The Future of Opens Skies

Jeffrey Lewis 0:03

Over Chicago, you are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog. I'm Aaron Stein, director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Anne Pellegrino 0:28

And I'm Anne Pellegrino, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. It's raining.

Jeffrey 0:36

What is this?

Anne 0:37

It is finally winter in Monterey.

Jeffrey 0:40

Yeah, yeah. Although I have to say, I went down to the beach on Thanksgiving, which is like one of my favorite things to do, and the waves were suitably large, and it was gorgeous. Then it began to dump rain.

Anne 0:52

Yeah, I do enjoy winter here in Monterey, although the... And we needed the rain, so I'm okay with it, especially I hosted my first Thanksgiving this year for 13 people. And Friday, with the torrential downpour, I didn't have to do a single thing, and it was incredible.

Aaron Stein 1:14

You sous-vided your turkey. I did. You were sharing pictures with us over our super secret WhatsApp group.

Anne 1:20

Mm-hmm. I did. I did. Sous vided the turkey for 24 hours and then finished it off in the oven. And I got to tell you, I had nightmares the night before about it not being fully cooked, but it worked out really well.

Scott LaFoy 1:33

It looked good. I ordered mine from Whole Foods. So you certainly outdid the Sebastian family.

Anne 1:40

Many years as my mother's sous chef for our large family Thanksgivings prepared me well to take up the mantle this year.

Jeffrey 1:49

I was going to ask if you know who is a Thanksgiving turkey.

Anne 1:54

No.

Jeffrey 1:55

Tell us. Senator Tom Cotton. He's a Thanksgiving turkey.

Scott 2:00

The arms control log favorite. Good old Tommy boy.

Anne 2:03

Oh, well, we're going to talk about him today, unfortunately. And, yeah, so turkey gap gives way to sensor gap and open skies.

Jeffrey 2:15

Yeah, we are going to talk about the Open Skies Treaty, which Tom Cotton suggested should be renamed the, I believe, Russia Spies on America Treaty.

Aaron 2:26

Gave me the incentive to go back and look at an earlier podcast, Jeffrey, you and I did on, at least posted on May 22nd, 2014. We've been doing this for a really long time. I was in college.

Anne 2:39

Yeah. I didn't even know that any of this existed back then. So that's a PSA for all of the good work that people are doing to get high school students, high school and college students into this field.

Scott 2:54

I was surprised it was that long ago. I'm going to be honest. It doesn't feel like we've been doing this this long, but, you know, we continue to keep on trucking.

Jeffrey 3:02

I have this experience in my class like today – or yesterday, rather, I was teaching – The 1995 NIE on missile threats to the United States and the context in which it led to the Gates panel and ultimately the Rumsfeld panel. And so this is like my living professional life. And many of the students were born in the 1990s, so they are just looking at me like – Like, they have – the reaction that they have to that period is precisely the same as the reaction that they have to, like, the Kennedy administration.

Anne 3:40

In fairness, you exist to teach us young folk about history.

Jeffrey 3:47

Yeah, I know, but it doesn't feel great to – The whole point of your job.

Scott 3:51

You are history. Yeah, that's right. There's an age gap. So let's dive into it. We're off the rails already.

Anne 4:02

Okay, so y'all, we're going to go back to your pod five years ago and then kind of bring it up to modern day and what kind of all the kerfuffle has been in the last few weeks. The debate over open skies kind of reared its head again.

Jeffrey 4:24

I want to note, if you go back and look, 2014 is when the podcast dropped. But We were harassing the Obama administration as early as December 2012 because the Obama administration signed a presidential policy directive, PPD 15, on implementation of the treaty on open skies. And even back then, we were worried that – The Obama administration was replicating an error of error of the Clinton administration.

Like, I don't know if people remember, but the Clinton administration had the genius fricking idea when they were simultaneously attempting to secure ratification of the CTBT. They were also going to retire the nuclear sniffer aircraft. Right. Which is like, just, I mean, oh, you know, it's like, guys, you're morons. What are you doing? But so we at the time were worried they were doing the same thing.

And it turns out we were right. Actually, I harassed poor Diana Marvin. I asked her one, two, three, I think three or four different times on Twitter if they would go ahead and release a fact sheet over a period of like six months. And finally, I gave up. But that then blew up in 2014 because the Russians did update their censor packages.

And it led to a huge fight at the time, which is what prompted the podcast, because allowing what Aaron called a censor gap to open, even if it wasn't of tremendous consequence, created a political environment where opponents of the treaty could argue the Russians were getting out more of it, more out of it than we were. And therefore it was bad.

