A challenge for our likely opponents?
Per your article:
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?
In any major near peer conflict the satellites will obviously be among the first casualties. The USA and China have been quietly engaging in an ASAT arms race for several years.
At some point the ICBM nuke exchange happens, as well.
This adds a sort of weird bit because, of course, it isn’t really clear why we’d care about carrier performance against China, if we assume it would be an ICBM war anyway.
Maybe a proxy war or some sort of limited thing could be envisioned… but it seems really risky. I hope we don’t do it obviously.
> nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome
Except the Trump administration, you mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-pollut...
Satellites require uplinks. You don't have to destroy anything in orbit if you can destroy the control station on the ground.
Plus if we can hack into it and force it into graveyard while expending all it's fuel that's obviously the opening move.
The count and function of China’s satellite fleet is no mystery. We see their payloads go up, same as they see ours.
Very much the same way they see our boats leave port, in fact.