The pages shown below are from an October 1st, 1999 Air Force training manual for communications and electronics managers:
What exactly would the Air Force be looking for 3,000 nautical miles and 22,000 nautical miles above the Earth?
Surely not the moon, or incoming missiles – one much to far away and missiles launched for heights much lower that 3000 nautical miles.
And asynchronous satellites orbit at 400 miles above the Earth, while polar satellites orbit much lower than that, and geostationary satellites orbit at 22,223 miles above the Earth or rather less than 22,000 nautical miles.
So the question, again, is “What exactly is the Air Force looking for between 3000 nautical miles and 22,000 nautical miles above the Earth?”
A further reading of Air Force manuals hint at the purposes for the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System, as this one indicates: The Air Force uses the system for “detection, tracking, and identification of space objects” – UFOs?