Back in March, as the American strikes on the Iranian regime, which had begun on the last day of February, continued apace and the world braced for what might become a wider conflict, a French naval officer took a run around the deck of the aircraft carrier he was deployed on.
Exercise time and the space to do it in can be hard to come by in a warship at sea, but if one can call it lucky, the opportunity for a good leg stretch is far easier on a carrier than anywhere else in a fleet for obvious reasons.
In any of the previous conflicts, this might well have passed without incident. But in these wired times, with a Fitbit at the least, or a monster like an Apple Watch or Garmin on nearly every wrist, it's a good deal more complicated. What was a conscientious effort to stay in shape with a morning jog turned into a serious breach of the vessel's security.
The French officer used a fitness app called 'Strava' to log his efforts that morning on the deck of the Charles de Gaulle, the crown jewel of the French fleet, whose whereabouts no one had known until that moment.
LE OOPS
A French officer has reportedly revealed the location of an aircraft carrier deployed towards the Middle East after publicly registering a run on sports app Strava.
French news outlet Le Monde first reported the officer, referred to as Arthur, logged a 35-minute run on the app while exercising on the deck of aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle on 13 March.
He used a smartwatch to record his run and upload the activity to the app, the paper said, creating a map that showed his location.
The vessel is the main part of a carrier strike group recently deployed to the eastern Mediterranean by the French, the ministry of armed forces said, as tensions in the region continue due to the Iran war.
...This is not the first time an activity on the app has exposed sensitive details.
Le Monde previously reported runs shared by Macron's bodyguards jeopardised his location in several occasions, while Secret Service agents accompanying then-US President Joe Biden also shared their whereabouts on the app in 2024.
A similar report that year said the app showed bodyguards for Russian President Vladimir Putin at luxurious properties the Kremlin denies owning.
Another function on the app, its 'heatmap', has previously come under fire for sharing the location of exercise routes of military personnel in bases around the world.
The heatmaps visualise all public activity recorded of all its users around the globe - allowing users to zoom in and explore different parts of the world.
This would seem to be a real-world problem in times of conflict now, and something the snail-mail world of even the First Gulf War didn't have to deal with.
The head of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, has issued a memo to all forces stationed across the entire Iranian theater of operations that seems a tad late, in my opinion. But I am also speaking without knowing what sort of guidance has been given previously, so I don't want to slam too hard.
But what it says is that the cell phone videos and pictures being uploaded by troops in theater are giving the Iranians invaluable targeting data and infrastructure information to work from, and if these numbskulls don't knock it off, they're going to lose their phone privileges.
This holds particularly true for troops stationed in those vulnerable Jordanian outposts.
US military may require some troops in Mideast to surrender cell phones, sources say
The top U.S. commander for the Middle East has warned troops that cellphone videos shared online can help Iran target American bases, and sources told Reuters some deployed personnel could soon be ordered to surrender their phones.Any crackdown on mobile communications would add a new dimension to the conflict for the thousands of U.S. troops in the region, many of whom still rely on phones to periodically message loved ones and assure them they are well.Admiral Brad Cooper, in a previously unreported letter, said Iran was benefiting from being able to see the success or failure of its strikes in near real-time by searching news reports or online posts by journalists referencing "reactions, photos, and footage from the cellphones of our troops."
Now, I have personally seen the footage referenced in the next paragraph, and my first reaction was absolute horror. Followed by something (because this is a family-friendly site) I can't repeat - but if you've read me long enough, you'll know it rhymed with 'ducking' and ended with 'moron.'
This full-blown drooling idiot soldier has a video of the entire inside of his command hut, makes sure he gets shots of all the desks and monitors as he's swinging on his protective gear at a run. With sirens blaring, he throws open the door to charge outside into the darkness and proceeds to show anyone watching how to get to the bunker and how it, too, is protected from incoming.
And this soldier, of the tiny, TINY brain, thought this was a good thing to load to social media for the world to see.
