Dude. That treatise is a basic outline of general strategies and tactics able to be utilized by a navy to conceal/deceive. For goodness sake, the example he gives in the footnote of using weather to conceal movement of a naval force comes from 1981! As others have pointed out, the specific technologies he discusses using meteorological conditions to conceal from are old, outdated technologies. In other words, this treatise isn’t intended as a guide for modern naval strategists to use in 2017 in specific cases; it’s a general outline of how to accomplish the goals, using examples which can be discussed on a non-classified Naval War College website. :rolleyes:
Yes.
They cannot cover the entire globe all the time, for example. But if the operator were interested in the movement of a specific ship, they could track it regardless of weather.
The rest are SAR. There’s no need for continuous coverage of the entire globe. Aircraft carriers don’t move very fast.
No. No they’re not. At least, as far as public source’s best guesses are. I provided you a link, but the tl;dr version may apply here, so here it is: the belief is that eight of them are SAR.
So the fuck what?
This paper estimates that as of 2013, China’s ELINT satellites have a revisit rate of not more than approx. every 90 minutes. That is a pretty substantial capability, if this analysis is correct.
And how many do you think they’d need to track an aircraft carrier?? Even one satellite can see a specific target several times a day.
I think you’re just trying to obfuscate the issue by nitpicking on the most microscopic details.
I agree. It’s a substantial capability. Early on in this thread, Frankenstein Monster said “… you can bet that China knows the location of U.S. carrier groups at all times to one-meter precision.” Conversely, I said ‘They could probably correctly narrow it down to “currently somewhere within these few hundred square miles” almost always’. Which one do you think is closer to the truth?
Depends on how accurate you want that tracking to be. Let’s take Ravenman’s cite as a good starting point. It says the SAR satellites have local crossing times at 2:00, 6:00, 10:00 and 14:00. Let’s say it’s the famous “3:00 am phone call” and the Chinese need to know right fucking now where the Carl Vinson is. Do you think they can they get that information to one-meter precision? After all, they know, to within a few meters, where it was an hour ago, at 2:00 am, when Yaogan 13 passed overhead. How far could it have gotten in an hour? At most, something like 35 miles in any direction, which would give you an area of, if my math isn’t wrong, something like 3800 square miles.
I think 1m is probably closer than “a few hundred square miles” – I bet, most of the time, it’s within a few square miles, and quite frequently (at least once a day, very likely), they have a visual picture of exactly where it is.
I’m trying to illuminate the issue. The hostility of some of the posters in this thread is a bit bewildering to me.
You also said a lot of other stuff, like that implied analysts are poring over pictures of tens of thousands of square miles of ocean looking for ships, and then you go on to post about cloud cover and whatnot. That makes me take all of your comments on this subject with a large grain of salt.
The reality is that the Chinese probably know where a carrier strike group in the region is, probably 30+ times a day, with precision that is quite great.
I didn’t imply that. Other posters did. I responded to it by explaining why (well, at least one reason) that would be a less-than-perfect method of tracking ships. Go back and reread post #32, which was the first mention of cloud cover in this thread. It was in response to other posters.
No it doesn’t. Those are equatorial crossing times. That’s an orbital parameter that tells you where its orbit crosses the equator.
Did you miss this part?
Ya think?
Logically, if this were true I’d have to wonder why China still bothers using air and sea assets for surveillance then. I mean, if they could really track US carriers with precision 30+ times a day anywhere in the Pacific then why would they need anything else?
A lot of people are making a lot of, to me, ridiculous claims in this thread both wrt what China (or other countries…hell, even including the US) can and can’t do wrt tracking US carriers using satellite networks. Certainly they can…but with precision (whatever that actually means) 30+ times a day? That would be enough to know where they are at all times 24 hours a day, basically…down to a couple of miles at most. I’m highly :dubious: of that claim.
At any rate, I think it’s pretty clear that, getting back to the topic of the thread, that Trump et al seriously fucked up…again. THEY don’t seem to know where the carriers are or what they are doing…perhaps they should be asking the Chinese and their magic satellites to help them out some. 
I don’t understand why the takeaway here is that “Trump doesn’t know where USS Carl Vinson is.”
The obvious conclusion is that Trump doesn’t care where USS Carl Vinson is. It never mattered.
When Trump enters into a deal, he lies in an effort to get what he wants. If he feels promises of reward will get him what he wants, he promises riches and rewards. If he feels threats will get him what he wants, he promises threats. If details have to be manufactured to impress the buyer, they are manufactured. It’s irrelevant as to whether such things are true; he gets what he wants and leaves the buyer holding the bag of an unfulfilled promise later. The reason Trump and his minions made the claim that Carl Vinson was headed to Korea is that it sounded cool (to Trumpists) and threatening (to North Korea.) Whether it actually was is an irrelevance to Donald Trump. Doesn’t matter; he probably didn’t even bother to ask anyone whether it could be sent that way. And like any good liar, his tactic upon being caught is to deny to the end he ever lied, and spin it endlessly.
So did he fuck up? Only time will tell. Obviously, he’s golden in the eyes of Trumpists, who now believe whatever alternative facts Trump is saying. But unlike his real estate and brand empire, where he can move from sucker to sucker, he’s stuck with the North Korea problem.
QFT.
I don’t see why. If Ravenman’s linked paper is correct, they have 19 satellites up there and they only have to really worry about the Pacific. Which part of the paper looks like it’s based on magic?
Ravenman’s paper is a few years old, and they’ve added some additional satellites in those intervening years, but their conclusion was (in part):
(If the cloud talk earlier bothered you, ignore this next part)
Again, just for simplicity’s sake, let’s pretend the Chinese got a good fix on the Carl Vinson’s location 24 times a day, once every hour. 30 minutes after their last fix, the Carl Vinson could have sailed 17 miles in any direction. A circle with a radius of 17 miles has an area of 900+ square miles. Even if the Carl Vinson is proceeding at a rather casual 20 mph, that is still an area of 300+ square miles that the ship may be in.
BTW, here (PDF) is an updated version of the same simulation report that Ravenman cited from May 2016.
A single picture of that area, with decent resolution, would very often show the wake, if not the ships themselves, of a carrier group. A handful of pictures would increase the chance even higher.
Combine this with other forms of intel, and most of the time China will have a pretty good idea of where a carrier group is, and even where they’re headed.
Again, carriers aren’t meant for stealth. Usually, we want them to be seen.