I can tell you about one thing that I didn't find mentioned. Argentina's Naval Prefecture is using a product called Galatea Watcher from Ascentio Technologies (they are the main contractor for Argentina's Space Agency and have developed the ground segment and done operations for them). This product does pretty much the same as in the article: it takes satellite imagery from several sources, does image processing and detection on them and cross-references it with AIS reports from vessels and alerts all the suspicious activity. One could see all the ships getting positioned just in the international border and then disappear by night. This is a well known issue.
The big question is what can a nation do to stop this? The normal diplomatic and legal avenues don't seem to do much. A ship here and there can be seized but much like fines that are slaps on the wrist for large corporations, there's too much economic value in violating the rules. A seized ship now and then is a small price to pay for access to everyone else's fishing areas. There don't seem to be any good escalation paths that aren't morally unconscionable.
The crew will likely be desperate and / or slaves.
So how about:
Sell the ship, let the crew live in a nice hotel, book them a 1st class flight back home, then bill the country under who's flag the ship was operating. If they can't / refuse to pay, import sanctions.
That way, you're not punishing the crew, yet making such behavior financially uninteresting. That's the only way because the person who decided to send that ship there is probably far away and busy counting profits.
Also, it's a lot easier to capture the boat if that's a positive experience for the crew. They might flee from a trip to prison but few people run from a paid vacation offer.
After you sink the boat you can pick the crew up and give them free tickets to Disney Land or throw them in jail it doesn't matter when it comes to dissuading illegal fishing.
The point is to make the expected ROI of trespassing in other nations' territorial waters negative. The crew is cheap and easy to replace relative to the boat. So you have to make the boat go away (sink it or impound it) to make the corporate owner back on land feel the heat.
Imprison them and give them back to their home country ASAP is probably the right way to handle the crew.
There's the large assumption that the flag carrier country will pay.
Realistically, once this becomes a strategem, and a known one, anyone with a boat can enter your waters, hoist the jolly roger, then say "Yeah, take me into asylum." And poof, your immigration procedures evaporate.
You should do some reading up on what is involved in applying for and receiving asylum in the US. Your post indicates an inaccurate understanding of what is involved and required for an asylum seeker to receive legal asylum.
I assume it is like immigration. In one sense, it is a long legal process with a variety of steps to ensure this person is serious. But in a more practical sense, it just involves crossing a border and having the phase "illegal immigrant" removed from the vocabulary.
I appreciate the cleverness, but no: trying to solve too many problems at once ends up with no problem being solved at all.
Want to get rid of the fishing fleet? Make a credible offer of residency and amnesty to all their crews - no strings attached, no continued use as pawns in politics. Simple trade: they bring in and surrender their vessel, you give each a green card, a key to a room, some starting cash, and a "thank you for your service", and forget about them.
International travel is already so easy these days that spies and saboteurs have no trouble entering any country they want.
But OK, so let's scratch the "and forget about them" part. Have the counterintelligence agency keep their details in their database, and warn them that they won't get security clearance in the next decade or three. This won't discourage anyone who's eager to escape their home country.
Both easy and hard. When I've traveled to Europe I often find the the door for non-EU citizens leads to exactly the same place as the one for EU, and nobody is even watching to check passports. India was a lot more careful about verifying my VISA, which I needed to get in advance. India has more reason to fear than the EU in general.
At least for the US, any spy or saboteur who wants to enter can do so on a student visa, I am sure. Just have to pony up for tuition at any of a number of schools who are desperately looking for students who will pay.
There is more time for a background check that way. There are many ways to work around the difficult US entry requirements if an attacker is determined, but if something like this bypasses the process attackers will go for that: boats are cheap.
It's not clear to me that an ocean-going fishing boat would be cheaper than college tuition. Is it? Would love to see some data. https://horizonship.com/ship-category/commercial-fishing-ves... has prices a good bit about even 4-year tuition for all the things that list actual prices.
