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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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.

It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption.

Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.

How cheap do you think a drone which can cover a large area of ocean actually is?

And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.

Fixed wing? Using Starlink perhaps? $10k or so, maybe less.

Taking out a billion dollar asset with a couple million dollars worth of drones and a few (more expensive) anti ship missles? Priceless.

A Ukrainian high speed Shahed interceptor costs that much and has a very short range.

You're off by at least an order of magnitude. The camera mount you'd have to put on such a drone would cost about that much, probably more.

You're also vastly underestimating just how big the ocean actually is.

And finding the aircraft carrier is not the penultimate step to destroying it (a "few" anti shipping missiles aren't getting through those defenses).

interceptors are much shorter range than attack/scouting drones because they need to go a lot faster and be more manuverable than the target they are intercepting. Cameras are cheap and really light compared to ordinance, and ziplime was able to make a fleet of fairly cheap drones with 200 mile range (as a private company a decade ago). Cheap drones definitely can maintain targeting of a carrier within a couple hundred miles of the coast (and if you can get to 5-600 miles you keep most carrier based aircraft out of range of your shores)

Less than $20 million each - assuming build capacity and plans ...

High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites Are Ready for Launch (2023)

  Editor's note: [ ... ] Airbus contacted Proceedings to note that the 2016 pricing estimates were correct at the time but that the company will be releasing new, lower estimates soon.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/february/hig...

Zephyr – down but definitely not out (2022)

  After an astounding 64 days aloft and a travelling a total more than 30,000nm, a British-built solar-powered UAV crashed just hours before it was due to break the ultimate world endurance record.

  The aircraft was the British-built solar-powered Airbus Zephyr UAV – one of a new breed of HAPS (high altitude, pseudo-satellites) – a new category of UAVs that are aiming for zero-emission, ultra-long- endurance flight as a kind of terrestrial satellite – able to loiter in the stratosphere for weeks or months at a time to monitor borders, watch shipping, relay communications or conduct atmospheric science.

https://www.aerosociety.com/news/zephyr-down-but-definitely-...

Not viable for a non-superpower to create and deploy a successful hostile drone, and imagination is cheaper than reality anyway.

Aside from the hostile drone command and launch being found and destroyed, the drone itself would either be shot down by a missile or disabled by a direct energy weapon.

If the drone were to fault on it's own and was designed to float, it will be expensive to retreive it. Cheaper at scale to launch the sensors into orbit or deploy bouys.

That's why standard carrier doctrine is to stand off from shore, out of range of cheap missiles and drones. To strike a carrier, an adversary would need large, expensive missiles or drones plus an effective detection and targeting system.

Couldn't they just send a boat/plane/balloon/zepplin with a charger on it out launch the drones from there. The would come back when low on power and recharge in waves. It took me 30 seconds to think of this so I am sure there are a lot of better ideas out there already.

That's not a new idea. In wartime any vessel or aircraft approaching within range to launch missiles or drones will be attacked.

> Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drone

Hundreds of cheap drones would have negligible impact on a modern warship's integrity. An aircraft carrier is designed to have an actual airplane crash into it and continue operating. These boats still have armor. It's not purely an information war.

Well everything's impossible, until its not.

Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.

The modern AI security onion

Not hidden from nation states with access to real-time satellite imagery, but more rustic guerilla operations usually don't have such sophisticated access

Just poor ones - how much could it cost to get a scan of the oceans once weekly or daily? 10 million dollars?

Actually probably even cheaper, a generic scan to spot all the ships, and when it's done, just need to get images around the last location. Probably can use something like the Planet API

Now imagine that adversaries maintain and monitor profiles on known military personnel with leaky online accounts such as these, supplemented with intelligence about their rank, unit, specializations, and so forth - correlating all of these pings together with known and unknown vessels, and across land. They can learn a lot more than "a big ship is there", without even necessarily having access to recent satellite imagery or other hardware.

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).

Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.

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.

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.

Ah, yes, Ticonderogas should be so far from the carrier so they couldn't even protect it, despite protecting their carrier is their main duty. Makes sense.

Is that what I said?

You must chose between being pedantic or having a common sense.

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.

