note: thread is ancient and most posts date back to 2010s, including legal threats
deleting landuse=military is quite pointless from security perspective. Is anyone really expecting this to be secret? Is military really relying on that?
Actual security would depend on distinction between “unimportant training military site” and “staging area for special forces” not being obvious, the same for say “old unused airstrip with no plans to be used” vs “old unused airstrip prepared as dispersal site for F-35 warplanes”. Or “where on this 40 square kilometers of landuse=military mobile anti-missile TEL is/will be located”. Or “which missiles sites are empty and which ones are with very expensive equipment”.
Or “empty abandoned military site” vs “artillery batallion defending capital”.
See also war in Ukraine where initial cruise missile strikes targeted military sites - some entirely disused for actual military purposes for last 20 years, while still being landuse=military.
But if someone is mapping say specific location where specific missiles are stored then I would start asking questions. But it would not be about “are you Chinese/Iranian/Russian/French spy” but something more OSM specific: how it passes verifiability requirement?
In general Verifiability - OpenStreetMap Wiki is applicable. If some secret got leaked to the point where it can be independently verified by OSM mappers, then surely spies also know about it already? And if it fails verifiability it can be deleted from map for that reason.
For something not failing verifiability, but being useful for attacker: I would NOT update map quickly after an attack, as it provides battle damage assessment for free.
Also, I would not map moving frontline positions, brand new military bases kept for now secret.
deleting power plants from map strikes me as especially pointless, as idea of hiding existence of power plants is dubious at best
if I can use Wikipedia, official documents and aerial imagery to find power plants in South Korea, China and Russia then surely Chinese spies can also do that? How deleting from OSM helps anything?
“they can bomb our power plants but they cannot find it, unless it is on OpenStreetMap” would be a quite bizarre competency gap
the same goes for military bases