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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Unrelated but the UK has 2 aircraft carriers (but not enough planes, but that's for a different time). Why aren't they being deployed? this war is literally the reason why they were built. It's not a declaration of war to project your military power to a region you have an interest in. But of course our navy is a laughingstock, taking a full week to deploy a solitary destroyer while our bases are under attack. (and the US basically broadcast their intentions months in advance). Meanwhile the strait of Hormuz needs defending and that is also something that's very much in the UKs interest as its continued closure is costing our economy. I'm confused what the logic is.
> It's not a declaration of war to project your military power to a region you have an interest in.
There was no declaration of war by anyone so far, and I doubt Iran would wait for an official letter telling them they're allowed to sink a US allied carrier, especially now that they killed the leader's wife, son, dad, and a bunch of relatives (plus the only dude who the US could reasonably negotiate with)
Nobody declares war these days. It is always going to be some type of 'special military operation' at best.
Declaring war implies sticking to the rules. Decapitation strikes on the leadership with side portions of schools getting bombed would be considered illegal if war had been formally declared. Equally, having cluster munitions rain down from the sky over populated cities is also not exactly morally correct.
Rules makes war a sport of sorts, it might as well be boxing where you are not supposed to bite ears or punch below the belt. Yet, if you came under assault and needed to defend yourself, then a bite to the ear or a kick in the balls might make sense at the time.
I think the international community is demonstrating to the US that they can't drop their military support for their allies and also expect that they still help to clean up their messes.
I kind of understand that, although of course i completely disagree with their line of thinking. Iran is everyones problem and open conflict like this would have been hard to avoid down the road. Point is they had months to anticipate this latest conflict, why did they do absolutely nothing to mitigate this? Why was the UK apparently completely unprepared? Europe's economy is suffering, more then America. Why do we even bother with a Navy if we don't wan't to use it?
Also what military support did they drop exactly? Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever. I will point out that it was the US, through a combination of bombing and diplomacy that got rid of the Houthi threat to shipping. Nobody else succeeded.
They fund terrorism in the countries around them, all the neighboring countries there hates Iran. That is why they aren't really angry that USA is bombing Iran.
It was at best a regional problem until the US and israel decided to fuck things up and make it a global problem, they didn't have nukes, they were not building nukes, even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats, so just like israel, everyone is OK with them having nukes despite being the same type of religious nutjob thecracy, strange. Iranians are very rational when it comes to escalation, more so than israel.
> Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever
Yeah idk, maybe don't put cia bases there then? And maybe don't antagonize russia for decades and act surprised when they act like enemies.
You won't catch me defending Russia or Iran but get the fuck out of here with the "the US are the good guys and we're doing god's work by wiping out evil regimes" rhetoric lmao
> Nobody else succeeded.
Yes because that's the only thing they know and understand, bombs, if the problem cannot be solved with bombs they're useless
> even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats
I'd agree for just about any other country, but Iran have a terrorist regime that is funding terrorists everywhere. They are not like Pakistan or North Korea etc, Iran is crazy and doesn't follow normal international norms.
Even Russia and Ukraine doesn't bomb third party countries in war just for supporting the other side, that is a crazy stupid thing to do and any country behaving like that should never ever have nukes.
Generally, the one who causes the problem should fix it. Especially when the problem they caused is hurting their friends.
It takes a really good friend to not only accept and forgive the hurt caused, but to help fix the problem, too. Usually an apology from the problem-causer must come first.
I think what we're seeing is that the USA has un-good-friended so many countries that it has no good friends left with the military capabilities to help. It has allies maybe, but nobody who would do such a favor after being victimized by the asker and the problems they caused, without even so much as an apology.
It certainly doesn't help that the USA is asking for help, but probably wants to boss around anybody who volunteers, and it is doing none of the work itself. Sounds like a toxic team.
> Iran is everyones problem
Iran is not everyone's problem. The effects of israel and the USA's war of choice on Iran are everyone's problem. What we're seeing now is not a result of anything Iran did, but rather something the USA and israel did. The worse the effects get, the more blame will be heaped upon the USA and israel. To that end, most countries are likely of the attitude that they have incurred enough costs from the war, and that the USA and israel had better fix the problem they caused ASAP.
They move a carrier into a vulnerable position in the Strait, where an attack by a tiny boat could both result in causalities and draw the UK into another protracted war in the Middle East with no clear exit condition and even more casualties?
And for what, exactly, a pat on the back from Trump? (who will then inevitably turn on them after a week and blame them for anything that goes wrong in the war.)
If escorting ship traffic was so straightforward with only upside, the US would be doing it already. Instead of trying to get someone else to take that risk.
You do not put your resources in danger unless you are actually ready to commit to it. And I mean possible loss of them and then entering to much hotter war.
deploy and do what exactly? Get involved and potentially sacrifice a few UK soldiers to stroke Trumps ego? Sit around and look pretty? Having a carrier there doesn't magically make problems go away.
Quite. It will in fact make a lot of problems for you if it gets attacked as then you need to decide if you've just had war declared on you and have to decide what to do about that.
Escorting shipping through the Straight isn't like helping an old lady across the road, it's doing it at a red crossing light while pointing an AK47 through the windscreen of the cars with your finger on the trigger daring them to test your resolve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
>> 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.
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.
>Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret?
Yes.
Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.
Iran is being fed intelligence by Russia, so they definitely have that info.
okay, imagine a different example which you don't think is being fed intelligence by russia
> 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.
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...
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.
https://archive.is/jDMmD
Unrelated but the UK has 2 aircraft carriers (but not enough planes, but that's for a different time). Why aren't they being deployed? this war is literally the reason why they were built. It's not a declaration of war to project your military power to a region you have an interest in. But of course our navy is a laughingstock, taking a full week to deploy a solitary destroyer while our bases are under attack. (and the US basically broadcast their intentions months in advance). Meanwhile the strait of Hormuz needs defending and that is also something that's very much in the UKs interest as its continued closure is costing our economy. I'm confused what the logic is.