Of course it's possible to find a giant ship. The interesting parts are that this vector is crazy cheap using public APIs, and the irony of the location source being the voluntary-or-ignorant active telemetry from a US service person.

It's possible to go to the moon, launch ICBMs, and make fusion bombs. It's news when something possible gets cheap and easy. It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.

>It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.

Well, peace makes you sloppy. No one is at war with France right now, and no one is realistically going to attack this ship.

If we were fighting WW3, you can bet sailors wouldn't be allowed to carry personal cellphones at all. Back in WW2, even soldier's letters back home had to be approved by the censors.

Interesting point. On one hand they probably don't care if everyone knows where the carrier is (actually I'm pretty sure every military power knows where the other powers' military is), on the other hand from a "good practices" perspective, it doesn't look good.

Would it just be virtue signaling, or is there more to it?

If they were trying to hide it, the top would probably be painted blue.

> 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.

Of course I meant, 'within a circle of 3,142 mi circumference'. But no I didn't - how embarassing. I leapt at thinking '1,000 x pi is the operating area of an aircraft carrier - so perfect.'. 785,400 sq miles is more impressive and harder to find.

That explains the downvotes!

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

I would expect that most nations are performing some kind of surveillance like this.

Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles.

Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way.

The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage.

Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.

An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.

> would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.

There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest.

The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.

Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.

that...wasn't nice

The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.

Yes and furthermore what percentage of those who can scrape Strava can actually take action based on the information so obtained? Probably close to 0% would be my guess.

One-half of a percent of a million is 5000. That’s what makes “cyber” stuff so different than IRL, “every crook in his mom’s basement anywhere” is a much different threat than “every crook in your neighborhood.”

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.

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.

Heh, establishing an "opsec failure guy" on the boat with software on his Garmin that can be activated on days with special secrecy demands to translate his runs to a plausible fake location? I like that idea. It would actually fit a one-off like the Charles de Gaulle quite nicely!

They are usually called Public Affairs Officers :D

True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too

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'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.

> 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.

Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.

>It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work

We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter.

If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.

That is kind of an amazing point. I looked it up and this transcript was enlightening!

https://www.badassoftheweek.com/stanislav-petrov-and-the-rcs...

> Don't ram the ship that has two bars and a Jacuzzi on board and is designed for, like, smashing glaciers. Mm hmm. Then the captain of the Resolute radioed to the guys in the water like, 'Hey, do you want some help?'

Heh.

No need to make it easier though

>> 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.

> 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.

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.

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&...

> because it's not going as planned and Israel is still getting hammered

What makes you say that? Iran is a country twice the size of Texas, and dismantling the military-industrial complex of a massive country takes time and money. Iran was outed as a paper tiger last summer, and hasn't been able to meaningfully defend their airspace, navy, or commanders. They are being absolutely destroyed. The question is whether this will be sufficient to cause regime change before the country is sent back to the stone age like Gaza.

>Iran was outed as a paper tiger last summer

Everything I posted already refutes that. What are you even doing?

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.

Jamming is a good way to make sure everyone knows exactly where you are.

Not so much when dealing with radar sats. A jamming signal directed at a paticular sat can blank out hundreds of square miles from the SAR radar.

https://defence-blog.com/russia-is-jamming-european-space-ag...

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 impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.

> computerized vision models

The CIWS is radar guided.

Modern ones are broad-spectrum optical.

Let them keep thinking a radar jammer will work…

At the very least it lowered the barriers for agents without satellite or maritime intelligence. Another piece of information extracted from the Strava episode is that the carrier is not going through a GPS-jammed location, or jamming it itself.

Or it was disinformation and the carrier is/was somewhere else.

Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.

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

[…]

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.”

I phrased that badly, what I meant is two things in one and I mashed them together:

- do you think nation-states have the same commercial relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your private messages to specific governments because they won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.

- do you think nation-states that are your opponents would be getting their services from commercial image providers that are loyal to you? The American companies you list are far from the only ones on the planet that provide satellite imagery as a service.

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.

>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.)

This boils down to a security via obscurity argument. Is obscurity a useful tool? Often, yes. Should you depend on it? Definitely not. Is it annoying to lose? Yes.

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.

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.

China*

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/

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