Show Notes
Commercial maritime sensing has made it easier to build naval order-of-battle estimates from open sources. AIS provides identity and patterns but is vulnerable to spoofing and manipulation. SAR detects ships regardless of cooperation, and fusion approaches exploit mismatches between AIS and imagery to identify anomalies and “dark ships.” Commercial RF mapping can add another layer of behavioral evidence when AIS goes silent. States should counter OSINT by reducing adversary inference through emission discipline, selective disclosure, AIS governance, and better internal sharing, rather than defaulting to overclassification.
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