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
You don’t need to scan every square yard if the earth, because you don’t *care* about every square yard.
Deep ocean? Don’t care about it.
Territory of a close ally? Don’t care either.
Strategic region where you don’t really have any interests and things are peaceful? Skippable, probably.
Remote area with very little infrastructure? Just quickly scan for new infrastructure, then move on.
The idea isn’t to see every single feature. It’s to see all the features you actually care about. Your enemy’s troop movements, new bases and such will generally be in somewhat predictable locations – ones with good infrastructure, strategic importance, things like that.
Once you start to filter out areas you don’t care too much about, it’s easy to monitor the areas you *do* care about.
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