{
  "id": "2006-september-october-tracking-problems-with-us-sky-spies",
  "slug": "2006-september-october-tracking-problems-with-us-sky-spies",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2006-september-october-tracking-problems-with-us-sky-spies.html",
  "year": 2006,
  "month": "September-October",
  "monthNum": 9,
  "headline": "Tracking problems with U.S. sky spies",
  "kicker": "SPOTLIGHT: MILITARY MANEUVERS",
  "author_name": "Mike Fabey",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "Aviation Week/Aerospace Daily",
  "summary": "Reporter Mike Fabey used federal contract databases and technical research to investigate budget overruns and mismanagement in the Pentagon's classified satellite programs.",
  "keywords": [
    "satellites",
    "Pentagon",
    "federal contracts"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Public Safety"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Federal Contracts Database",
    "Internet"
  ],
  "full_text": "Space proved to be – if not the final frontier, certainly a new one – for the military trade publication Defense News. The newspaper, where I recently worked as a reporter, had blanketed other military programs, but never those in space. Our editors decided to change that and assigned me to dig up what I could on Pentagon-related space programs. It promised to be a fruitful fishing expedition. The Defense Department had mismanaged nearly every space program it had – most of the satellite systems were billions of dollars over budget and months or years behind schedule. The question was this: what could I find that was different and had not been reported before? I simply could not serve up a reheated story. But I also knew that for all of the coverage, there had been relatively little analysis, especially financial, to put it into context. Database analysis of program spending played a key role in reporting the story. I started by contacting longtime source Loren Thompson, a space expert at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia, a think tank advocating free-market policies and limited federal governance. Thompson told me the one topic that had not been looked into for years was the development problems of the nation's eavesdropping satellites and provided some starting information. But I needed to learn a lot more to report on classified projects that few people would want to talk about on the record. Most of the material was highly technical, and I needed to find expert guides. I studied books on basic communications and the science of radio waves. I read more than a dozen technical books on satellites, the history of U.S. eavesdropping, space communications, and so on, for a basic understanding of the technology and the jargon of the field. I also read nearly 30 articles from periodicals and after-action reports from Marine and Army divisions involved in the invasion of Iraq. Because the focus of my stories was on the money issues, I read and reviewed a score of budgets, military planning documents, selected acquisition reports, special intelligence studies and other documents. I rounded this off with a file drawer full of company reports, studies and brochures on the capabilities they were promising for commercial and military use. I focused on the companies that are the main satellite builders or developers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Most of these sources are available online. A good Pentagon budget summary for key programs is in the Selected Acquisition Reports at www.acq.osd.mil/ara/am/sar. As I read all of the reports, the outlook seemed gloomy for the U.S. spy satellite programs. American eavesdropping and eavesdropping satellites, many built years ago to keep tab on the former Soviet Union, are proving ineffective in the war on terror, thanks to prevalence of the Internet and cell phones. The U.S. military and intelligence communities are trying to fix the problem with costs at $60 billion and climbing. The military's main satellite-builder – the National Reconnaissance Office – is struggling to maintain its relevance as critics charge the NRO is obsolete and out of touch with its \"customers.\" Defense Week purchased an updated federal contracts database from the IRE and NICAR database library. (For more information see www.ire.org/datalibrary). The database includes detailed information about federal contracts, including those with the Defense Department. But I needed a way to find the satellite contracts I wanted. In some cases, the word \"satellite\" would not even appear in any of the contract fields, so I needed to find a way to capture any of the possible contracts for that work. Most would be funded by Air Force, the military's financial clearing house for most satellite work, even for intelligence spacecraft. I called up www.defenselink.mil and searched its Pentagon contracts, plugging in \"satellite,\" \"space\" or other terms. I learned the different possible contract numbers and types of services. I then used these contract numbers to find contracts and modifications in the Federal Contracts database from NICAR. Armed with that information, I used Microsoft FoxPro 2.6 database manager to hunt through each year's data to find groupings and amounts of contracts (space, satellites, classified, etc.) Then I used SPSS statistical software to do some of the statistical work on those groupings. It's easier and much more versatile when working with millions of records. I used SPSS to look at the percentage differences for classified and unclassified contracts. While I could have done this with FoxPro, it would have taken longer. Also with SPSS, I broke out other percentages for different types of contracts – by military service, contractor, and so forth. Most of the contracts I was trying to examine dealt with classified programs and could not be identified easily. In some cases, sources helped guide me. In others, I tailored my queries to find contracts dealing with \"space services\" or \"telecommunications.\" During the reporting I also put online contract information in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Access database manager for further analysis. When the analysis was done, I learned that most of the satellite contracts were classified. Classified satellite programs had grown by one-third between 2001 and 2004, as had military contracts overall. Brad Peniston, my managing editor, and I decided to start publishing stories so we could develop sources and build credibility on the subject as we published. Our first story focused on the growth in satellite classified contracts, and the difficulties federal agencies such as the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office faced in analyzing program spending. The stories that followed zeroed in on the satellite program difficulties. I had a good foundation, but I needed sources to put it in perspective so I reached out to experts via ProfNet (www.profnet.com), an expert-finding service run by PR Newswire. I joined organizations like the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which is a great resource. I also talked to executives in companies doing commercial satellite work. While officials doing government work could not discuss classified programs, they could talk about their commercial work in similar areas. As they had to overcome many of the same technical hurdles in the commercial arena, their perspective was pertinent. Also by writing stories about the commercial side of the business, I developed contacts, expertise and the trust of the satellite executives. We had decided to run the hardest-hitting piece – detailing the NRO's woes in trying to build the next generation of eavesdropping satellites – in April, the same week of the Air Force's key space-systems conference. The NRO said nothing about the piece. When dealing with classified systems like this, the only time when you hear from the folks you're writing about, is when you screw something up so we knew we were right on target.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
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      "slug": "2006-september-october-federal-contracts",
      "score": 0.185
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