Aaron 6:25

Yeah, and I was just joking and calling it a sensor gap. You referenced Kennedy earlier. It was a nod towards the nonexistent missile gap or bomber gap. And people got really upset with me in that I was aiding right-wing talking points by even suggesting that there was a sensor gap. Yeah.

Jeffrey 6:47

By the way, I think this is one reason we lose all these debates because we are – people police language so much that we often don't have, I think, the – Full and accurate discussion that we need to have to avoid getting hit by the back truck that Tim is driving. Right.

Scott 7:07

I was just kidding because it's funny, or at least it's funny to me, and I have a very odd sense of humor.

Anne 7:13

It is funny. It was funny. When you told me what you called it, I groaned a little bit, but then I was like, oh, okay, that's funny. Yeah.

Aaron 7:23

It's because despite the Russian upgrades, there is no real censor gap. I just want to put that out there.

Jeffrey 7:27

But I call it a censor gap. I just imagine two liberals arguing with one another over some minute point of language when they just get hit by the truck and you just see Tim lean out of the window and pull the horn. Right. Eye on the prize, people. Eye on the prize.

Scott 7:50

I agree. But so let's – I mean, Jeffrey, do you want to summarize what it is that the Russians did?

Aaron 7:55

And for background, because for those of the listeners who didn't go back into the Wayback Machine and listen to the May 2014 podcast.

Jeffrey 8:04

It's that the Russians deployed a new sensor and it was a digital sensor. And so the reaction of many unwise people was to decide to destroy the treaty rather than just build a new sensor of our own.

Aaron 8:23

Yeah. And I even want to unpack that a little bit further because sensor sounds like when we say sensor, I mean, we're really talking about cameras here, right?

Jeffrey 8:32

Yeah.

Aaron 8:33

Yeah. I mean, a digital camera versus a white film camera.

Jeffrey 8:37

By the way, I don't know why digital is so much better.

Aaron 8:39

I mean, well, anyway.

Anne 8:41

I have a question, actually. So when we were talking about the digital sensor upgrade, there's that's I'm guessing this is only one one sensor that was upgraded. Like what about all of the you know, there's there is a wide range of sensors.

Jeffrey 8:58

There are four types of sensors that are.

Anne 8:59

Yes. So is this all of the sensors got upgraded to digital or was it just like the optical camera?

Jeffrey 9:10

I do not know.

Anne 9:12

Because I know there's SAR, synthetic aperture radar, and a couple other things. I don't know if it makes a huge difference, but I'm curious about that.

Jeffrey 9:24

So I do not know. The precise details of the Russian package, but there are four types of sensors. So there are panoramic and framing cameras, video cameras, infrared line scanners, and synthetic aperture radar. The sensors must be commercially available. So that every state party has access to the same capability, and the resolution of the optical sensors is limited to 30 centimeters.

Okay.

Aaron 9:51

So even if they went from, like, wet film to digital, right, just in this example, it's the same resolution.

Anne 9:57

Yeah, right.

Jeffrey 9:58

So they're just... And I suspect that there may be some issues, like, you know, we do a lot of work with determining resolution, and, like... You know, calculating the actual resolution of something I think is a little bit tricky, you know, so for example, just to pick a very practical example planet markets, their sky sat images at 70 centimeters.

But you can that is with their processing. And there are companies that purchase their images and process them themselves. And they get something that looks a lot more like 50 centimeters to me. So, you know, I should say that, you know, those kinds of restrictions. I mean, it's a limit. Right. But there's probably a certain amount of interpretation that goes in, which I could see raising some some concerns.

Anne 11:03

Okay.

Aaron 11:05

Yeah. And I think maybe we should also tell the listeners what the treaty was intended to do in the first place.

Jeffrey 11:10

Open skies. Be able to take pictures to verify arms control treaties.

Anne 11:15

Well, I was just going to say this is actually a serious point because there is, I think, a disconnect where people in the arms control community are trying to constantly explain and try to convince people why open skies is so important for arms control where – It it other people who don't really know as much about this field don't see it as like they're just like, oh, it's like spy planes, blah, blah, blah.

All of those stupid talking points. They don't really get why it actually is so important for arms control.

Jeffrey 11:52

Right. So in order to reach agreements with other countries about what kind of the number or the disposition of military forces, obviously that has to be verifiable. And so the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed. Did that with spy satellites. But we actually were able to do a multilateral treaty where many parties, including countries that were parties to the now more abundant CFE treaty.

