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Air Force pulls controversial TV ad

An Air Force recruiting ad may have impressed the public, but not some airmen in space careers.

The second commercial in the service’s “Above All” recruiting campaign asks, “What if your cell phone calls, your television, your GPS system, even your bank transactions, could be taken out by a single missile?” As a satellite orbiting the Earth explodes, the voiceover announces, “They can.”

But airmen working in the satellite field — joined by scores of bloggers — told Air Force officials that the message was inaccurate, according to Keith Lebling, chief of the Air Force’s marketing and branding branch.

VIDEO:

Click here to see the controversial commercial

Click here to see the 'Vigilance' ad

“It’s not technically inaccurate, but it is misleading,” Lebling said. “A single missile wouldn’t destroy all those capabilities necessarily. ... If the GPS satellite went down, then the other satellites wouldn’t necessarily work, but they fly at different orbits and different altitudes.”

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.

The bottom line: “One missile wouldn’t be able to hit multiple satellites like that,” Lebling said.

The service pulled the ad off the air May 14, and it will not run again for the remainder of the fiscal year, Lebling said. This year’s advertising budget has already been allocated, he said, leaving the third “Above All” ad, called “Vigilance,” to run during the NBA playoffs and a few other programs.

Copywriters will re-word the line about the “single missile,” Lebling said, so that the space commercial can return in fiscal 2009.

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