This is from 12/31/2004 or so....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1462097RE: DLC newsletter
Reps and Dems connected by satellite!
Look at this, courtesy Center for Corporate Policy, on GNN
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In the buildup to the war the Pentagon bought up access to numerous commercial satellites to bolster its own orbiting space fleet. U.S. armed forces needed the extra spaced-based capacity to be able to guide its many missiles and transmit huge amounts of data to planes (including unmanned Predator drones flown remotely by pilots who may be halfway around the world), guide missiles and troops on the ground.
Industry experts say the war on terror literally saved some satellite operators from bankruptcy. The Pentagon “is hovering up all the available capacity” to supplement its three orbiting satellite fleets, Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association explained to the Washington Post. The industry’s other customers – broadcast networks competing for satellite time – were left to scramble for the remaining bandwidth.
Loral Space & Communications Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz is very tight with the neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration’s foreign policy ranks, and is the principal funder of Blueprint, the newsletter of the Democratic Leadership Council.
In the end, the profits from the war in Iraq didn’t end up being as huge for the industry as expected, and certainly weren’t enough to compensate for a sharp downturn in the commercial market. But more help may be on its way. The Pentagon announced in November that it would create a new global Intranet for the military that would take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. Satellites, of course, will play a key part in that integrated global weapons system.
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