Given that Australia, Singapore, the UK, Indonesia, China, South Korea and without doubt DPRNK, knew which direction the Carl Vinson was actually going, and some knew the exact location because the US told them, who do you think the White House announcement was trying to alarm/appease?
That’s not a claim I made. I suspect that lots of people have a general idea where they are, and significantly fewer people have precise and timely knowledge of their locations (including Trump, unfortunately). China’s knowledge of our carriers is almost certainly somewhat incomplete, imprecise, inaccurate and / or out-of-date, but they’re probably getting some of the picture some of the time.
Out of all the countries you listed, it wouldn’t surprise me if North Korea has the least accurate information about the Carl Vinson’s location. Why are you “without doubt”?
They say that if you connect two points, you make a line… and that if you can tell which of the two points came first, you can determine the flow or the direction of that line.
I like to think of satellite pictures as specific points of data …well magnified data… taking place at very specific points in time.
If on a pass over a large area, a satellite should take two pictures in short succession of a teeny-tiny object… one nearly invisible to the human eye (like lets say… a US Aircraft Carrier) the data might lead to a course and possibly even a speed.
I can’t honestly say which satellites are whose in orbit, but I can say that not all of them are from the US. I’ve also heard that many different countries intelligence services supposedly trade pictures/data such as this on a regular basis.
No one else seems to have picked up on this, but is Trump seriously leaking the location of USN boomers? Attack subs are in no way more powerful than carriers, so unless we just say he’s talking gibberish (a very real possibility) he has to be referring to missile subs. Is it not standard practice to refuse to say anything whatsoever about the location of boomers?
More than 30 of them. And note that many are C-band SAR satellites, that can see through clouds and rain.
So yes, you can bet that China knows the location of U.S. carrier groups at all times to one-meter precision.
Also the Ziyuan
Given the inaccuracy of his statements, it’s probably best described as a misinformation campaign rather than a leak, but to add some additional detail: “boomers” / SSBNs that are equipped with a couple dozen nuclear-warhead-tipped Trident missiles could nuke North Korea from thousands of miles away. They have no need to sail anywhere close to the Korean peninsula, and probably haven’t.
There are four Ohio-class subs that were converted to SSGN. Their Tridents were removed and replaced with up to 154 (non-nucleaer) Tomahawk land-attack missiles. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if an SSGN (or two) was lurking in the water somewhere off the coast of North Korea. That’s probably what Trump was referring to as “submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier” but that’s just a guess. Personally, I wouldn’t call an SSGN a “boomer” in the classic nuclear-deterrent use of that word.
I’d actually bet all my money that this is not accurate today.
That’s a hyperbolic claim, but I bet China knows enough about the locations of US surface warships in the Pacific (based on satellites, shipping info, long-range sensors, spyplanes, drones, and more) to know very quickly that the WH claim about the Carl Vinson was false.
I agree. The Chinese aren’t omnipotent, but in their “neighborhood” in the western Pacific, they’ve got a variety of tools available (and a lot of motivation) to get pretty accurate information about the location of our capital ships. They could probably correctly narrow it down to “currently somewhere within these few hundred square miles” almost always, and some of the time will even have accurate real-time data from “eyes on” observation.
One GPS group: List of BeiDou satellites - Wikipedia
Many more: Category:Satellites of China - Wikipedia
The direction heading? Yes, without doubt and probably from multiple sources.
You don’t think DPRNK would be tracking naval exercises between Australia and the US?
That they might have some friendly operatives in Singapore who noticed that when the fleet left harbour they turned to starboard rather than port?
Have some navigation officers from commercial shipping keeping an eye on their radar screens?
Using Jindalee OTHR Australia can track wave heights in the Indian Ocean but you reckon an entire US carrier group can go dark?
Obligatory West Wing reference:
I suspect, most of the time, it’s a lot more accurate than that, if not quite down to the 1m scale.
… and whom was the White House seeking to misinform?
I don’t know what you mean by “direction heading”, but I doubt they have all that many sources of information. The Chinese might share with them, but if not, they probably spend a fair bit of time largely in the dark about the whereabouts of a lot of USN vessels.
I’d be surprised if they didn’t do the best they can, but the best they can is probably pretty limited, particularly the farther from their coastline things get.
The radar on commercial vessels is usually pretty short-range, and I suspect the vast majority of navigation officers on commercial vessels are not particularly interested in sharing the location of US Navy vessels with the North Koreans.
I apparently reckon that they’re a lot more difficult to get accurate location information on than you do.
That line was a joke.
Flight MH370 disappeared only a few years ago. In fact, it was only a few months ago that they formally abandoned the search. We’re talking about a huge aircraft. And despite all the C-band SAR satellites and drones and sympathetic commercial navigation officers and Jindalee OTHR and the rest of it, we don’t have a clue where it went. Does that not give any of you pause?
An airliner, while a big plane, is a hell of a lot smaller than a god damn carrier battlegroup. Not to mention a hell of a lot less scary. It’s not noteworthy when you see an airliner overhead, but it is a massive global news story when carriers are moved around.
It was fun listening to snippets of Spicer’s presser on the radio this afternoon. That guy is comedy gold. The problem, it seems, is that the statement that this vast armada was steaming toward NK merely meant that it might do so at some future date, and the inferior liberal journalists failed to seek the appropriate clarification. If, for instance, someone had said to Sean, “But Sean, isn’t the USS Carl Vinson at the moment 3000 miles away and moving away from North Korea?”, Sean would have been happy to reply “Why yes, now that you ask”. But since no one asked, Sean found it unnecessary to add this detail. That seems pretty clear to me. 
Also, once an airliner reaches the surface of the ocean, it sinks.