The Eyes and Ears of War

Throughout the war, commanders at the operations center used the map to reroute bombers the moment targets emerged -- whether they were Saddam Hussein sightings or Iraqi missile launches. In a matter of minutes -- not hours or days as in past wars -- commanders identified targets and then sent out orders to bomb.

This compression of time, known in the military as "shortening the kill chain," was possible for just one reason: satellite information. Flowing through a network of electronic eyes and ears above Earth, information bathed the battlefield, sending location data to GPS units in tanks, messages to sturdy portable computers with the troops and satellite images to weather stations set up on the dusty front lines.

The fire hose of information from space was a little-heralded but critical part of the swift victory in Iraq, providing a different kind of shock and awe: the ability to act almost instantaneously and cripple the Iraqi army's ability to respond.

In the Iraq war, space became the ultimate military high ground.

While last year's conflict in Afghanistan saw the use of space technologies in small skirmishes, the Iraq war marked the first effort to apply them across an entire battlefield swarming with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a constant rush of tanks, jets and helicopters.

"If you ask what was the difference between Iraq's army and America's army, the big difference was satellites," said John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, an intelligence and military policy think tank based in Alexandria, Va. "And it's technology you don't even notice."

Though overshadowed by headline-grabbing pilotless drones and 21,000-pound MOAB bunker-buster bombs, the quick, quiet, almost mundane flow of electronic information -- whether from polar orbiting weather satellites 23,000 miles above Earth or school bus-sized KH or "keyhole class" spy satellites keen enough to read large newspaper headlines from space -- proved one of the U.S. military's most powerful weapons.

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