When a military satellite finds a base being set up or personnel/vehicles being moved in large numbers in a foreign country, how do they know where to look?
Presumably they don’t have people who scan every square yard of the earth until something changes, and I’m guessing there is an element of other intelligence gathering to use as a guide – but do computers do the rest with something like a before/after comparison every so often and flag up differences? The follow on question from that would be what stops them flagging every car that moves?
In: Technology
A friend of mine worked in military intelligence for the Royal Air Force, and quite a lot of his role included interpreting satellite images that have been flagged by automated processes and neural networks.
Essentially, life on earth follows certain rules. People need to be able to get to and from a location, to deliver supplies, to work and so on. This means you need access via road, rail, sea or air.
Military locations will likely have at least one of these and quite possibly multiple. You’ll then see things like power, water, gas, fuel and other utilities, most of which are very obviously visible to satellites and recon aircraft.
Once you have established how much material, human traffic and utilities are going to a specific location, you can work out quite a lot.
Obviously militaries, the military-industrial complex and other organisations will try to be stealthy and discrete, but you can only do so much to hide large construction projects and faciltiies.
You’re essentially looking for something out of the ordinary and then establishing what is causing the unusual lack of, or presence of, X things, and the more you observe a particular nation, the better you get at recoginising their traits and signs.
Latest Answers