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).
replyAlso 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.
replyCan 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.
Not hidden from nation states with access to real-time satellite imagery, but more rustic guerilla operations usually don't have such sophisticated access
replyJust poor ones - how much could it cost to get a scan of the oceans once weekly or daily? 10 million dollars?
replyOh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.
replyThe modern AI security onion
replyWell everything's impossible, until its not.
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