Were able to fly aircraft on flights in order to take pictures that could be used in verification. And frankly, I think the canonical thinking of those of us who work in arms control has always been that when you have a lack of information, It tends to get that vacuum gets filled in with fear and paranoia. So, you know, poor Aaron gets beat up over the sensor gap.

But like the missile gap arises because we don't have pictures. So did the bomber gap. Yeah. And the things that you write, the U-2 dispelled the bomber gap. And well, I guess I guess the U-2 dispelled both the bomber gap and and the and the missile gap.

Aaron 13:13

I think one of the problems, I mean, as we go forward with this is that – is while arms controllers may support this and why the imagery contributes to broader understandings about implementation of certain arms control treaties, that's hard to politically sell at a time – and it's not really – Pushback against the treaty is not really against the implementation of the treaty.

It's about noise and disinformation about – I mean just to be crude, like Russian spy flights and why are we allowing Russians to overfly American territory when they have nice cameras and we don't.

Jeffrey 14:00

Right. And so we had a whole podcast basically that made the argument that we should just stop complaining and make better sensors, which, to be fair, in 2016, they finally got around to doing, you know.

Anne 14:12

But they're not on. Yeah, they're not on any planes yet.

Jeffrey 14:15

Well, they're on the old planes and not on the new.

Anne 14:16

Oh, OK. OK, OK.

Jeffrey 14:19

So in 2016, they got new censors, and I think on January 1, they're supposed to award – it said January 1, but that can't be right because who the hell is going to work on January 1? Maybe it's already been awarded. They're going to build some new planes, although probably not because the Trump administration is planning to leave the trade.

Anne 14:39

Okay. Well, so now we're up to modern day. And so bringing it back to Tom Cotton briefly, I, it would be great. I think if one of y'all could talk about, I think one of his comments that he made was, you know, why, one of the arguments is, you know, why do we need these flights when we just have our spy satellites?

And I, I was reading a different article that was talking about it's much easier to use OpenSky's acquired imagery in verification purposes rather than stuff that is taken by our spooky spy satellites.

Jeffrey 15:24

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there are – I mean, you know, the president's tweets showing off those capabilities notwithstanding.

Scott 15:35

I was about to say, a lot of things change with that one image of Iran, but yeah, okay.

Jeffrey 15:42

Yeah, you know, there is a – so, you know, 30 centimeters, particularly the video and the synthetic aperture radar, I mean, the 30 centimeters is the limit of the optical, but Having those images in a shareable format is incredibly valuable, I think. And frankly speaking, for an optical image, 30 centimeters, the difference back in the old days when spy satellites were at 30 centimeters or better and commercial satellites were at a meter, like that's a big difference, right?

There's a bunch of stuff that you can see at 30 centimeters that you can't see at a meter.

Anne 16:25

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 16:27

The difference between 30 centimeters and whatever the resolution of the image that the president tweeted out, like, yes, I can still see more stuff. But it's not as important, right? Or it's wonkier. I mean, it can be important. I don't mean to undermine its value, but like you can see a lot at 30 centimeters, right? So you can see some substantial portion of what you'd want to see.

So to have that information on a shareable basis and particularly to allow allies to be able to collect that information themselves rather than us just being in the position of giving it to them or providing it under agreement, I think is incredibly valuable.

Aaron 17:07

Yeah, I think if I can synthesize that, I mean essentially what you're saying is that allies are able to take high-quality imagery that it's not at the level of classification of like the image that the president tweeted of the failed Iranian space launch, which allows for basically the passing of back and forth bureaucratically of these things without violating whatever classification law that would be out there.

And it gives everybody like at least a level playing field to be able to take these images themselves rather than – again, things have changed a lot. But I guess flattening the – flattening of verification mechanisms to a whole multitude of states in ways that wasn't available a while back. I do think that maybe this is slightly off topic because some of the commercialization of space – of satellite imagery is – Replicated elements of this, but obviously without the nice framing of the treaty and its provisions and all that stuff.

Jeffrey 18:12

Ah, but Russian spy planes. Russian spy planes.

Anne 18:16

Russian spy plane again? Russian spy planes over Chicago.

Jeffrey 18:21

Yeah. Yeah. Which, by the way, I mean, we'll now talk about this genius, but, like, that explains why the Obama administration was so slow to figure this out.

Anne 18:30

Been waiting for this.

