Simple direction finding would serve as an effective alternative means of detecting large warships, and a U.S. carrier group under normal circumstances is a floating electromagnetic buffet, throwing out any number of signals. It would not be difficult at all to find unless it was sailing dead quiet from a signals perspective.
Using big carriers as a DF target would be hardly “wasteful,” it’s what you’d want your EW operations doing all the time both for surveillance reasons and for training purposes.
A carrier group isn’t a stealthy thing. The details of this thread have gotten kinda silly, but it has to be admitted by any reasonable person that a carrier group sailing about in peacetime can be at least generally located by any military power that really wants to know that information. I don’t think they can tell you to the metre where USS Carl Vinson is, but I’d bet you a week’s pay they can place it well within enough accuracy to:
Ascertain its present operational capabilities in terms of the range of its aircraft and time-to-location for a given position (e.g. how long will to take to sail within range of North Korea)
Ascertain the strategic meaning of its position and possible intentions of the United States, and
Attack it with nuclear weapons.
I mean, the MEDIA figured out where USS Carl Vinson and her escorts were.
In the IT world, if something is truly mission-critical and you have sufficient motivation and resources, the preferred configuration is ‘active-active’ or load-balancing–you have multiple redundant systems running in parallel at all times. You don’t have a ‘backup’ at all in the classic sense; if any one node goes down, then the other nodes already running merely pick up the slack. All of your day-to-day operations are run with pretty much every piece of equipment you’ve got.
Second choice would be a ‘hot backup’ system: your backup systems are up and running at all times, just not doing very much until you need to fail over to them. The classic ‘backup we test once a month’ is for lower-priority systems and resource-constrained environments.
Applying this analogy to China: if war comes, it may well be an existential fight for the very survival of the nation. That’s pretty strong motivation. China also has enormous resources: spending the money and the manpower is not a problem. I would EXPECT China (and Russia, and the US, and each of the other powers major and minor in the region) to run with full capabilities at all times. That way, no matter what happens, you’ve got data coming in at a steady pace from trained and tested sources that your analysts and systems are familiar with–no waiting around to start up some other system, no struggling to understand the data format. Always-on also lets you cross-check multiple sources of data, weeding out unreliable sources and accounting for systemic errors before the crisis is upon you.
I’m of the opinion that this is a non-story. The Vinson WAS on its was to the peninsula was it not? The media was not there to get more information on training exercises they wanted to hear about NK. this is one instance where it was about the destination, not the journey. So yeah a miscommunication, but my faith in the navy is unshaken to say the least.
This thread was really interesting to read though, satellite capabilities are really impressive.
We’re not talking about swapping out a hard drive, although I doubt that any major corporation isn’t running constant backups even of fully RAIDed mission critical data.
We’re talking about getting surface assets to locations possibly thousands of miles away, after your satellites have been taken out. Having your EW ships sitting in port, and maybe firing up their engines once a week just to make sure they work, is not going to help you do that.
Obviously, you can’t track every ship, but the US has less than a dozen supercarriers, and only a fraction of those in the Pacific. It defies belief that the Chinese wouldn’t be tracking those with several levels of redundancy.