[Infowarrior] - USAF pulls controversial TV spot

[Richard Forno]

  U.S. Air Force pulls controversial TV spot
By BEN IANNOTTA
May 15, 2008

http://www.c4isrjournal.com/story.php?F=3530863

The U.S. Air Force has temporarily pulled a television advertisement  
depicting a missile destroying an American satellite.

The blogosphere lit up with criticism of the ad’s narration, which  
said that a single missile could knock out cell phone calls,  
television programming and GPS navigation. The ad, which ran on CNN  
and online, was part of the Air Force’s new “Above All” recruiting and  
public-relations campaign.
The service does not appear to be backing away from the ad’s fiery  
visual or its premise that Americans are more vulnerable than they  
realize to attacks on U.S. satellites. The Air Force plans to bring  
the ad back with a new story line, said Air Force spokeswoman Maj.  
Morshe Araujo.

“The Air Force stopped airing the spot due to a misleading statement  
about the ability of a single missile to take out multiple satellite  
capabilities,” Araujo said, adding that new language is under review.  
“We’re looking at the story board and making sure it doesn’t have any  
misleading statements.”
The service completed pulling the ad May 14.

In the ad, which still appears on the YouTube.com Web site, a  
satellite floats above the Earth while a narrator warns: “What if your  
cell-phone calls, your television, your GPS system, even your bank  
transactions could be taken out with a single missile? They can.” The  
satellite then explodes.

GPS experts said it is true that cellular-phone communications and  
bank transactions would crash without timing signals from the Air  
Force’s GPS constellation. The precise timing signals ensure that  
millions of communications do not collide with each other as they  
course along crowded airwaves and fiber-optic cables. But several GPS  
satellites would have to be destroyed to disrupt those services, they  
said. The same thing could be accomplished, though temporarily, if an  
enemy were to use ground transmitters to jam GPS signals at key  
communications installations.