tl/dr: U.S. Military spy satellite camera calibration.
My guess is that they served a function for calibrating ground control points rather than orbital elements. Even today, NORAD publishes orbital elements (TLEs) for spacecraft deduced by radar (and also optical means). I think other radio ranging techniques were also used before GPS. Trying to point at Earth-fixed point with only an inertial attitude (without a position/velocity) seems really tough.
Today, lots of CubeSats don't have GPS, so they eagerly await getting TLEs from NORAD. It seems like this Twitter is always the first with new data:
It's not too long IMO and the human element of the story is lost in this summary.
Um no. It just helped the US know where shit is. They didn't keep us safe. Mutually assured destruction did. That's why every war since then has been a proxy war.
If anything, programs like this poured massive amounts of money into expanding out out of control military and probably caused the expansion of wars into areas, leading to the deaths of countless civilians in the former USSR nations.
It's all part of it. Without intelligence (from dozens of source) to act upon, and Americas enemies believing we could find meaningful targets and/or hit them, MAD wouldn't really exist. Same goes for not having the tech to launch the nukes. Or a hundred other things.
It all helped, to one degree or another, and that is all they said. "This [X] we're standing on right now helped protect us from nuclear war".
Am i missing your point?