United States reconnaissance aircraft deployed at a military hub in the Western Pacific Ocean has collected thousands of hours of intelligence data about China and North Korea.
Newsweek has reached out to the Chinese Defense Ministry for comment by email. The North Korean Embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why It Matters
The U.S. Air Force operates various spy planes, including the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint, from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, a Japanese island that is part of the first island chain. The blockade is a U.S. defense concept designed to counter threats from adversaries.
Using open-source flight tracking data, Newsweek has mapped U.S. spy flights from Kadena Air Base to international airspace off the coast of China over the East China Sea and the South China Sea, as well as near North Korea’s border over the Korean Peninsula.
What To Know
According to the U.S. Air Force 18th Wing, which is the host aviation unit for Kadena Air Base, the 82nd Reconnaissance Squadron has been conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions in the Indo-Pacific region since its arrival at the base in 1968.
The squadron’s primary mission is to secure “our strategic military advantage in the Pacific theater” by providing vital intelligence, the 18th Wing said in a press release on March 12.
Aircraft operated by the squadron, including the RC-135V/W, are capable of capturing and disseminating “real-time intelligence” to key decision-makers. The Rivet Joint aircraft can detect, identify, and geolocate electronic signals, according to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet.
In support of the U.S. National Defense Strategy, the squadron “collected 81 terabytes of intelligence data over 2,800 flight hours for the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chief of Staff” last year, the press release revealed without further elaboration.
According to the binary conversion, one terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. The data collected by the squadron is equivalent to 82,944 gigabytes, or 29.6 gigabytes per hour.
For a rough comparison, the file size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is 4.2 gigabytes.
Data storage unit conversion suggests that the squadron gathered approximately seven encyclopedias of electronic intelligence data per hour in the Indo-Pacific region, an open-source intelligence analyst on X, formerly Twitter, @MeNMyRC1, told Newsweek.
What People Are Saying
U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel John Casey, commander of the 82nd Reconnaissance Squadron, said in a press release on March 12: “We are the seeing eye—always there, always reliable, always serving this region, ensuring that we maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific, as per our national defense strategy.”
The U.S. Air Force wrote in a fact sheet: “The RC-135V/W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft supports theater and national level consumers with near real time on-scene intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination capabilities.”
What Happens Next
The U.S. military continues to fly spy missions from its air bases in the Western Pacific Ocean as tensions in the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and Korean Peninsula persist.
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