US spy chief warns America’s enemies ‘you possibly can’t disguise – we’re continuously watching’

The director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in the US has issued a stark warning to his nation’s adversaries, stating they have nowhere to hide.

Chris Scolese, the head of the government spy agency, cautioned America’s enemies “you can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking,” as plans are underway to construct a network of at least 100 satellites. The NRO is utilising SpaceX‘s Starlink satellite assembly line to keep tabs on its foes. So far, more than 80 of the mass produced spacecraft have been built, with more in the pipeline.

A significant number of what the NRO terms a “proliferated architecture” will offer regularly-updated imagery of foreign military installations and other sites of interest to US intelligence agencies.

Scolese, a former NASA engineer now leading the US spy agency, stated the satellites will “get us reasonably high-resolution imagery of the Earth, at a high rate of speed”.

However, the NRO isn’t the only national security agency with its sights set on a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency is planning to initiate a rapid-fire launch sequence next year to start positioning hundreds of small satellites in orbit to detect and track missiles threatening US or allied forces.

NRO officials still anticipate the need for some hefty satellites equipped with top-notch optics to closely observe intricate details like missile sites, naval groups, or guerrilla hideouts. Yet, the reality is that these few substantial optical or radar imagery satellites can only pass over points of interest a handful of times each day.

On the flip side, with the multiple satellite formation, the NRO plans to snag images of most Earthly locations far more frequently.

Moreover, the NRO has clocked extra advantages. For big players like Russia or China, knocking out an expansive network of orbiting scouts is way harder than taking down a single spy platform. “It gives us a degree of resilience that we didn’t have before,” Scolese said.

Scolese said the NRO aims to provide useful information to federal government users as fast as possible. However, he said the large amount of data from hundreds of satellites can be challenging.

“Once you go to a proliferated architecture and you’re going from a few satellites to tens of satellites to now hundreds of satellites, you have to change a lot of things, and we’re in the process of doing that,” Scolese said.

He added with so many satellites, it “means that it’s no longer possible for an individual sitting at a control center to say, ‘I know what this satellite is doing’,” Scolese said.

“So we have to have the machines to go off and help us there. We need artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated processes to help us do that.”