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’ll never get an exact answer because the other side will obviously hide from the methods if they find out, but it’s similar to what you think
“why is china building a dirt road out to that mountain”
“why is that bridge so fortified? it must be used to carry heavy objects across”
“that building is new and they didn’t build it until X occurred”
“there are just as many vehicles here at night as there are during the day. it’s 24/7”
“north korea has moved their rocket fuel trucks out from their bases. that’s not cheap, follow where they’re going”
the military has been using “proto-ai” systems to filter for things like that for many years longer than the civilian market has had access to. still, a human is reviewing the footage in most cases to apply their interpretation of what’s occurring based on their training and perspective
three cool stories of humans interpreting satellite photos:
(per some experts) during the cuban missile crisis, one of the red flags was the soccer fields in cuba since soccer was not a very popular sport in cuba. suggested soviet advisors
during the cold war, the US would hide their SR71 planes in hangars when they knew soviet satellites were passing overhead. the soviets deduced the shape of the SR71 based on the heat differential on the runway. the shadow where the plane was parked cooled down the runway in the desert a few degrees
(according to the director) when the new top gun movie was being made, china repositioned their satellites to make more passes over the experimental mach 10 plane that was being used for the intro scene. it supposedly caught their eye pretty quickly
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