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I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea. We are not talking

• deepsun 7mo ago
  Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
  • charcircuit 7mo ago
    You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.
    • matkoniecz 7mo ago
      This capability is available only to few countries on planet. Not all of them.
      • SteveNuts 7mo ago
        I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
        • malfist 7mo ago
          Clouds occasionally happen
          • IshKebab 7mo ago
            SAR is not blocked by clouds.
        • estearum 7mo ago
          As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.
          • rtkwe 7mo ago
            Commercial operations like Planet Labs currently cover most of the Earth multiple times a day.
            • matkoniecz 7mo ago
              This should not be assumed to be available in case of a war. See say https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hold-back-161336526.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hol... > Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.
          • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 7mo ago
            You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close. For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course. 1. https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/ https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/
        • chias 7mo ago
          What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?
          • filleduchaos 7mo ago
            ...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
            • OneDeuxTriSeiGo 7mo ago
              It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships. The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict. Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship. Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it. And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel. So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
              • filleduchaos 7mo ago
                But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at. The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
      • fxtentacle 7mo ago
        You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.
        • matkoniecz 7mo ago
          What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates? (of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
          • rocqua 7mo ago
            Figure out where you can't buy pictures to narrow it down, if you want a more exact match, pay for pictures from that area from non US providers.
          • blitzar 7mo ago
            Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks. It did not say if it had acted at the request of US authorities. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hold-back-161336526.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hol...
          • marcosdumay 7mo ago
            Do them publish the banned coordinates in a list too? Maybe they could put the reason at each line.
            • matkoniecz 7mo ago
              No, it would be wide area. Like delay covering entire area of war. See say https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hold-back-161336526.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hol... > Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.
      • swarnie 7mo ago
        Billy Boy from the Island can use commercial satellites to map mud huts for his vaccine NGO, i'm sure any nation state can find a few quid to locate a war ship.
      • bell-cot 7mo ago
        Those are the few countries that France needs to worry about. Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not. EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
      • geeunits 7mo ago
        was
      • s5300 7mo ago
        [dead]
  • joe_mamba 7mo ago
    >Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need. That's why satellites use radars and scientific instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or even subs underwater.
    • post-it 7mo ago
      Those suffer from the same problem. There's a lot of ocean, and if you don't know where to look then you won't find what you're looking for.
      • joe_mamba 7mo ago
        >if you don't know where to look I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find the carrier there, then I can plot the course between France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that course taking into account such a ship's relative velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-zag through south america and the north pole on its way there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something sci-fi?
        • gherkinnn 7mo ago
          It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.
          • joe_mamba 7mo ago
            I am always open to corrections from specialists in the field or just any average joes with a different opinion. That's why I keep coming here.
            • burnished 7mo ago
              It is absolutely one of the better benefits of this forum
  • cbsks 7mo ago
    I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?
    • mikkupikku 7mo ago
      I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers decades ago.
      • mapt 7mo ago
        Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are trivial at panopticon scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc is a good overview of what's up there so far, and what's coming as they really try to scale the technology. Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that. I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission requirements.
        • Sanzig 7mo ago
          > Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used for civilian ship detection applications (traffic management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc) for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes back much further. > SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that. No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically displacement from true position - this is often called the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem, and can actually be useful in some situations (eg: looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to estimate its speed).
  • reactordev 7mo ago
    This. You can search for years for a ship and never find it.
  • the8472 7mo ago
    Ships are giant hunks of metal and radio emitters. They light up on SAR satellites[0]. Sentinel-1 gets whole earth coverage and a revisit time of 1-3 days[1] with two active satellites. And that's the public stuff, if you can afford a fleet or even some extra fuel to steer them into interesting orbits you can get faster revisits. [0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisit%20time.jpg?inst-v=8a216200-52de-4ba5-a3cb-f92d9541d94d https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisi...
    • rustyhancock 7mo ago
      And they also don't travel alone. 5-10 ships moving at speed across the ocean. Blasting the skies with radar. Its as easy as anything is to find it in the ocean. And were pretty damn good at tracking ships at sea even small fishing vessels let alone a floating city. The threat model to CSGs are basically nuclear submarines from nations that would simply tail the group if needed.
      • mijowi 7mo ago
        U.S. anti-submarine doctrine for surface vessels is pretty much just “run away”, that’s how dangerous subs are, so that’s why U.S. CSGs often include an attack submarine escort.
