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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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, 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.
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.
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.”
>> 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.
>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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
anime?
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.
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'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, 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.
Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
>> 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?
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.)
> 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.
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
Everyone capable of damaging the ships can get that intelligence.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.