The nice hotel is called prison and the Chinese Embassy should handle their release. If they work as slaves, they should testify doing so and maybe ask for political asylum. I know it's complicated with Chinese citizens being blackmailed by the PRC with their families at home, but it only takes a few to do so
You don't even need to sink the ship doing the "trawler wars" of the 1970ies when British pirate trawlers were plying Icelandic water(with the protection of the royal navy) Iceland manage to destroy enough trawls by dragging wires though them that the Brit's eventually gave up trying to fish in Icelandic waters.
A few trawlers got boarded but no shots were fired.
Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute. The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back, just as it is common to let the fishers fish for 10 years (the problem clearly isn’t new) until the population starts noticing that our ecosystems are destroyed, rather than arresting/sinking ships.
Democracies do tend to have rules preventing military action at home, yes. And they also tend to sign on to things like human rights treaties, that say arbitrarily killing people (even foreigners breaking the law) is not ok.
> The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back
Nations like ours with low birth rates and aging workforces depend on immigrants to maintain vibrant economies. The alternative is to become like Japan, where the economy stagnates and abandoned houses litter the countryside.
At least in European context, many migrants who cross the border illegally lack sufficient education to do well in modern labour market, and end up having a very low employment rate & high dependency on welfare. Even those who do find employment are likely to have low salary that doesn't bring much tax income.
Thus uncontrolled migration can never be a solution to our population issues. Instead effort should be put into attracting more skilled workforce that is in demand, and they should come in legally.
So why not selectively import the people (workers, professions) the country needs?
There are competent engineers "waiting in line" for years, while illegals are allowed to stay... it's basically rewarding the criminals and punishing the honest ones.
You’re talking to much sense. Fact is, a portion of the people advocating for not enforcing immigration laws profit from the off-the-books labor. The greater portion are useful idealists. The difference between the two is that the latter imagine a world that concurrently has an endless supply of low skill laborers and a meaningfully high minimum wage law that would be respected. Perhaps there’s another fraction that believe in growing minimum wage for citizens and (as today) no such law for black market labor pools of non-citizens, but I like to think that level of maliciousness is not as common as hapless idealism.
We can do both. We don't have to choose between welcoming the many highly skilled professionals who want to work here, and welcoming the asylum seekers and economic refugees who are fleeing violence or poverty and eager to build a better future here. We can do both, and we would benefit from both.
Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment. One resents the other because of 2000 years of domination, the other for being in social priority and not being effectively competent in the same position despite 60 years of fight for equality, and instead of working on bringing our citizen together, we bring new ones. I don’t know to what problem this is the solution.
Long story short, many people still want to have children, and not having fertility should be the problem that is getting addressed.
> Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment.
Male-female resentment is not the reason fertility rates around the globe have fallen precipitously over the past century. That's a bizarre idea.
When women have access to contraception and opportunities to participate in the workforce and pursue higher education, it turns out they are less interested in raising large families.
There are tools we could be using to encourage people to have more children, such as universal childcare and pre-K, generous financial support for low-income families, and high quality public schools. Unfortunately, opponents to immigration typically also oppose these policies, too.
Our lazze-faire(sp?) attitude towards who can have children will come back to bite us, someday. The most "successful" parents are those who invest very little into their offspring.
> Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute.
Immigration is generally not territorial dispute, indeed, its far more often voting for an alternate regime with one’s feet than asserting a hostile territorial claim.
Letters of Marque and Reprisal.[1] This is how the early U.S fought the Barbary pirates in the Barbary Wars[2] in the early days of the republic. This power is actually authorized explicitly in the U.S Constitution.
And abolished since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, if memory serves well. And thus illegal.
It would be better to fight the defacto slavery of the crews (agencies, owners and so on), the abysmal conditions in these crews home countries and sanction the hell out the owners of these ships and the people / companies making a healthy profit from them. But why bother, because you would just end up with more expensive shipping im general and more expensive fish.
