Maritime

The maritime picture has two halves: large-formation US naval movements that are publicly tracked and reported, and the wider AIS picture of every cooperatively reporting vessel at sea. SENTINEL renders both, plus a curated catalogue of strategic ports, chokepoints, and undersea cable routings, so a single view answers questions about commercial shipping and military posture at the same time.

US carrier strike groups, amphibious ready groups, and named destroyer surface action groups draw their positions from the United States Naval Institute fleet tracker and a small set of supporting open sources. Each asset renders with a fleet-tier-specific silhouette: a Nimitz/Ford for CSGs, a Wasp/America for ARGs, an Arleigh Burke for the surface combatants. The fleet history is reconstructed from successive USNI articles, so you can see where the Gerald R. Ford was last week as well as where it is today.

AIS contacts are the wider population. Most large vessels broadcast position, course, speed, vessel type, and a unique MMSI; SENTINEL ingests the live stream and renders ship icons with an arc-trail behind them. Filters scope by vessel type, by sanctions status, and by chokepoint proximity. The OFAC sanctioned-vessels overlay, when enabled, paints flagged ships in a distinctive colour so dark-fleet activity is visible without leaving the main view.

Chokepoints carry their own cards. The Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez and Panama canals, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and a handful of less-cited corridors each render with daily transit counts pulled directly from the canal authorities, plus a status indicator (clear, caution, disrupted) tied to the patterns engine and the active conflict scoring. Click any chokepoint card and a live MarineTraffic embed centred on that location renders inline.

Undersea cables are the third maritime layer worth singling out. Critical international fibre routes render as thin lines across the seafloor; rerouting events, cable cuts, and BGP route leaks tied to specific cable systems flow through the cyber tab and into the patterns rail when severity warrants. Energy infrastructure on the seabed (LNG terminals, offshore platforms, subsea pipelines) renders alongside.

Country dossier pages summarise the maritime activity tagged to each country: nearby fleet movements, sanctioned vessels in territorial waters, chokepoint state when relevant, and the most recent country-tagged signals from the OSINT roster. The live globe carries the same data with deeper filtering and the AIS arc trails enabled.