Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

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.

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).

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.

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.

> 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.

>> 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.)

Sometimes there are things that you don't want publicly known even if they're not strictly secret.

Many countries do not have ready access to satellite imagery, much less realtime satellite imagery. Iran, for example.