Aaron 18:32

Yeah. So when was this? This was in August. August. Is it 2019? I remember this tweet, and we're going to talk about it. I blocked it out of my mind, and then you reminded me of it, and it also ruined Patricia Arquette for me in movies. But, like, let's talk about it.

Anne 18:51

Okay, August 14th, 2019 was when Michael Carpenter made his fateful tweet.

Jeffrey 18:59

Jeffrey, you want to read it? Yes. I'll tell you why a Russian spy plane flew over downtown Chicago, and it has nothing to do with military transparency. In all likelihood, it was surveilling critical infrastructure. And who's Michael Carpenter?

Anne 19:14

He is the former DASD, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, for Russia, the Balkans, and Eurasia. AKA, he should have known better.

Aaron 19:25

I know. You know, when you... They weren't – oh, man. It's really hard to like wade through piles of disinformation online. And then the people that you like ostensibly can count on or at least want to count on to cut through the noise, like reinforce it. And especially when they come from the side of the political debate that is fighting to keep the treaty alive.

It's really annoying and it's just demoralizing and it – Friend of the friend of the pod, Tom Moore, who I would note was was a Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Jeffrey 20:10

Yeah, was was not amused. And my favorite tweet is like, congratulations, Mr. Carpenter. Today, you did not help. And and he included a tweet to or he included a tweet to RT picking up the. Picking up the tweet.

Anne 20:30

Who else picked it up? I beat you to it.

Aaron 20:36

Aaron, that's your cue, man. Patricia Arquette, I mean, I don't have the tweet in front of me, so somebody's got to read it, but Patricia Arquette picked it up and said something along the lines of a Bush-era treaty allows Russia to spy on America.

Anne 20:51

It's better than that, she says. Yoo-hoo! Turns out Russia's spy planes are flying around taking pictures of U.S. military bases now because of a Bush treaty. True story.

Jeffrey 21:03

I mean, it was a Bush treaty, but does that make it a bad thing? Is it okay for Republicans to occasionally be right?

Aaron 21:16

No, no, it is not a bad thing. The tweet could be phrased a nice way, you know. Republican administration sees value in, in, in transparency and enables peaceful overflight with digital camera. You know, like, like it, it's, it's one of the things, and. I think that we talked about it earlier in this podcast is focusing on the wrong things.

People busting me up over saying censor gap rather than saying this is why this treaty matters. This is why this treaty was put in place. This is how it works, and this is why the Russian plane was overflying Chicago, Mr. Carpenter, and for Ms. Arquette, also why they are allowed or at least sort of enabled – To overfly certain parts of the United States because the idea is to make the world safer and more predictable rather than give policymakers less – I guess policymakers and the public less access to information about military, about the military and about weapons of war.

Jeffrey 22:33

By the way, just a closing thought. I don't know why people are so in love with digital. You know, we do a lot of historical work with actual photographs.

Anne 22:45

Photographs are like they're better.

Jeffrey 22:48

They're beautiful. I mean, film is it's beautiful. And I find analytically staring at a film photograph in 3D, I get so much more out of it.

Anne 23:06

You should be careful about what you're saying. We also love digital, so everybody who gives us digital photographs, we love you, and you make our lives a lot better.

Jeffrey 23:17

Obviously satellites, I mean, dropping film buckets from space and having airplanes catch them is not a desirable, like I understand, satellites are going to be digital, but let me just observe that I find stereo imagery on film taken by aircraft analytically to be quite useful. And that really comes out when we work with training aids that we have, you know, looking at historical imagery.

There is just something about seeing something in 3D on film that is different than looking at it on a screen. It just is.

Anne 24:01

I understand. Yes.

Jeffrey 24:04

So this is my – what I want the X-37B to do, the little space plane. So I want them to put a film camera on it, take stereo film and fly it back.

Aaron 24:15

In the process of our conversation, we did leave something out that perhaps we should address real quickly before we wrap up, is that there are – You can't put in national caveats about where to overfly, and the Russians do do that, right?

Jeffrey 24:27

And so like – Yeah, there are definitely compliance issues for sure.

Aaron 24:31

And so I think one of your – just to bring it full circle, I mean one of your criticisms of the Obama administration is that they could have handled this better politically. They could have both made the case for the Open Skies Treaty. They could have more quickly pushed for funding to like – I guess – I mean modernize, I guess, the sensor suite on U.S. planes or build new planes for whatever reason, maybe cost-saving on digital rather than wet film.

And then three is that in the compliance report that you mentioned that we pulled away from, there is some ways to sort of – Maybe needle the Russians about some compliance issues. And would you say that's fair?

