Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial Ships to Spot

Even in that case, it's the same as the passive sonar example I illustrated: the ship is there and you can see it, but they didn't avoid it anyway. Failure of communication.

It’s perfectly normal to see this in our own waters. AIS will identify the vessel as being named simply “Warship” or “Surfaced Submarine” (where “Warship” means “none of your business”, and “Surfaced Submarine” should be treated as a hazard to be actively avoided, as they're damned difficult to spot). They usually won’t give any useful to/from port (part of the AIS messages), and I’m not convinced their MMSI (identifying number) is actually fixed, but more likely disposable (or in practice, simply ‘0’).

And that’s okay. We can work with that. I don’t actually need to know who they are, I just need a location, course and speed so my radio can calculate whether our closest point (CPA) is uncomfortable, and the designation of “Warship” is perfectly sufficient to ensure my eyeballs and the computer are talking about the same vessel. MMSI should be useful, but rarely is - Warships are surprisingly difficult to raise on civilian radio. It's not unusual for them to have no idea how the civil band is channelized. In & around ports if you need to communicate with them, it's best to look for their police escort & raise them, and anywhere else .. "If it's grey, stay away".

There’s entire oceans for them to go play hide’n’seek in. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when they’re in a shipping lane, they obey the rules of the road - in peacetime at least. If they want to be invisible, perhaps the worlds busiest shipping lanes aren't the best hiding places.

Or, look at it this way. If a small sailboat was arsing around in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, at night, with no navigation lights, no AIS, no radar reflector, and what appears to be insufficient watch-keeping/lookout - and got mown down by a frieghter - you’d have very little sympathy. “That’s a terrible shame, but realistically inevitable”.

This is exactly what the USN look like to everyone else on the shipping lane. Playing hide’n’seek on a busy road, and wondering how these accidents keep happening. And yes, they should be blamed for any incident where the bare minimum of good behaviour would have averted entirely. (I should say seamanship, but this concept is long since lost on the USN)