Satellite monitoring recalibrates unilateral battle reports of the US and Iran

Dear Editor,

On February 28, 2026, US-Israeli airstrikes triggered retaliatory strikes by Iran against US bases in the Middle East. On April 4, the United States invoked “shutter control” over commercial satellite companies such as Planet Labs, suspending the distribution of high-resolution imagery of the conflict zones.1 This move established a “data-denial environment” in flashpoints, aiming to secure wartime information dominance. This data embargo restricts the objective assessment of battlefield realities by global open-source intelligence. Under this data vacuum, the US emphasized effective defense, while Iran claimed to have inflicted heavy losses on critical hubs. This information asymmetry makes it difficult for the international community to accurately assess the true physical scale and humanitarian impact of the conflict.

To strip away the selective embellishments of narratives, we leveraged the open-source satellite data to achieve a rapid battlefield evaluation. Specifically, we utilized 10-m-resolution Sentinel-2 Level-2A imagery to monitor all US military bases reported to be attacked across the Middle East from February 28 to April 9, 2026, encompassing both targets with confirmed damage (red triangles, Figure 1A) and those with no obvious destruction at this resolution (orange circles, Figure 1A). Bi-temporal image pairs (pre- and post-strike) were aligned using cubic convolution resampling, and relative radiometric normalization was applied within valid overlapping regions to mitigate illumination discrepancies.