The 1856 Paris Declaration, in fact. Also the 1907 Hague Convention. The US was not a signatory to the former, and did not agree to the provision against privateering in the latter, so for the US, at least, privateering is still on the table. Argentina, however, was a signatory to the Paris Declaration. Perhaps they can change their minds, but probably they won't for something like this.
And Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia... The list is long. Western democracies don't seem to care of all the sweet dollar that is to be made in these countries. At least Russia used to pretend to play by established rules.
The problem with these rules, IMHO, is that they were created to serve the interests of western powers. Hard to force other countries to play by them, then.
The very reason you're downvoted is the reason you're right. People have their heads in the sand. They don't realize that there's no political will to oppose China because China has already bought the needed to control to tamp down on any efforts to oppose them.
Hell, we're witnessing in-your-face genocide of the Uighurs, takeover of Hong Kong, imminent takeover of Taiwan, support of North Korea's psychopathic regime, destruction of the environment in every way possible (as in this story), etc... and the rest of the world sits on its collective hands. China knows how to boil frogs nice and slowly.
The rules of engagement are such that killing usually isn't required. They would announce who they are and tell the boats to turn around and exit territorial waters. Those who do not comply, or repeat or suspicious offenders, might get stopped, boarded, and their cargo confiscated, perhaps even their boats sold at auction. Any sailors aboard could request amnesty if they are truly in an effective-slave situation.
The only way it turns to shoot-and-sink is if the boats flagrantly disregard orders through multiple points of escalation. Even then the attempt would be to disable the ship, not destroy it (by shooting out the engine or rudder, for example).
You’d probably have to offer the sailors a ride before the sinking the ship to be humane. Odds are not good the average crew member has much control of the fact they are fishing somewhere illegally.
Indonesia has sunk more than 550 vessels related to illegal fishing between October 2014 to 2020. And all crews has been arrested and deported, none were killed. If Indonesia can do it, why other countries can't?
I honestly don't know what it'd take to re-home them. But the first time you sunk a fishing vessel with 20 kids on it, you'd have a global PR disaster.
This video claims to show the Russian navy firing on Somali pirates.
One narrative concerning piracy off the coast of Somalia is that incursion of foreign fishing fleets took away the opportunity for lawful livelihoods for those living in Somalia. Which in the context of this post is ... troublingly ironic.
They were attacking fishing boats (they didn't have a navy because there was no real government, so these attackers were pirates). The Somali pirates should get more respect from most hardliners. This is basically people grabbing guns to protect their land and create a livelihood instead of lying down to die.
Somalia shows nicely why we, as the West, has a hard time combating illegal fishing. We ignore large scale illegal fishing in Somali waters, ruining the local economy. We also ignore that our fishing fleets aren't that innocent.
When the locals, for lack of a standing Navy, defend their waters, we call them pirates and send our Navy to fight them. No surprise, that these pirates went after bigger ships, realizing that being more profitable than fishing.
Now imagine a world, in which our Navies would defend Somali waters against these intrusions. While at the same time, we did some real, like non-military, backes nation building through the UN. I guess that would have been a much better way to combat piracy there. But who gives a shit about some poor bastards in a failed state somewhere in Africa?
The sad thing is the people out there on the boats are in all likelihood just trying to scrape a living and the people who deserve to be in harm's way are higher up the economic ladder. There are a lot of world problems that amount to "no one holds China accountable" (and to a lesser extent, first world nations don't do enough to hold themselves accountable), and I would really like for countries to tax and/or sanction China for their negative externalities (e.g., pollution, overfishing) it would make the world a much better place--either China starts to compete fairly or else they lose the wealthiest markets to the advantage of the whole world and especially countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America who would fill the manufacturing void.
Mandatory disclaimer for the pro-China accounts: I'm very much not interested in deflecting to the West's problems--they exist, but they don't excuse China (nor does China's bad behavior excuse that of the West's). This kind of deflection is just a race to the bottom.
"Desperate" doesn't imply "legally innocent". In particular, China has an abundance of desperate people (I won't remark on its political system), so punishing the desperate in this case probably won't move the needle.
