The Public Battlefield: Commercial Satellites, Social Media, and OSINT in Contemporary War

Hours before Vladimir Putin announced his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, an unexpected warning flashed across computer monitors thousands of miles away. It did not originate from a CIA bunker or a NATO underground command center, but from open-source researchers tracking an anomalous late-night traffic jam on Google Maps just north of the Ukrainian border in Belgorod. The armor had begun to move. The age of the transparent battlefield had arrived.

In 'The Public Battlefield', military historian and analyst M. A. Muñoz delivers a definitive, gripping investigation into the most profound military transformation since the invention of radar: the complete democratization of battlefield intelligence. For over a century, sovereign states held an unchallenged monopoly over reconnaissance from the sky and across electromagnetic waves. Today, that fortress of secrecy has crumbled. A global ecosystem of commercial satellites—spearheaded by Maxar, Planet Labs, and Capella Space—provides sub-meter optical imagery and synthetic aperture radar capable of piercing dense cloud cover and night, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a credit card.

Simultaneously, the modern soldier has become a walking sensor. From careless selfies and Strava jogging routes that betray secret forward operating bases to tactical communications surging through Telegram channels and combat footage broadcast live on TikTok, contemporary war unfolds before an audience of billions. Muñoz unpacks the rise of decentralized civilian detective networks like Bellingcat, the algorithmic battlefield mapped by initiatives like Oryx and DeepState, and the privatization of military-grade infrastructure through platforms like Elon Musk's Starlink.

Yet hypervisibility does not mean the end of strategic deception. Drawing on deep technical analysis and firsthand battlefield evidence from Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, and the October 7 assault on Israel, this book exposes the dark side of open-source warfare: algorithmic disinformation, deepfakes, cognitive overload, and the dangerous illusion that what cannot be seen on a screen does not exist. Rigorous, incisive, and intensely narrative, 'The Public Battlefield' is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the future of war, intelligence, and geopolitics in our hyper-connected century.