In wars of the future, national security won't end at space Russia's invasion of Ukraine clearly defined how warfare going forward will look – a mix of the horrors of conventional fighting on the ground and the more hidden though ferocious battle in cyberspace. That was on display from the opening days of the war in February 2022, with the ground and air assault coupled with a complex …
Russia's invasion of Ukraine clearly defined how warfare doesn't work these days - FTFY
I hope that Russia's failure is also influencing Xi Jinping who is quieter about Taiwan these days, the politics still leaves him talking about it but Russia's failure in the Ukraine is probably helping the Chinese, both on the mainland and the island.
Security via obscurity. The age-old mantra.
It does work. Do you know where the nearest CIA safehouse is ? Of course not, you're not in the know and the building (or appartment) looks just like any other one. Impossible to tell at a glance. The neighbors might not even know.
But a satellite ? It may be sailing in the dark and hard to spot with the naked eye, but a radioastronomer can likely discover it and follow it without trouble.
A satellite is only hidden when it doesn't emit any signal. Unless it's a very specific satellite with a very specialized use case, it's likely that it is spewing radio waves of all sorts. Even if encrypted, those signals can be detected.
That being said, knowing that it's there doesn't necessarily tell you what it does. You'd also have to know about its orbit.
Commercial satellites generally don't move around all that much. A commercial company wants its hardware to last, and changing orbit is costly in propulsion fuel. A spy sat, on the other hand, has the task of gathering information, so if it has to move to get that intel, so be it.
In other words, if a satellite is changing orbit often, there's a chance it may be a spy sat.
But I'm sure that Chine, Russia and the US are all very aware of that already.
But a satellite ? It may be sailing in the dark and hard to spot with the naked eye, but a radioastronomer can likely discover it and follow it without trouble.
There's a band of brothers fascinated enough with tracking satellites, to do it as amateurs, which should tell you, they're very, very good. And they report some satellites apparently disappear from sight.
There's just one problem with that I can see - if a satellite can disappear from sight for the purposes of eluding tracking while it is operational, what'll happen if it fails prematurely, and the operators can't deorbit it? And no one can find it?
We've already had one non-operational military satellite crash into an operational communications satellite. We can't allow Doofuses Anonymous too much fun, can we? Particularly after the non-showing of the Numpty Breeders Association in 2018, when two of the finest examples of numpty breeding from both sides of the Atlantic were in the UK and could have been shown, and received Blue Ribbons ...
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