Jeffrey 25:14

Yeah. And, you know, to be fair to the Trump administration, when they are locking children up in cages, they did take some of those steps. And, you know, I think those were that was a reasonable thing to do, you know, to take measures that didn't violate the treaty that were courtesies to the Russians to say that if you're not going to if you're going to if you're going to give us a hard time, we can give you a hard time back.

Now, I don't have any problem with pushing the Russians. But it just seems like the you know, it felt to me like the Obama administration was afraid of the issue. And instead of seeing this as a a a an opportunity. To gather information and investing in it and making the political case for investing in it, I feel like they kind of acted like if they just never talked about open skies, then maybe Tom Cotton would forget it existed.

And I just – I think that was not the right decision politically.

Aaron 26:19

And I think it's probably going to cost us the treaty to be honest.

Jeffrey 26:25

Was that a direct answer to your question or did I answer that tangentially because you're just being real quiet?

Aaron 26:30

No, it's just frustrating because by allowing it to get into Congress and with no – I would say with no executive pushdown like we'll push, but we want to keep it. If Trump says that to Senate Republicans, we have no issue. We have money appropriated. You have House. On the House Democratic side, you could then find a matching compromise with Republicans.

We get our new sensors. We get our new airplane. We're talking about cash here. We push Russians where we need to. We can needle them around, but we keep the treaty. It is something that is ultimately doable if you have the buy-in. But when you let it just fester and you have flop it around like calling it a spy plane, you get the worst of both worlds.

I mean you have money sort of thrown at a problem and a treaty that gets ripped up, and you come out the other end with no treaty. And that may not affect the day-to-day operations of how we surveil the Russians, but it certainly affects global perceptions of how the United States enables multilateral surveillance of the Russians. I don't even like to use surveillance words.

You know, like overflight to the Russians. You know what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 27:43

Yeah. Well, you know, I think we lose sight a little bit of the fact that the Russians are happy to let us kill the treaty. Because at the end of the day, if the treaty goes away, our ability to fly commercially available sensors over anything in Russia is fairly limited, right? But given how general aviation works in the United States, like the ability of the Russians to put a commercially available sensor on an airplane and fly it pretty much anywhere they want is – like this is an open country.

And so it's really – The U.S. and our allies are going to lose access and not so much Russia, which, you know, one, already has that access and two, doesn't have any allies it needs to share things with.

Aaron 28:38

Is that a happy note? Is that a happy note?

Jeffrey 28:44

Yeah.

Aaron 28:45

No. No. No. I mean, but it's like we've – no, it's not a happy note, and it shouldn't be happy because – it would be one thing if we were ripping up the treaty because we had some technical reason to do so and the debate was smart. We're ripping up the treaty because the debate is stupid and we have no technical reason.

So there is no happy note to end here. We just wallow in stupidity. I'm tired. I've been up since 4 o'clock in the morning. I have a happy note for you.

Jeffrey 29:09

Yeah. We are probably not going to live long enough, given the way things in North Korea are going.

Aaron 29:15

That's the next podcast. To see the administration leave the open sky. That's the next podcast, man. That's the next podcast. Just kidding.

Anne 29:27

Just some holiday cheer that we're bringing, y'all.

Aaron 29:29

Happy Thanksgiving. And Turkey was fabulous. Even though I wasn't there, just living it vicariously through pictures shared on WhatsApp.

Anne 29:38

I will – next time – well, not next time. Whenever we end up hosting our Arms Control Walk podcast gathering, meeting of the minds, I will sous vide a turkey.

Aaron 29:52

Maybe in May.

Anne 29:53

Oh.

Aaron 29:54

Maybe. Okay. We'll see. The Stein family may be heading west for a California adventure. That's awesome.

Jeffrey 30:03

Why don't we just go to Meteora and get burritos? Okay, fine.

Anne 30:09

Oh, my gosh. We are so far gone.

Jeffrey 30:16

We will get burritos and nachos, and we will show up at Fieldworks, and we will drink beer. It will be lovely. That sounds wonderful. Your kids can run around. Well, those that can run will run around.

Aaron 30:28

So if you'd like to support Jeffrey and Anne's burrito habit, head on over. You can support the show at Patreon. You can head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for as little as $3 a month, if you're a student, you can get access to our Slack channel and $5 a month if you are just a regular person and not a student.

With that, onwards and upwards to digital photography, and let's hope the open sky street survives our current political moment.