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.
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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 on eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys capital ships are.
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.
To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed.
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
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.
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?
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.
Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.
If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance satellites.
Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
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?
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.
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?
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
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.
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.
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.
You can find yesterday's location easily on flightradar24.com. Try it it will make you feel like an ossint sleuth or something. Look to the south of Cyprus.
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
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.
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.
This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.
So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?
Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced.
It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.
About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.
Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.
I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn’t respect those rules (I’m talking both sides) are either dead or missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still some behaviors left to correct.
I 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.)
It 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.
It'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).
You 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.
If 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.
It’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?
I'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
For 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.
China 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.
Strava 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.
Clouds 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.
Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example 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.”
“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.”
> 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.
>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.
>> 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.
Not 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.
That 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.
>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.)
Anyone 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.
Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats
His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier.
I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the user.
IIRC USA had similar issues with soldiers using Strava exposing secret bases[0]. I wonder wat kind of connectivity they had, was it Satellite internet for the carrier or did it sync once they got close to the shore? For the first one maybe they should switch to whitelist and not whitelist Strava.
GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"
Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).
Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the
waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink
satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold
crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without
the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times
story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security
risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
that it is hard to believe.
More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.
Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.
Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.
Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and
A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.
Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there
then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location
not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself
imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible
However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS
I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though
The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm
Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.
This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.
The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.
Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.
Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).
Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.
I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.
I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
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 about stealth vehicles.
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.
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
It can also go over any part of the globe. The aircraft carrier is limited to non-shallow water.
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.
Just like it was with that amateur sub that imploded. It later surfaced the Navy heard the implosion and knew what it was.
Uhhh surfaced?
Made me smile. Thank you.
The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
> And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.
Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?
MH370 crashed in the Pacific.
Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to the Mediterranean.
Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.
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.
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 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisi...
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?
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.
Neither SAR nor high resolution optical sensing are trivial at panopticon scale.
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.
> 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).
> You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite.
I feel like there must be people at NRO whi are dedicated to sub tracking via satellite.
> 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.
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 on eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys capital ships are.
You would only need to find it once, potentially at a port, and then you can follow it.
This capability is available only to few countries on planet.
Not all of them.
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.
So you task the satellite to where you know the ship is?
Would you prefer to lose it first?
To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed.
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
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)
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.
Do them publish the banned coordinates in a list too? Maybe they could put the reason at each line.
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-hol...
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?
As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.
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/
Commercial operations like Planet Labs currently cover most of the Earth multiple times a day.
Clouds occasionally happen
SAR is not blocked by clouds.
What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?
Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.
https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
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)
The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.
If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
It would make tracking impossible, as no other country operates satellites.
...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.
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.
You don't even need a free account on flightradar24 to track its planes, at least two launch from it and pattern circle around it almost daily.
That relies on transponders which can be switched of if decision is taken to do so.
Sure, and they don't decide to do that in many cases.
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.
was
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.
>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.
There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance satellites.
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.
Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry.
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
>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?
It is dangerous to believe a problem goes only as deep as one's understanding of it.
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.
It is absolutely one of the better benefits of this forum
> I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too
Seems to have come as a shock to the US government.
This. You can search for years for a ship and never find it.
Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava
Here you go: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/videos/article/2025/01/13/stravale...
Especially considering the limited jogging/biking space on a sub.
How about secret bases?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?
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.
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?
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
Iran does with Russia. It's been in the news a lot lately. I have no doubt they do with China as well.
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.
Iran, like most countries, does not a blue water navy with assets in the Mediterranean sea to perform realtime surveillance.
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.
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.
They don't but it shows they could.
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.
Russia and China help them.
Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely) sailors.
But don't you dare suggest that hanging a portrait of Putin in the White House is inappropriate, or a Republican might get mad.
>Yes, Russia helps Iran target our troops and (likely) sailors.
You surely know that the US helps Ukrainian target Russian troops and refineries deep in Russia?
I certainly hope so, but we've pretty much hung Ukraine out to dry under Trump [1], just like we did the Iranian protesters.
Unlike Russia, Ukraine evidently doesn't have any kompromat on Trump or the Republican Party in general.
1: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-military-aid-ukraine-...
> 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.
If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malligyong-1
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.
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.
Many sites? Can you show me any De Gaulle aircraft currently in-flight?
You can find yesterday's location easily on flightradar24.com. Try it it will make you feel like an ossint sleuth or something. Look to the south of Cyprus.
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
If de Gaulle is turning off AIS, it stands to reason that it's also turning off the transponders in the air wing.
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.
I checked - nothing but commercial air: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2026-03-19-02:31&lat=...
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.
This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).
An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.
So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?
Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced.
It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.
There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names.
Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.
Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.
It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...
It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"
Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...
About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.
Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.
I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn’t respect those rules (I’m talking both sides) are either dead or missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still some behaviors left to correct.
TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.
It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.
In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.
It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.
anime?
A style of animated TV show from Japan
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
I 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
[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
It 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.
Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.
Well everything's impossible, until its not.
It'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).
But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.
You 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?
Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.
A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.
And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.
The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.
Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
If 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.
It’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?
> 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.
[delayed]
I'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.
I'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
Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.
that...wasn't nice
Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.
For 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/Coperni...
China 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) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
Strava 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.
Clouds 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.
No need to make it easier though
True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too
Many of the threats to a carrier aren’t nation states with a constellation of satellites.
You can buy satellite imaging.
Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example 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.”
Do you seriously think they were referring to commercial image providers when they mentioned nation-states being able to buy images/tracking?
Yes. 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
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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.”
Everyone who's a threat to the carrier can get that from an ally.
You can damage or sink an ordinary ship with a bombing, like what happened to the USS Cole, but a carrier will have a fleet escorting them.
> 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.
>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.
>> 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.
Iran has their own satellites. They are also allied with Russia that has satellites and launch capabilities.
Russia has very limited numbers of SAR satellites, it's very unlikely that Iran has any.
Specifically, wikipedia suggests Russia has a grand total of 3 such satellites.
> Iran has their own satellites.
It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
Not 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.
Based 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&...
That 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.
>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.)
Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.
Sometimes there are things that you want publicly known even if they're strictly secret.
Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
Anyone 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/
Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
China*
okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats
I occasionally see civilians on Strava doing the same thing, running laps around the deck of a cruise ship. The speeds and distances look ridiculous.
His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier.
I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used.
I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
I was doing support for a fitness data aggregator where a partner reported an issue: a user logging 15k+ steps between 9pm and 4am with minimal location delta. Sadly I wasn't able to push a "stay hydrated" notification over our system to the user.
IIRC USA had similar issues with soldiers using Strava exposing secret bases[0]. I wonder wat kind of connectivity they had, was it Satellite internet for the carrier or did it sync once they got close to the shore? For the first one maybe they should switch to whitelist and not whitelist Strava.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?
GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.
Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.
GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this
It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"
Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).
It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.
Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:
https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.
Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.
Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.
Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and
A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.
Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker
Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740
https://archive.is/jDMmD
What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there
then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location
not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself
imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible
However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS
I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though
The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm
Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.
This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.
The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.
Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.
Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).
Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.
> This is the modern way to die of stupidity
With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.
Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.
I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.
You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.
Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.
Many questions:
I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?
Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?
Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.
I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
So how did the carriers network not block Strava? I doubt the sailors watch was direct to satellite.
And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
Surely the GPDR does not prevent users from consenting to share their data with a public audience.