Everything about Clandestine Operation totally explained
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Clandestine operation is a military or Intelligence operation carried out in such a way that the operation goes unnoticed.
The bulk of clandestine operations are related to the gathering of intelligence,
typically by people and by hidden sensors. Placement of underwater or land based communications cable taps, cameras, microphones, traffic sensors, monitors such as sniffers, and similar systems require that the mission go undetected and unsuspected. Clandestine sensors may also be on unmanned underwater vehicles,
stealthy satellites or low-observability
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or
unmanned detectors as in
Operation Igloo White and its successors or
hand-emplaced by clandestine human operations.
There is a delicate line between clandestine and covert when using concealed remote sensors or human observers to direct air and artillery strikes. Clearly, being bombed tells the target that he's probably been located by the other side, although "harassing and interdiction" or "free-fire zone" rules can cause a target to be hit for purely random reasons. The exact method that was used to locate the targets, however, can remain clandestine. Sometimes, the real method is covered by another method. In World War Two, targets found through
cryptanalysis of radio communications, were attacked only if there had been aerial reconnaissance in the area, or, in the case of the shootdown of
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, where the sighting could be attributed to
Coastwatchers. During the
Vietnam War, trucks attacked on the
Ho Chi Minh trail were completely unaware of some sensors, such as the airborne device that sensed their ignition. They could also have been spotted by a human patrol, staying clandestine.
It can reasonably be said that a covert operation can have clandestine components within it. To go back to the US military definition of clandestine, which includes "concealment of the operation" as the primary consideration, the targeting component can be covert, while the attack is overt.
Until the 1970's, clandestine operations were primarily political in nature, generally aimed at assisting groups or nations favored by the sponsor (for example, secret political subsidies to
Japanese politicians). Today these operations are more numerous than ever before, but are swamped in percentages by the shear number of technology related clandestine operations.
The term "clandestine" is frequently misused, even within the military. Popular literature and poor journalistic standards often create confusion on the term. The above-named quote has been the accepted definition for the US and NATO since World War II. Clandestine is to mean "hidden", and Covert is to mean "deniable." Stealth is a tactic and a technology, used as an adjective, and isn't used to formally describe a type of mission.
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