Further, and I say this as someone who prefers to err on the tough-on-crime side, it's unjust to punish the desperate when the wealthy are pulling the strings, raking in the profit, and bearing none of the risk.
Europe lost a lot, if not all, soft power during the Arabic Spring and the subsequent refugee crisis. There, we showed to the world that we outsourced border protection to people like Gadhafi. And that we really didn't give a fuck about human rights. The vile of human rights having been the moral source of Europes soft power, flanked by its economic power. The former was thrown out of the window, the latter then easily used against us by rich totalitarian countries (pick your favourite). The US witnessed something similar under Trump. Important to note, that it took almost 80-odd years since WW2 to build that power, but only a couple years to throw it out of the window.
Europe is very capable of border protection - but because of the human right thing, it is not seen as good, if the border police just shoots illegal trespassers.
So people do care about human rights.
But of course with hypocrisy - so we are quite nice - but we paid Gaddafi and now ergogan and morocco to do the dirty work to keep them away, so we can have more or less clean hands.
FWIW, this was nothing but a media circus. Trump largely continued immigration practices that existed under Obama and indeed Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama did in his first term, but under Obama everything was great and then under Trump they were “concentration camps” and kids were in cages and being separated from their family and America is a white supremacist hellscape and etc.
This doesn’t mean that the Us didn’t deserve its immigration-policy reckoning; only that Trump didn’t do anything to cause it except offend the media.
(for the rabid partisans out there, this one particular defense of Trump doesn’t imply that I’m a Trump supporter or that he doesn’t deserve criticism for other things, etc)
>Therefore, the concept of people's war was applied to the sea with fishermen and other nautical laborers being drafted into a maritime militia.
>Most vessels are issued with navigation and communication equipment while some are also issuedsmallarms. The communications systems can be used both for communication and espionage. Often fishermen supply their own vessels, however, there are also core contingents of the maritime militia who operate vessels fitted out for militia work instead of fishing; thesevesselsfeaturereinforcedbowsforramming and high powered water cannons. The increasing sophistication of militia vessels' communication equipment is a double-edged sword for Chinese authorities. New equipment, as well as training in its use, has substantially improved command, control, and coordination of militia units. However, the vessels' resulting professionalism and sophisticated maneuvers make them more identifiable as government-sponsored actors, dampening their ability to function as a gray-zone force.
I've been following the situation in Argentina for some years, and it seems that their military is tired of fighting with the political class for the appropriate resources. They seem to be technically competent, but the resource allocation is a joke.
Piñeyro's own documentary, "Fuerza Aérea S.A." ("Air Force Inc") showed otherwise: our military is incompetent, reckless & corrupt. Their handling of commercial airports, until taken from them by the government, was so terrible and reckless you really didn't want to fly in Argentina. Any mistake was covered up because that's how our military is used to behaving.
Also remember we Argentinians suffered a bloody dictatorship in the 70s, complete with illegal detentions, torture and executions, and while of course the military renews itself with new people, some sectors of it still haven't come to terms with their past (some remain who actually sympathize with the dictatorship or were involved in it).
So no, what you're describing is not the full picture.
Was surprised to learn some years ago that in Brazil the military was responsible for civilian air traffic management. That seemed so wild at the time. Don't know if it's still the case...
Still is the case. But here they take that job very seriously.
I even saw a higher up personally helping once, I was in an open source tech conference, and a colonel was present to show the air force work using Ubuntu and Debian, while chatting with him he got a phone call about a radar issue, he immediately picked up a laptop and started to fire up some domestic made tech and started helping the operators directly.
If the timing wasn't seemly so random I would think they did it on purpose just to show off the cool tech.
I don't know how to reconcile the safety culture of 'telling the truth no matter what' and not blaming, with the chain-of-command, authority and obeying orders sir-yes-sir of the military. I probably have a very warped view of military leaders, but I know which customers ask for the 'safety override' button...
