Two leading Democratic lawmakers warned the Trump Administration not to leave the Open Skies Treaty.

The Open Skies Treaty allows members countries to overfly one another, confirming that one country has adhered to arms control agreements and promoting transparency.

The Trump Administration claims it gets "nothing" out of the treaty, but that simply is not true.

Update May 21, 2019: The Trump Administration will withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty. It is the third major arms treaty President Trump has withdrawn from in the past two years, including the Iran nuclear accord and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. Withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty remains a bad idea.

Top lawmakers in Congress sent a letter to the Trump Administration Monday, warning it should not pull the U.S. out of a key arms control and inspection treaty. The Open Skies Treaty allows participants to conduct unarmed overflights of other participant countries.

The Trump Administration argues that the U.S. gets nothing out of the treaty and that Russia places unnecessary restrictions on inspections. Advocates of remaining in the treaty claim it’s a vital show of transparency and confidence building between two countries increasingly at odds with one another.

Defense News reports that two top Senate Democrats, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, wrote Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to advise against the U.S. withdrawing from the treaty. The two wrote leaving the treaty would “harm both U.S. and allied security interests,” depriving U.S. arms control specialists of “real time, comprehensive images of Russian military facilities”.

The Open Skies Treaty was first signed in 1992 and entered into force in 2002. The premise of the treaty, that unarmed aircraft be allowed to overfly the territory of other signatories, was first proposed during the Eisenhower Administration. Under the terms, according to the Arms Control Association , each member state can outfit an unarmed aircraft of its choosing with “optical panoramic and framing cameras, video cameras with real-time display, infra-red line-scanning devices, and sideways-looking synthetic aperture radar.”

The member state can give 72-hour notice that it wishes to conduct an inspection flight of another member state and must file a flight plan within 24 hours. After that, it is free to conduct the mission, snapping photos, and beaming radar beams at whatever is in the flight path.

The U.S. Air Force’s lone OC-135 Open Skies aircraft. U.S. Air Force photo by Charles J. Haymond

The U.S. Air Force maintains a single OC-135 aircraft designed to support the Open Skies Treaty. Based on the Boeing 707 airliner, the OC-135 is fitted with two KS-87E framing cameras for low altitude photography, a KA-91C panoramic camera for high altitude photography, and an integrated data annotation and recording system that, according to the USAF, “stamps each frame with correct position, altitude, time, roll angle and other information.”

Russia flies similar aircraft, the Tupolev Tu-214ON, Tupolev Tu-154M-LK1, and An-30, each outfitted with the OSDCAM 4060 digital electro-optical sensor, the specs of which are publicly available. No country has any sensors certified for use for Open Skies Treaty flights beyond those used to collect imagery in the visual spectrum.

Other, smaller powers also conduct inspection flights. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—all Open Skies Treaty signatories— fly joint missions over Russia with a Swedish Air Force Saab 340 aircraft. The Turkish Air Force will overfly Russia on March 2 with a Brazilian-made CASA CN-235 transport modified to perform aerial inspections. Canada, according to open source analyst Steffan Watkins, uses a modified C-130J Hercules with a wing-mounted sensor pod.

A Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130J aircraft taxies at Rosecrans Memorial Airport, St. Joesph, Mo. February 1, 2018 after a training flight for the Treaty on Open Skies. U.S. Air National Guard photo/Tech. Sgt. John Hillier

The data collected by an Open Skies Treaty flight is not very high quality. Countries with spy satellites can typically collect better imagery—and collect it without informing the other party. In that respect, the flights are more useful to minor powers with limited reconnaissance means.

The real value of the treaty to a country like Russia or the United States is in the symbolism. The Open Skies Treaty is a symbol of cooperation between two distrustful countries, and in that respect, is a model for behavior. It’s also a calming mechanism: the act of allowing a potential adversary to overfly one’s territory is a clear and reassuring sign to the rest of the world that tensions between the two countries are low. Finally, participants on both sides get to know one another during the process, leading to more interaction and greater communication at the inspection level.

Washington’s departure from the treaty would not bode well for U.S.-Russian relations, and it would send a signal to the rest of the world the two countries are growing more distant. It would also leave Washington at a disadvantage in Europe: Menendez and Reed argue that if the U.S. left the treaty Russia could continue to overfly American bases in Europe without any reciprocal activity on the U.S. side. How such a situation would be an improvement over the current one is unexplained by those pushing for a treaty exit.

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Another problem with leaving the Open Skies Treaty is it would be the second arms control treaty the U.S. would abandon with Russia in two years. The United States has already left the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty , and Administration critics fear leaving Open Skies would build momentum to leave the New START treaty on nuclear weapons, which expires in less than one year. If the Administration, which argues that it gets “nothing” out of the agreement, is allowed to kill Open Skies it will be easier to kill New START.

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