Kuwait: Image Mapping - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 34

A Washington Post reporter even referred to the invasion of Kuwait itself as
a “failed exercise in cartography-by-tank.” Writing from the “steamy port town”
of Umm Qasr, Caryle Murphy noted that the border was near it, “but because
the frontier was never marked, few people knew exactly where the line lay. Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein hoped to clear up this ambiguity by invading and annexing
Kuwait.” 19
He failed, and maps were not only at the source of the dispute, but also instru -
mentalized in its conduct. The Gulf War was a battle unprecedented in its reliance
on maps, from the digital ones stored in the on-board memories of cruise missiles
to the commercial satellite data purchased by the Pentagon during the war. Para -
doxically, the detailed maps commissioned years before prefigured both the war -
time and postwar need for their extensive detail and the erasure of the lines they
interpreted: as if the possibility of this erasure, as if the war itself, were already
inscribed in the drawing of the map.
It's easy now to look at Kuwait from 561 miles above. These three images were
made from remote-sensing data gathered once every three days along the Landsat
satellite's track around the Earth. Images like this were produced before, during,
and after the war over Kuwait. Although it was widely reported that satellite sur -
veillance provided much information to Allied forces during the war, their military
imaging capacity was severely limited by weather, night, and other obstacles, such
as smoke. As one headline in the Los Angeles Times put it, “U.S. reconnaissance
satellites aren't all-seeing, so don't expect miracles.” 20
For these and other reasons, the military made extensive use of available
images from SPOT and Landsat satellite images for maps and targeting. “Satellite-
based map information of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was lacking as the Desert
Shield buildup began in August, 1990. The Defense Mapping Agency and other
organizations made extensive procurements of French Spot and US Eosat/Landsat
data to update maps as the crisis escalated.” 21 The U.S. Air Force obtained more
than a hundred SPOT scenes of the region, including many of central Baghdad,
which went into battle overlaid on pilots' digital terrain maps. “It was absolutely a
life-saver,” an officer told a journalist later. “It provided a never-before-seen capa-
bility in the field of mission planning.” 22
The Gulf War famously came to an end with a chaotic, map-driven slaughter
and the images that resulted. On the night of February 25, 1991, flying in a Joint
Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (J-STARS) Boeing 707, analysts were
mapping what has since come to be known as “the highway of death.” J-STARS
radar technology detects moving ground forces on a battlefield, superimposes
those tracks of movement on the ground onto stored maps, and distributes them
to attackers in “near real time.” That night, the J-STARS radar image mapped a