...In a video posted online this month, a U.S. service member recorded a video as soldiers ran for shelter during a deadly Iranian attack on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17.Cooper appeared to reference the footage in his letter, saying it had been recorded on Meta smart glasses with a built-in camera."Video captured from a service member's Meta glasses was posted on Instagram showing where and how the individual had evacuated to a bunker during an Iranian missile and drone attack," Cooper wrote.Iran would normally have a tough time determining the success or failure of its strikes, were it not for such accounts, Cooper said, thanks to the U.S. military's electronic jamming or other tactics used in war zones."Iran knows the weapons were fired; however, their forces do not know if they missed by 50 meters, hit an empty tarmac, or successfully struck a crowded facility," he wrote. "Detailed lists, descriptions, and analyses of what was hit, openly published by news outlets are essentially performing Iran’s Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) for them, free of charge," Cooper said.
The little video star might well be responsible for whatever future maimings and deaths occur at that base. I'd have him back in the States and strung up by his little toggling thumbs so fast it would make his empty head spin.
If stalkers in any American city can find you from the background in an innocent picture online...
Literally any skyline photo from your window is giving away your exact address.
— Bilawal Sidhu (@bilawalsidhu) July 28, 2026
Check out these photos I took around Austin, precisely geolocated by matching pixels against a 3D scan.
The most insane match was a photo I took inside a high rise looking down. It nailed the… pic.twitter.com/ki4w4FUV9O
...what in the Sam hell do these young idiots think the Iranians are doing?
And, honestly, this is such weird timing because I was having a conversation just last night with a friend whose young - 19 - grandson is on one of those boats floating out there. He's got a computer that they Facebook message with at what she said seems to be nearly any time of the day. Of course, he's miserable, young, and on his first float, which also happens to coincide with wartime action, so I totally get it. Major suckage.
There is no one more willing to listen to you moan than your family who loves and misses you.
As they do not speak Navy, she asked me - and by extension, major dad, who has been on a float or two of note in his lifetime - is this bellyaching or are things truly so dire?
Mostly bellyaching, I was able to assure her, even without the husband's fond reminiscing about 1-minute showers (if any at all) when the boat's on water hours, etc.
But then we got talking about the communication aspect. The grandson calls, or messages home with his first-termer beefs - and everybody hates life as a first-termer. Then he hits the rack and wakes up the next morning, no worse for the wear, ready to bitch about life again. But what he doesn't realize and really can't, is that now he's got how many people at home who don't know any better (because so few anymore have no personal experience to go by) fretful and worried that the boat is sinking, or they don't have enough water, and that someone's not taking care of the troops or sailors. Wherever they are or whatever service they might be in.
When that's not the case at all. It's a fact that life at sea or in a hostile zone is hard at any time, and especially challenging in an active-threat environment.
It's the instant communication that we are not fans of. Does a guy in one of those isolated bases really need to hear from his wife at home that she's pissed off for the third night in a row?
To paraphrase Pet Sematary's famous line, sometimes letters are better. Even during the First Gulf War, that's all we had to communicate with unless we got really lucky and major dad could get a call out of a head shed line to our squadron. Lasted five minutes, which was plenty.
The accessibility of real-time messaging overload can easily work against force morale in the best of times. However, as they are now waking up to, it can be downright deadly in a combat environment.
Today's young people are stupidly narcissistic in many instances. It would never occur to them that their air-raid evac video could compromise the safety and security of the unit going forward. And again, I don't know what sort of briefings they got not to do such ridiculously foolish, irresponsible things.
But excitement and danger are thrilling muses, and having that camera at hand would be well nigh irresistible to a generation practically birthed with them in their palms.
But once it's done and out there, what does a command do to mitigate the damage?
I honestly don't know. You can't rebuild the base. You can't juggle those mobile units around easily, and what blast shields some of them have available (those concrete fences like Jersey barriers) are nowhere near enough.
Take the cell phones and those Meta glasses away. Take them away.
Pull the batteries out, put them in a secure locker on check-in, and give them back when they check out.
Learn to write letters. We all survived on letters and out-of-the-blue calls from secure lines. Most of the kids have laptops, too. There is less chance of immediate security damage with those. Commander's discretion.
When the bad guys are reading your social media posts for all the wrong reasons, more might survive if more went back to pen and paper.
