New surveillance commons means the end of military concealment

On February 26, 2026 – 48 hours before the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury – Hangzhou-based MizarVision posted AI-annotated satellite imagery of F-22 Raptors at Ovda Air Base in Israel, carrier strike group positions in the Arabian Sea and AWACS aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

The company does not own satellites. It purchases commercially available imagery from Western and non-Western providers and processes it through proprietary AI that identifies and categorizes military assets through automated object detection.

Operation Epic Fury launched approximately 24 hours after one particularly significant imagery release. MizarVision continued posting throughout the campaign, including damage assessments after Iranian strikes on Al Udeid, THAAD battery repositioning in Jordan and tanker aircraft locations at bases across Bahrain and the UAE. The US military classified many of its own force movements. A Chinese commercial AI platform published them on social media in near-real time.

The conventional understanding of operational security in the satellite age assumed that the relevant constraint was satellite access. Cold War spy satellites were large, few, expensive and operated by states, meaning only great powers had the persistent surveillance capability to track military force movements with meaningful temporal resolution.

Commercial satellite constellations changed this calculation over the past decade, but the full implications were not operationally demonstrated until Epic Fury. Planet Labs operates more than 200 SmallSat imaging satellites with daily revisit capability over any point on Earth.

Maxar’s constellation provides sub-meter-resolution imagery available by commercial subscription. These are not classified systems — they are commercial products accessible to any buyer with the appropriate subscription and the computational capacity to process the imagery at scale.

What MizarVision demonstrated is that processing commercial imagery with AI-enabled object detection compresses the timeline from satellite pass to military intelligence product from days to hours.

Force posture information that once required a classified satellite program and a dedicated ground processing facility can now be extracted from commercial imagery by a private company posting its findings to social media.

The operational consequences of MizarVision’s activities during the campaign were significant. F-22 Raptors at Ovda were identified from a satellite pass, and their presence was publicly confirmed before the operation began.

THAAD battery repositioning in Jordan and Saudi Arabia was tracked across successive passes, revealing defensive configuration changes that affected Iranian retaliation planning. AWACS positions at Prince Sultan were published, and Prince Sultan was subsequently struck repeatedly by Iranian attacks.

OSINTtechnical geolocated the destroyed E-3 Sentry after its loss, identifying it as serial number 81-0005 from publicly available aircraft markings and satellite imagery. Whether MizarVision’s publications directly informed Iranian targeting — and whether the correlation between imagery release and subsequent strikes reflects causal influence — remains unresolved by public evidence.

The operational reality that the correlation documents is analytically significant regardless of causation: US force posture across seven countries was continuously visible to any actor with access to MizarVision’s social media posts throughout the campaign.

The governance architecture for commercial satellite imagery and its military applications does not address this reality. The US government operates a system of shutter control — the authority to restrict commercial imagery providers from releasing images of specific locations during sensitive operations — over American companies.

Planet Labs and Maxar are subject to this authority. MizarVision is not.

It is a Chinese company purchasing imagery from non-US providers, processing it with AI and distributing it on social media platforms. There is no international agreement governing the military use of commercial satellite imagery by non-state entities, and there is no norm limiting the publication of AI-processed military force posture data derived from commercial imagery.

The Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations govern the export of military systems and technology, not the commercial imagery that allows adversaries to track those systems.

The strategic implication is not primarily about MizarVision specifically, or even about China’s use of commercial intelligence more broadly. It is about the structural transformation of the surveillance commons.

Every military in the world is now conducting operations under the assumption — confirmed at operational scale for the first time — that concealing force posture from commercial satellite observation is not achievable for assets visible from orbit.

This includes not only large platforms like aircraft carriers and AWACS aircraft, but increasingly smaller and harder-to-hit targets as AI-enabled object detection improves.

The operational response — US Air Force imagery of the destroyed E-3 was not released, commercial imagery from US providers of Prince Sultan was delayed and assets were dispersed across isolated taxiways to complicate targeting — reflects the adaptation of force protection doctrine to a surveillance environment that did not exist when the doctrine was written.

The governance gap is real and not currently addressable through unilateral US policy. An international agreement limiting the military use of commercial satellite imagery by non-state entities would require China’s participation — the state whose commercial intelligence companies most directly exploited the capability during Epic Fury — and would represent the most consequential arms control negotiation since the Open Skies Treaty, which the US itself withdrew from in 2020.

The commercial satellite commons will not be ungoverned indefinitely. The question is whether governance emerges from negotiation before the next conflict demonstrates consequences more severe than the force-posture visibility revealed in 2026.

Aleena Saif Ullah is a scholar in international relations specializing in global defense and security at the University of the Punjab, Lahore.