[wideminded]

The thing I find confusing is why spy satellites have seemingly not helped to find the WMD in Iraq. I am assuming that Saddam still had major WMD programs. Yet we don't seem to have a single clue about where he stashed the evidence. The satellites also didn't seem to help find Scuds in Gulf War I. And they seemed to have had problems identifying armored vehicles in the Kosovo war. Apparently they can focus on particular areas at particular times but:

1. We don't seem to have adequate methods for scanning an entire country to search for particular patterns.

2. There seems to be some problem in following a situation continuously to spot changes and movement.

[FairOpinion]

"The thing I find confusing is why spy satellites have seemingly not helped to find the WMD in Iraq. I am assuming that Saddam still had major WMD programs. Yet we don't seem to have a single clue about where he stashed the evidence."

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Key word "we don't SEEM" to have a clue -- publicly. But I am sure we have watched Saddam take move his weapons to Syria. I think there was one such mention quite a while back, and Powell mentioned once that our satellites saw a chemical weapons test and missile launch is Syria.

As for him moving things around in the country, one truck looks like another from the sky, you can't tell which have WMD-s and which don't. That is why it is essential to combine satellite based intelligence with human intelligence.

[alnitak]

3. There is only a small number of satellites and their orbits are known, so it easy to be "somewhere else" when they fly over - they are in Low Earth Orbit, so they cannot continuously monitor everywhere.