[hackuser]

> Moving is not a major defense if your easy to find

Based on practitioners and experts I've read, finding ships is very difficult. The ocean is a huge place; remember there's far more ocean than land area. Imagine if you were told that somewhere in North America there's an object the size of an aircraft carrier, and it's moving around. How hard would it be to find it? The Pacific is much larger (though if there's a war over a contested location, the search area becomes much smaller).

Also, there are not nearly enough resources to watch the whole ocean at once. The U.S. military can't even monitor all of Afghanistan, or even all of contested regions in Afghanistan.

[Retric]

Aircraft carriers use active radar which makes them really easy to find. It's much closer to locating Iowa in the middle of the ocean than a boat. And once you locate one they can't really hide very well.