This may be more pronounced, but this has been going on for at least 15 years and probably longer. I only say 15 years because that is how long I have been working with satellite imagery that easily shows these boundaries. They show up as obvious lines of light in nighttime visible satellite imagery.
Even in the article Jason Wang says he’s seen this before, but this represents a massive scaling up, from hundreds of boats to thousands
Do you have a pic you can share?
“What are they intending to do with this capability?”, I asked when going to read the archived link.
The masses of the smaller boats could also act “as missile and torpedo decoys, overwhelming radars or drone sensors with too many targets,” said Thomas Shugart, a former U.S. naval officer now at the Center for a New American Security.
This seems a reasonable explanation. Provide cover for those who must travel undetected.
So they’re using fishermen as human shields?
Did they have a word count to fill?
Don’t they also do this with fishing vessels somewhere in international waters near South America? I read somewhere that there’s so many of them that they light up the night sky.
Anyone got a non paywalled source?
Just so you know, you can do this yourself. Take the article link and visit https://archive.is/ and enter it into the bottom box.
TIL!all nyt pages I can find are missing the actual article.Doesn’t work for me, no article visible.
Here’s a Wayback Machine archive, albeit with the interactive element at the start seemingly not working.
I was able to view by opening in desktop mode
Works with 3rd-party js and frames disabled.
