How this is made

ORBAT Map shows what armed forces have announced about where they serve: standing commitments, patrols, exercises, operations, deployments, training overseas and permanent stations, with the latest defence news and topics written by Vertical Sensing. The United Kingdom comes first; other nations follow the same layout.

The rules

• Only what the forces and their governments publish, or reputable press reports. Everything links to its sources.
• Deployments are shown to a country or a sea area, never more exactly. Patrols show as the area they cover. Stations show at their published location.
• Fleet figures are as published on the date shown, or marked as an estimate. They are not live.
• No tracking of military ships or aircraft, and nothing pieced together from social media. Commercial shipping only, in a few busy sea lanes.
• No individual people are named.
• Each entry, fleet and topic is read by a person before it's published.
• Latest news is the publisher's own headline and a link to their article. It appears by itself from the sources listed for each nation, placed by a small AI model that reads only the headline or the feed's short excerpt, and leaves the map after seven days. It is not checked by a person first, so a pin can be wrong.

How it's kept up to date

The official news pages are read once a day. New or changed activity is drafted from the article and checked by a person before it becomes an entry. Headlines are fetched every three hours.

Spotted something out of date? The sources on each entry are the place to check; corrections are welcome.

Who makes it

ORBAT Map is made and run by Vertical Sensing, which builds business intelligence for small business owners: finding new work near them (building permits, public tenders, new businesses), helping them win it, and writing their marketing.

ORBAT Map uses the same map and reading tools, and is free to everyone.

The environment layers

Hazards (hurricanes and cyclones with their tracks, earthquakes, floods, wildfires and volcanoes) come from GDACS, the US Geological Survey and NASA, as Vertical Sensing reads them. Commercial shipping is shown in a few busy sea lanes, from public AIS broadcasts; military and law-enforcement vessels are left out. These are for awareness only: follow the issuing agency for warnings.

Satellite imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless, s2maps.eu, by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016); the daily picture from NASA Worldview (GIBS). Hazards: Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS), USGS, NASA EONET. Ships: AIS via aisstream.io. Place names and borders © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap. Land outlines in share pictures from Natural Earth.