quote:
Originally posted by Lastseer:
Well while the USSR may not know how to make some of the specific high tech items the US has. I'm sure they probably have a very good graps on how many naval vessels or aircraft the US has (probably even by ship class). From both Intel sources like Satellites and tracking parts of the defense budget that are public record. But I'm sure they also do things, that don't require a high level of espionage. (E.g. have a tourist go to a nearby beach and count the ships that enter and leave port with a binocular.)
That brings up an interesting point: back in the cold war days, there was talk of a "bomber gap" between the US and USSR, based on observations made during a parade in the USSR. We found out years later (I think it was years) that the Soviets had tricked us: they flew the same bombers over the parade multiple times, to make it _look_ like they had more planes. The poor guy who was watching the parade and counting planes (and I think they did it with tanks, too, BTW), didn't realize what was going on.
Not certain how that would be implemented in SEIV, but it's a way to fool low-level espionage tricks like counting the number of ships that pass a given beach.
OTOH, there's quite a bit of data to be found in "public domain" periodicals. The problem is sifting through the vast number of magazines and newspapers. I heard someplace that the Japanese had an organization in WWII whose job was reading all the American journals and newspapers to find any information relevant to the war effort. Fortunately for us, by the time the war ended, they were 2 or 3 YEARS behind, because of the vast amount of information to wade through.