> It's not a declaration of war to project your military power to a region you have an interest in.
There was no declaration of war by anyone so far, and I doubt Iran would wait for an official letter telling them they're allowed to sink a US allied carrier, especially now that they killed the leader's wife, son, dad, and a bunch of relatives (plus the only dude who the US could reasonably negotiate with)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war
Nobody declares war these days. It is always going to be some type of 'special military operation' at best.
Declaring war implies sticking to the rules. Decapitation strikes on the leadership with side portions of schools getting bombed would be considered illegal if war had been formally declared. Equally, having cluster munitions rain down from the sky over populated cities is also not exactly morally correct.
Rules makes war a sport of sorts, it might as well be boxing where you are not supposed to bite ears or punch below the belt. Yet, if you came under assault and needed to defend yourself, then a bite to the ear or a kick in the balls might make sense at the time.
NATO countries need to keep their military close to the Noth Atlantic to protect Greenland from recent unexpected threats.
I think the international community is demonstrating to the US that they can't drop their military support for their allies and also expect that they still help to clean up their messes.
I kind of understand that, although of course i completely disagree with their line of thinking. Iran is everyones problem and open conflict like this would have been hard to avoid down the road. Point is they had months to anticipate this latest conflict, why did they do absolutely nothing to mitigate this? Why was the UK apparently completely unprepared? Europe's economy is suffering, more then America. Why do we even bother with a Navy if we don't wan't to use it?
Also what military support did they drop exactly? Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever. I will point out that it was the US, through a combination of bombing and diplomacy that got rid of the Houthi threat to shipping. Nobody else succeeded.
How is Iran anyone but Israel and USA's problem?
They fund terrorism in the countries around them, all the neighboring countries there hates Iran. That is why they aren't really angry that USA is bombing Iran.
> Iran is everyones problem
It was at best a regional problem until the US and israel decided to fuck things up and make it a global problem, they didn't have nukes, they were not building nukes, even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats, so just like israel, everyone is OK with them having nukes despite being the same type of religious nutjob thecracy, strange. Iranians are very rational when it comes to escalation, more so than israel.
> Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and the US has been carrying 90% of NATO since forever
Yeah idk, maybe don't put cia bases there then? And maybe don't antagonize russia for decades and act surprised when they act like enemies.
You won't catch me defending Russia or Iran but get the fuck out of here with the "the US are the good guys and we're doing god's work by wiping out evil regimes" rhetoric lmao
> Nobody else succeeded.
Yes because that's the only thing they know and understand, bombs, if the problem cannot be solved with bombs they're useless
> even if they had nukes they would not have used them for anything other than extinction level threats
I'd agree for just about any other country, but Iran have a terrorist regime that is funding terrorists everywhere. They are not like Pakistan or North Korea etc, Iran is crazy and doesn't follow normal international norms.
Even Russia and Ukraine doesn't bomb third party countries in war just for supporting the other side, that is a crazy stupid thing to do and any country behaving like that should never ever have nukes.
Generally, the one who causes the problem should fix it. Especially when the problem they caused is hurting their friends.
It takes a really good friend to not only accept and forgive the hurt caused, but to help fix the problem, too. Usually an apology from the problem-causer must come first.
I think what we're seeing is that the USA has un-good-friended so many countries that it has no good friends left with the military capabilities to help. It has allies maybe, but nobody who would do such a favor after being victimized by the asker and the problems they caused, without even so much as an apology.
It certainly doesn't help that the USA is asking for help, but probably wants to boss around anybody who volunteers, and it is doing none of the work itself. Sounds like a toxic team.
> Iran is everyones problem
Iran is not everyone's problem. The effects of israel and the USA's war of choice on Iran are everyone's problem. What we're seeing now is not a result of anything Iran did, but rather something the USA and israel did. The worse the effects get, the more blame will be heaped upon the USA and israel. To that end, most countries are likely of the attitude that they have incurred enough costs from the war, and that the USA and israel had better fix the problem they caused ASAP.
They move a carrier into a vulnerable position in the Strait, where an attack by a tiny boat could both result in causalities and draw the UK into another protracted war in the Middle East with no clear exit condition and even more casualties?
And for what, exactly, a pat on the back from Trump? (who will then inevitably turn on them after a week and blame them for anything that goes wrong in the war.)
If escorting ship traffic was so straightforward with only upside, the US would be doing it already. Instead of trying to get someone else to take that risk.
As the UK chief of defense staff commented drily: "we have an aircraft carrier, it's called Cyprus".
> this war
There is no war; there is a speical military operation, an excursion or a preemptive retaliatory defensive strike.
You do not put your resources in danger unless you are actually ready to commit to it. And I mean possible loss of them and then entering to much hotter war.
deploy and do what exactly? Get involved and potentially sacrifice a few UK soldiers to stroke Trumps ego? Sit around and look pretty? Having a carrier there doesn't magically make problems go away.
Quite. It will in fact make a lot of problems for you if it gets attacked as then you need to decide if you've just had war declared on you and have to decide what to do about that.
Escorting shipping through the Straight isn't like helping an old lady across the road, it's doing it at a red crossing light while pointing an AK47 through the windscreen of the cars with your finger on the trigger daring them to test your resolve.
> deploy and do what exactly?
To get sunk by a $20k drone, the most likely outcome at that point
How would a drone sink a carrier? If Iran could do that they would already have sunk the American carriers.
The risk at the straights aren't drones but torpedoes and mines and attack boats.
[dead]
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.
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.