Yes, I see. What I mean is that in civilian systems I designed (or helped design) the focus is on redundancy, safety and personel safety. I've felt for a long time the 'for the military' design was quick to forgo redundancies and failsafes, for better 'performance' (my vocabulary is lacking there, sorry).
The mentality is changing a lot and I'm starting to see safety requirements in contracts and more and more frequent audits from customers on the topic (even though it wasn't in the spirit of things or the contract when system was designed, ugh...) and it's very, very hard to retrofit safety and personel safety in a product line, codebase, system design, and especially in the daily reflexes of systems or sw engineers. Everyone seems to overshoot ("safety says we must do X" - well no it's still an engineering compromise you still have choices and trade-offs - "but safety!" - yes, let's go back to the safety plan, what are the critical elements, what are the failure modes, what are the chances, what is the expected system response?...)
It's particularly tough for those teams that have to swallow the double firehose of safety and "cyber"-security :-D
Argentinian military, like in most of south America, is completely corrupt and should really stop existing for the good of its people. Whenever they have resources they use it to fuel military dictatorships.
Check out the Turbot War when we in Canada sent Navy ships to confront Spanish fishing vessesls in international waters illegally overfishing. Spain and Germany also sent warships. But Ireland and the UK didnt (foreshadowing the biggest gripe of Brexit?) Turbot/halibut is a type of fish.
International water is a somewhat different situation, this is within Argentina's exclusive economic zone.
Also
> But Ireland and the UK didnt
Yes one can only wonder why the UK would side with Canada over the EU.
> foreshadowing the biggest gripe of Brexit?
Only the biggest nonense of the brexit nonsenses.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars. In fact, the UK's hypocritical support of Canada in the conflict led Iceland to declare for Spain / the EU.
I find this part so telling : ... domestic and foreign overfishing had taken its toll. In the end, stocks of cod in and around Canada's EEZ were severely depleted. Reluctant to act at a time of declining political popularity, the federal government was finally forced to take drastic action in 1992 and a total moratorium was declared indefinitely for the Northern Cod. The TAC for both the Canadian EEZ and NAFO regulated area was based on Canadian scientific advice. This turned out to be wrong and the Northern cod stock collapsed in 1992, and has never recovered.[5]
[5] Rose, Alex (2008). Who Killed the Grand Banks?. Toronto: Wiley. pp. 53–71. ISBN 978-0-470-15387-1.
You mean, Turbot is a delicious type of fish. I'd understand sending in the navy. Especially since it is (iirc) a fish that stays down near the 'ground' so to fish them properly you need some specific kind of equipment or you destroy ecosystems?
You'd have better luck getting the British to send their OPV based in the Falklands over than get any meaningful response from what little of the Argentine armed forces or other authorities have.
Yeah, but if a hobby pilot can fly over the area and find dozens of ships, the Navy/Coast Guard could do the same - send out an airplane to check, and then send a few boats over if it finds something?
Radar on an oceanic buoy is probably more efficient. Ocean buoys are giant metal spheres with some concrete ballast to add stability, attached via steel cable to an old train freight car used as an anchor. You can throw a couple hundred watts of solar and electronics on there no problem. There's hundreds of these things scattered about in the ocean for oceanic research/weather forecasting, not a new technology. Modern, consumer-grade solid state radar ($1200, off the shelf at Amazon or West Marine, google "4G radar") can pick up seagulls sitting on the water at 500 feet, or track a tiny ski 4 person boat at 10 miles.
Before you ask, no, there is no such thing as a stealth radar fishing boat.
We're talking about a vast area of ocean. Each buoy would only be able to monitor a small circle. There are limits to anchoring depth so they can usually only be used close to score. And marine electronics require frequent maintenance due to the harsh environment.
On page 42 they talk about two different mooring systems for buoys up to 6000m in depth. Average ocean depth is approx 3000m. Marine electronics are considerably more robust than you give them credit. All my consumer grade electronics on my boat were installed in 2001 and with the exception of one LCD display are all in perfect working order.
