Vantage
The information is already public — it is just scattered across a reactor register, a hydrology paper, a defence budget and a community sensor network. Vantage puts it on one map: where the world's strategically significant infrastructure is, what each site does, and how much we actually know about where it is.
What this map cannot see
Every map of military activity built on public feeds has blind spots, and a map that hides them is worse than no map. So, plainly:
- Ships switch AIS off whenever they like. AIS is a collision-avoidance courtesy, not a surveillance system. Warships routinely run dark, and spoofed or replayed identities are common. Any "naval tracker" built on AIS is really showing merchant traffic plus the warships that chose to be seen. Vantage therefore leads with basing — a fact that does not blink — and treats live vessel positions as a bonus where the data is lawfully open.
- Military aircraft are visible only when they choose to be. ADS-B Out is often on for transit and airspace deconfliction, and off for operations. Tankers and transports are far more visible than combat aircraft — which is exactly why tanker movements have become the classic leading indicator.
- A worked example. On 21–22 June 2025, thirteen B-2s left Whiteman AFB. Six flew west toward Guam and were reported by flight trackers while still airborne. The seven that struck Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan went east with minimal emissions and were not tracked. The decoy package was designed against open-source observers, and it worked. Two lessons follow, and they are the honest frame for this whole layer: absence of a track is not absence of a flight, and a track you can see may be there for you to see.
- Coverage is uneven. Community ADS-B receivers are dense over Europe and North America and sparse over oceans, Africa and interior Asia. An empty region on the live layer usually means an empty receiver map, not empty sky.
Location precision is a first-class fact
A surveyed coordinate from a national register and a point placed from a paraphrased sentence are not the same claim, so they never look the same here. Every record carries a precision class:
Entries are also marked verified (hand-checked against a primary source) or harvested (machine-collected, description generated from the cited structured fields rather than written). A ◇ means we still owe it a primary source.
What is deliberately not here
Vantage is a reference atlas of infrastructure. It documents what a place is and does. It carries no targeting material of any kind — no aimpoints, no vulnerability or hardening assessment, no weapon-to-target reasoning, no strike planning — and nothing about private individuals.
Everything on it comes from open sources: government open data, CC0 and CC BY research databases, public registers, and open community sensor networks. Nothing classified, nothing restricted, nothing behind a login.
Where the data comes from
The backbone is Wikidata (CC0) for identity and coordinates, Natural Earth (public domain) for the basemap and its bilingual place names, and public-domain US government analysis — EIA for chokepoint transit volumes, DoD and the China Aerospace Studies Institute for command structure. Live aircraft come from the adsb.lol community network under ODbL 1.0.
Wikidata is used as a finding aid: it tells us where to look, and we cite the authority. Records still sourced only to a finding aid are flagged, and counted, so the number can be driven down.
How it stays current
Nothing here is updated by hand on a good-intentions basis. Live aircraft refresh about every two minutes while the layer is on. Harvested layers re-run weekly. Curated entries get a quarterly review reminder. Every automated run validates before it commits, and a run that would delete more than 5% of a layer fails instead — because upstream breakage looks exactly like real change.
If a feed dies, the map says so rather than quietly showing yesterday.