MizarVision — a private Chinese geospatial intelligence firm — just published a report reconstructing 62 American bomber sorties from Operation Epic Fury. Every B-1, B-2, and B-52 mission that flew against Iran between March 1 and March 17 is now mapped, phased, and annotated in a Chinese intelligence product distributed to whoever wants it.

The data source? Free. Publicly available. Left on like a porch light.

Here is how the world’s most expensive air force got tracked by a company with a website and a subscription to FlightRadar24. The bombers themselves don’t broadcast ADS-B transponder signals — they’re stealth aircraft, and turning on a transponder would defeat the purpose of spending $2 billion per plane on radar-absorbing paint. But the tankers do. KC-135s and KC-46s — the aerial refueling aircraft that keep the bombers airborne — broadcast ADS-B signals as a standard aviation safety measure. They do this because international airspace regulations require it. They also do this because apparently nobody at the Pentagon considered that a Chinese intelligence firm might be watching.

MizarVision took the tanker signals, cross-referenced them with the known loiter patterns of aerial refueling operations, mapped the refueling tracks over the Mediterranean, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz, and reverse-engineered the bomber flight paths. Three operational phases. Sixty-two sorties. Full geographic reconstruction. Published on a website with a Chinese domain.

The United States Air Force just got its homework copied by a kid sitting in the back of the class using a calculator we handed him.

This is not a hack. This is not an intelligence breach. This is not a spy satellite or a mole or a compromised communications channel. This is a Chinese company using the exact same publicly available data that any aviation enthusiast with a laptop and a RadioShack antenna could access. The Pentagon didn’t get penetrated. The Pentagon left the front door open, turned on the lights, and put a sign on the lawn that said “bombers refuel here.”

The obvious question — the one that should keep someone at Air Mobility Command awake tonight — is why ADS-B transponders were active on tankers supporting a combat operation against a near-peer adversary’s ally. The tankers were not flying commercial routes. They were not in congested civilian airspace. They were orbiting in designated military refueling tracks during an active kinetic campaign. And they were broadcasting their position, altitude, speed, and heading to anyone with a receiver.

The slightly less obvious question is what else the Chinese mapped that they haven’t published yet. MizarVision released 62 sorties’ worth of data. That’s the sanitized version — the intelligence product a private company is comfortable showing the world. The PLA’s own signals intelligence operation, which has access to everything MizarVision has and considerably more, has presumably built a much more detailed picture. And they’re not publishing theirs.

Here’s the civilizational tell. The United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. The B-2 Spirit costs $2.1 billion per aircraft. The radar-absorbing coating on a single B-2 costs more than most countries spend on their entire air force. And a Chinese startup with an internet connection just mapped where every one of them refueled during a shooting war — because we left the tanker transponders on.

If you wanted a one-sentence summary of why the American military-industrial complex is simultaneously the most powerful and most bureaucratically inept fighting force in human history, this is it. We can build a plane invisible to radar and then broadcast its refueling location to a Chinese company’s inbox.

Turn off the transponders. Or don’t. MizarVision will be watching either way.