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Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
by paxys 8mo ago
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
- nickburns 8mo agoLe Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.
- caminante 8mo agothat...wasn't nice
- miningape 8mo agoNo need to make it easier though
- dgrin91 8mo agoSatellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.
- fuoqi 8mo agoFor tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather. I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them. [0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Sentinel-1D_delivers_first_images_from_Antarctica_to_Bremen https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
- phire 8mo agoChina has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution) And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
- jandrewrogers 8mo agoClouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.
- mxfh 8mo agoStrava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either. I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment. Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.
- usrusr 8mo agoHeh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!
- mxfh 8mo agoThey are usually called Public Affairs Officers :D
- petee 8mo agoI'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes
- alexfoo 8mo agoI would expect that most nations are performing some kind of surveillance like this. Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles. Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way. The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage. Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo agoSometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.
- blitzar 8mo agoSometimes there are things that you want publicly known even if they're strictly secret.
- mmooss 8mo ago> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger. A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving. With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.
- Jblx2 8mo ago>US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
- mmooss 8mo agoOf course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more impressive and harder to find. That explains the downvotes!
- ImPostingOnHN 8mo agoMany countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
- paxys 8mo agoIran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
- ImPostingOnHN 8mo agookay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
- nitwit005 8mo agoEveryone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
- barrenko 8mo agoChina*
- rtkwe 8mo agoAnyone with a big enough checkbook can rent 12 50 centimeter resolution overflights a day from Planet Labs. Their 1.3m resolution is maybe enough to track it in decently cooperative weather given enough compute spend. https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
- hollerith 8mo ago>Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
- sandworm101 8mo ago>> Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine. Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be jammed.) But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone. An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's readiness state, under the assumption that people aren't going to be doing much jogging while at battle stations.
- tokai 8mo agoIran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
- drnick1 8mo ago> Iran has their own satellites. It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
- rtkwe 8mo agoNot destroyed at least. Anything that big would show up pretty clearly, the US and other publish the orbital tracks of anything big enough to be a meaningful spy sat and it being destroyed would show up in that data.
- tokai 8mo agoThat is not safe to say at all. There is not reason to suspect that without any sources. Messing with satellites is a taboo approaching that of nuclear, every time someone test or mention anti-satellite capabilities it has made for international condemnation. So please don't make unlikely claims up without any evidence.
- unselect5917 8mo agoBased on what? They said it would take a few days and now they're asking for $200,000,000,000.00 to continue it, because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered: https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&f=top&src=typed_query https://x.com/search?q=israel%20sirens%20since%3A2026-03-19&...
- 4fterd4rk 8mo agoMany of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.
- snowwrestler 8mo agoYou can buy satellite imaging. Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
- Someone 8mo agoCommercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-firm-extends-middle-east-image-delay https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-...: “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”
- filleduchaos 8mo agoDo you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
- Someone 8mo agoYes. https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/19/commercial-satellite-imagery-leaders-see-increased-international-demand/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/imagery-and-sensing/2025/05/1...: “BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities. […] Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense […] Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
- Totoradio 8mo agoTrue, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- astrobe_ 8mo agoIt's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia. It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoWell clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
- chistev 8mo agoBut the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
- paxys 8mo agoYou don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss. A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring. Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.
- justsomehnguy 8mo agoAnd American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
- cwillu 8mo agoThe battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
- jcalx 8mo agoI would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.) [0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1 [1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-warship-survival/ https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
- rtkwe 8mo agoIt is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and precise enough to hit the ship with no other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the missile itself). Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
- btown 8mo agoIt also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption. Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
- XorNot 8mo agoHow cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is? And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
- altairprime 8mo agoIt’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime. It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
- alphawhisky 8mo agoI'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.
- loeg 8mo ago> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking. > It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
- altairprime 8mo agoOh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mrguyorama 8mo ago>It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter. If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.
- MikeNotThePope 8mo agoIf I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
- reactordev 8mo agoIt’s impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.
- themafia 8mo ago> computerized vision models The CIWS is radar guided.
- jandrewrogers 7mo agoModern ones are broad-spectrum optical.
- reactordev 7mo agoLet them keep thinking a radar jammer will work…
- saxonww 8mo agoThis boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it? Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.
- BHSPitMonkey 8mo agoNow imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit, specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other hardware.
- dkga 8mo agoAt the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of information extracted from the Strava episode is that the carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming it itself.
- alexfoo 8mo agoOr it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere else. Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
- bigfatkitten 8mo agoThe number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.
- sneak 8mo agoYes and furthermore what percentage of those who can scrape Strava can actually take action based on the information so obtained? Probably close to 0% would be my guess.
- beede 7mo agoOne-half of a percent of a million is 5000. That’s what makes “cyber” stuff so different than IRL, “every crook in his mom’s basement anywhere” is a much different threat than “every crook in your neighborhood.”
- soleveloper 8mo agoAn intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.
- themafia 8mo ago> would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target. There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest. The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.