Drones are perfect for this use case, as they have long loiter abilities at higher altitudes. Low single digit Global Hawk fleets can provide high availability over large amounts of geography.
Probably best for the job at night would be SAR? A bit more costly than photography though I guess... Coastal radar, with range up to 100 Nmi might also do the job. But what's the use if you're not sending in the cavalry?
Problem is that over engineered stuff like the global hawk actually have an higher pr hour cost then a converted business jet which is what most countries use.
Maybe US could help Argentina enforce its fishing rights, in return for a lease of port space. The sort of win-win arrangement that builds mutual good will.
Being scared of the bully is how we got here. This behaviour is happing all over the pacific, and due to dependence on Chinese money, China gets away with it.
China seems to get away with whatever they want lately. When are "we" going to stop tolerating their wanton disregard for global ecological and human rights standards?
Maybe if (when) they get aggressive with Taiwain, TSMC.
Or if lab leak was proven, or lab leak + it was a product GOF deliberately created to infect humans it could provide enough public support to back it. I think there are enough hawks in government. Good or bad, a hot or 'warm' war is a huge and devastating step without huge public support across many nation coalitions. Don't want iraq 2.0 with weapons of mass infection that turn out to not be true.
China and Taiwan are the same situation we have with the Baltic States and Russia. And I have the impression both, China and Russia, are that emboldened right now that they might just call NATO and the US on these countries.
Yeah Russia is definitely already testing NATO in Ukraine, though they aren't actually in NATO.
Personally I think Trump emboldened this behavior with his child-like understanding of the politics and singular focus on 'they will pay for the wall' attitude towards NATO.
Honestly, probably nothing. There is no will to do anything about increasing Chinese belligerence and I suspect a fair amount of perks offered by China to keep it that way. Look at the silence about the Uyghurs. Nobody cares about them. Why would they care about some fish? (Granted, people often care more about fish than human beings.)
Uyghurs is an internal affair and they brought Beijing pressure on themselves by making terrorism acts. Fishing in other nations' waters, bullying Taiwan, leaking virus are international acts that are serious enough for retaliation from the international community, if they wanted to do something about it.
List of incidents covered within this general Wikipedia article [1].
A factor I haven't seen discussed much in non-Chinese press is that the Xinjiang region was one of the last (if not the very last) to resist the CCP in the Chinese Civil War [2] [3], with some relatively non-trivial, remotely-originated clandestine support by both the (by then) Taiwan-based KMT and CIA until well after (around 1953) the generally-recognized end of the civil war (around 1949).
I'd like to hear the perspective of native-born Chinese "CCP-ologist" and "CIA-ologist" HN readers on how this historical background might color the CCP's current handling of the region. IMHO, both the CCP and CIA have long memories, but I could be off base.
The CCP is not going to publicly get behind illegal fishing operations. Perhaps they tolerate it behind closed doors, but taking a stance that violating another countries sovereign waters is OK would be politically insane.
That's China claiming sovereignty over that particular sea though. China publicly taking the stance that all waters were international would be the opposite of that
Good question. How much leverage does China have over Argentina? It seems unlikely that Argentina exports much to China. It surely imports a lot but China doesn't seem to punish anyone by limiting its own exports.
Wow! And most of that is agriculture.
And perhaps ironically, about 6% of Argentine exports to China are "Fish, crustaceans, molluscs, aquatics invertebrates".
The World Bank says[2] that exports make up 14.25% of Argentine GDP. Assuming no substitution, if China cut off all Argentine exports, it would therefore reduce Argentine GDP by 1.56% -- a very big deal. There would of course be substitution, so that's a weak upper bound.
And maybe an extremely weak one. According to this[3] (apparently Australian news outlet which I admit I've never heard of), China's trade sanctions against Australia following the latter's suggestion that the world look more into the origins of the coronavirus only reduced Australian exports to China by 2%.
Ah yes the doctrine used to justify things like training and arming right wing death squads to put down popular uprisings because it might introduce communism into the Americas...
