Originally Posted By: Astro14
Let's look at just how "easy" it is to cover the Earth with continuous surveillance.
Our Aegis class Cruisers (perhaps known as "robocruisers") have a continuous all-aspect surveillance range of 100 NM, covering an impressive volume of space. They can focus the beam to get longer ranges, but we're talking about coverage in all directions in this assumption set. So, 100NM = 185 KM. The area covered by the SPY-1 radar is then πr2, or 1.08×10(5) square KM.
The Earth's surface is 510.1 million km². If the Oceans are 70% of that total (and they are, roughly), then there are, roughly 360 million km² of ocean surface to be watched.
So, to cover the surface of the sea with radar cover that has no gaps would require roughly 3,400 Aegis ships, equally distributed...slightly more to account for inlets and coves, but again, this is a rough estimate of coverage required to track everything, everywhere, all the time.
The US Navy, the largest Navy in the world, has an impressive set of 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers and 62 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers...those 84 ships would, at best, not quite cover .02% of the ocean surface at a given time.
Now, to cover just the 3.5 million km² of the South China sea would take only 32 ships...but that's nearly half the US Fleet...and that fleet is busy across the globe...
Yeesh. Thanks for putting my argument to sleep.
Now, I don't know (and do not want to know) the position of our fleet, or our fleet movements. Since that area is fairly busy and bustling, I thought it would follow that there we would have a robust military radar net around there.