws of physics and common sense, while flying in the face everything that’s known about the world’s constellation of satellites.
"What if your cell phone calls, your television, your GPS system, even your bank transactions, could be taken out with a single missile?" the military ad asks. "They can."
No, they can’t. Not unless there’s some new missile out there that can strike dozens and dozens of targets, spread out over thousands and thousands of miles. Even a nuke in space wouldn’t do the trick.
Communication, television and navigational systems are handled by different arrays of satellites. Each craft in the constellation is set apart by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. And each constellation is thousands of miles from the other. At least ten thousand miles, for example, separates the arrays of communications and GPS satellites. The communications birds are typically positioned in geostationary orbit, or GEO, about 22,000 miles away from Earth. The ring of 32 GPS satellites, on the other hand, circle the planet in a Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO, approximately 12,000 miles up. There’s no missile that can hit two targets that far away from one other. (In fact, there’s no anti-satellite missile, taking off from Earth, that can even reach GEO or MEO. China’s satellite-killing missile only reached up to about 540 miles.)
And even if such a weapon was one day invented, it still wouldn’t cause much more than hiccups in your GPS or bank service. Because "while it is true that a single ASAT [anti-satellite weapon] could theoretically take out a single satellite, none of the services mentioned in the commercial rely on a single satellite," says Brian Weeden, who served nine years in the Air Force’s space and missile corps. "I find it distressing that the Air Force would resort to such fear-mongering."
Take GPS. There are 24 of those satellites. Blasting one of them might slow up your car’s navigational system for a little while. But one missile could in no way bring down the entire constellation. "It is impossible, period," says the Center for Defense Information’s Theresa Hitchens.
"We do lose satellites, you know. They die all the time," adds our own Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on space security (among other things) at the New America Foundation. "When the Galaxy IV [telecommunications satellite] croaked, there was a real problem for the pagers in the U.S. But we got over it. E ven if you whack one satellite (which is really a collection of transponders), the service could simply lease more space. The point is that with debris, the harsh environment of outer space and Murphy’s Law, that we don’t have a single satellite in orbit that is irreplaceable. Because it would go dead at the worst possible time."
And, of course, not all of the services mentioned in the Air Force’s ad rely solely on satellites to function. "Cell phone calls are not, generally speaking, dependent on satellites. Indeed, that is why they are not called satellite phones," Lewis quips. "Nor does television (or radio), with the exception of DirectTV and satellite radio. So, you lose porn and Howard Stern, but PBS keeps going." Even banks — which do use GPS to track the timing of their transactions — have terrestrial, fiber optic backups.
"It is clear that the Air Force is preying on the lack of public understanding of the threat (and space in general) in an attempt to convince voters that space is important too and only the US Air Force can protect America in space,’ Weeden notes. " After years of trying to convince the politicians that areas such as space situational awareness needed more funding and failing, the Air Force has turned to another method to get its message across: fear."
Because Air Force Space Command can’t even do that much against the kind of satellite-killing missile depicted in the ad, Hitchens observes.
The anti-satellite ad is part of an $81 million marketing push to " reinvigorate America’s love for fighter jets and high technology, and to highlight the service’s wartime activity," as the Washington Post put it. Most of the commercials in the series make no explicit attempt to recruit new airmen. And the service is currently looking to pare back, rather than increase, its workforce.
Which leads John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, to say, "I am at a loss to understand the statutory authority under which the US Air Force can spend my money in propagandizing to me that they are doing a great job of spending my money. This advertising initiative is without precedent, and if it is not illegal it should be."