    • julosflb 7mo ago
      There is a french company (https://unseenlabs.com/fr/ https://unseenlabs.com/fr/) that specializes in tracking ship at sea through observing their RF emission from space. Cool tech. I'm pretty sure their main clients are not all civil...
  • mytailorisrich 7mo ago
    Satellites only have to track, not find. Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar. So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys' capital ships are.
  • ajross 7mo ago
    > it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier. That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone camera images would be able to bullseye it. Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the view. So it's not a DIY project. But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big". The globe is kinda small these days.
    • MengerSponge 7mo ago
      And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep water.
      • NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
        to be fair "relatively deep water" is 99% of seas and oceans...
        • bigfatkitten 7mo ago
          And “only so fast” can be north of 30 knots. The vessel could today be 1000km in any direction from where it was when you found it yesterday.
          • gorbachev 7mo ago
            Yes, but if you know the general direction of where it's going that reduces the search area quite a bit. In this case, for example, the French Government publicly announced where it's going.
• echoangle 7mo ago
  Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right? Or does getting told by Russia count?
  • elif 7mo ago
    Look at marinetraffic.com and then try to map a course across the Mediterranean that won't be seen by dozens of ships. It's impossible.
  • ronnier 7mo ago
    Russia and China help them.
  • rtkwe 7mo ago
    I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it would be enough to get more capable assets into the right area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they attacked Midway.
    • bpodgursky 7mo ago
      Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime surveillance.
      • rtkwe 7mo ago
        They had a handful of frigates mostly but those could go out as far as the Med pretty easily. One of their ships was sunk near Sri Lanka.
        • signatoremo 7mo ago
          It was sunk there because it attended an on-off event in India before that. Iran's ships don't get on regular trips far from home.
• rtkwe 7mo ago
  If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.
• JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.
• 1970-01-01 7mo ago
  If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?
  • drysine 7mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malligyong-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malligyong-1
    • rtkwe 7mo ago
      That's in a sun synchronous orbit so would only over fly once a day so the task does get a lot tougher. A few days of bad weather and you've largely lost the ship.
  • vntok 7mo ago
    Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.
    • cwillu 7mo ago
      If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
      • kjkjadksj 7mo ago
        Maybe, maybe not. When the US did their venezuela maduro operation they turned on adsb on f15e for whatever reason. And only turned it on for like a portion of the mission so maybe that wasn’t intentional.
      • vntok 7mo ago
        Not at all, depends on the mission. In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar. It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city. Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
• fiftyacorn 7mo ago
  Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • BobaFloutist 7mo ago
    Especially considering the limited jogging/biking space on a sub.
  • kjkjadksj 7mo ago
    How about secret bases? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
  • CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
    Here you go: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/article/2025/01/13/stravaleaks-dates-of-french-nuclear-submarine-patrols-revealed-by-careless-crew-members_6737005_108.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/article/2025/01/13/stravale...
• thisisnotmyname 7mo ago
  Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?
• garyfirestorm 7mo ago
  We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
  • epsteingpt 7mo ago
    Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.
  • baq 7mo ago
    There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.
    • abcd_f 7mo ago
      Just like it was with that amateur sub that imploded. It later surfaced the Navy heard the implosion and knew what it was.
      • awesome_dude 7mo ago
        Uhhh surfaced?
        • dmos62 7mo ago
          Made me smile. Thank you.
    • IncreasePosts 7mo ago
      They could just feed the data to some associated outside party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.
  • 7mo ago
• Barrin92 7mo ago
  That's not really the point. The issue is that a soldier almost certainly without a lot of thought ended up leaking information that he wasn't aware of leaking. And furthermore identifiable information of a particular individual, which people can use to for example find out what unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about what the mission is about and so on. In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could identify and track operators by their unique signature. This was used during world war 2 to track where particular individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal of information not just where but what they were up to. If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's always involved in particular operations you didn't just give something obvious away but potentially something very sensitive.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
  Why make it easier for them? I think people tend to lack imagination about how some piece of intel could be used by an adversary.
• kelnos 7mo ago
  Sure, but there's a big difference between using nation-state resources like spy satellites, and using a public API exposed by a fitness app. Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have spy satellites.
• tsoukase 7mo ago
  Especially aircraft carriers deliberately let their position public in order to cause the fear and alignment that are destined to. It's that they don't publish their accurate position but only the approximate.