Wretchard at The Belmont Club asks “Why does Google Earth’s resolution suddenly improve in certain areas of the Pakistani-Afghan border?” He then provides a link to this Wired article that argues that this is because the Military has been paying independent companies to provided detailed views of the area. According to Wired, Google then gets those views about a year latter.

I wonder if this is true. I would have thought that the US has enough satellite assets that it did not need to buy feed from private companies.