This analysis was written by Mr. Miralem Alic. I want to thank him for sharing his perspective and allowing this piece to be published. His work explores how open-source intelligence has reshaped a system once defined entirely by secrecy, exposing the mechanics of the global arms trade in a way few people ever witness firsthand. What follows is a clear, unfiltered look at how the world’s shadow markets are being transformed in real time.
The Collapse of Secrecy
For years I watched the world’s most profitable shadow industry operate with near-total impunity. Arms brokers in Vienna hotel suites, military officers routing money through Cypriot shells, Gulf fixers on Dubai yachts – everyone understood the only real capital was secrecy. Everyone knew the game was rigged in favor of those who controlled information. Information was power, and power was locked behind classification stamps, bribes, and satellite budgets only superpowers could afford.
Then the information democratized.
Not from some noble leak or crusading journalist, but from the coldest force on earth: someone figured out how to make money selling the view from orbit.
When Planet Labs started spitting out daily 3-meter imagery of every square kilometer on Earth, when AIS transponders became fifty-dollar toys, when teenagers in Kharkiv could geolocate a Buk launcher from the blur of a TikTok background, something fundamental snapped in the old order. The arms trade did not end. It mutated.
And it mutated faster than any of us thought possible.
Generals have been heard dismissing OSINT as “amateur hour” inside SCIFs, then two hours later using the exact same slides, pulled from a Dutch kid’s Twitter thread, to brief the Secretary of Defense. I have watched analysts present Maxar imagery and Flightradar24 tracks with a level of seriousness once reserved for classified collection. The truth is uglier and simpler: The black market still moves Kalashnikovs, Igla missiles, SA-18 systems and everything worse, but the old cloak of plausible deniability has been ripped to shreds.
When the World Started Watching
The numbers are merciless.
Between 2018 and 2024, the percentage of confirmed arms lifts to Syria first exposed by non-state OSINT went from roughly one in five to nearly nine in ten. That is not a Langley footnote. That comes from the ledgers of the men who actually unload the crates in Tartus. They know because hazard bonuses started arriving, not for American missiles, but for Bellingcat threads.
Think about what that does to a man.
Il-76, registration RA-78835, lifts off from Chkalovsky. In the old world we waited for a Keyhole pass or a paid source inside cargo handling. Now, before the gear is even up, some kid with the handle IntelCrab has pulled the hex code, matched the callsign history, and posted satellite shots of the same airframe loading 152 mm crates for Wagner in the Central African Republic six weeks earlier.
The plane still lands in Latakia. But now everyone knows.
The seller knows the buyer is being watched.
The insurer triples the war-risk premium.
And somewhere outside Damascus, a senior officer in the region who used to sleep like a baby now wakes in sweat because a bedroom analyst in Rotterdam just tied his offshore company to a small European financial institution that never imagined its Swift messages would end up on ImportGenius.
That is the real revolution. It is not that arms stopped moving. It is that the price of moving them has exploded, and the circle of players still willing to pay 2025 rates has shrunk to a merciless few.
Darkness Leaves Footprints
North Korea adapted first. After OSINT gutted the Cholima Star network in 2022, Pyongyang did not quit. They changed the physics. Ships now kill AIS two hundred miles off Wonsan, run dark for weeks, then reappear off Ust-Luga wearing fresh Panamanian colors and forged manifests for farm equipment.
Beautiful cruelty: darkness itself leaves footprints.
Synthetic aperture radar does not care about your silenced transponder. Umbra and Capella birds caught the ghost convoy in October 2024: six hulls in arrowhead formation, no lights, no signals, eighteen days of empty ocean followed by T-62 turrets peeking from under tarps in Rajin.
The intelligence cycle that once took three months and half a billion dollars now takes a Discord server twenty-four hours and whatever the top Patreon tier costs. I have seen old warriors spit on the phrase crowd-sourced intelligence right up to the day the crowd sourced the believed coordinates of Iran’s new Shahed-136 plant in Isfahan, down to the loading bay where the trucks reverse at 0300 every Tuesday. After that they just started saving the tweets.
These operations included counter-smuggling (arms and drugs), counter-terrorism and counter-piracy. CUMBERLAND’s newly installed Pacific 24 Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) were key to these roles and allowed the Ship’s embarked Royal Marines and Royal Navy Boarding Teams, in conjunction with the Lynx aircraft, to intercept and board any vessels suspected of being involved in these activities. Photo: POA(PHOT) Sean Clee/MOD, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0
The Old Routes Are Dying
The arms trade is being re-engineered in real time.
Routes that survived forty years – Beirut to Aden via Djibouti, Odessa to Banias via the Bosporus – are now effectively dead. Too many eyes. New corridors open instead: overland through the Nimroz region into Iran, then dhows across the Gulf of Oman disguised as rice shipments. Or the Arctic lane: Murmansk to Sabetta, trans-polar to Petropavlovsk, where six months of ice still disrupts optical satellites.
But the ice is thinning, in every sense.
The new masters are not the traditional brokers. They are the obfuscation engineers: certain offshore structures designed to layer maritime fraud, single-voyage owners in Majuro, smaller regional insurers who never ask, Ukrainian crews who still need the money.
They are very good.
They are also doomed.
Every time they declare construction materials for Conakry, some kid in Auckland runs the deadweight hash through CargoMetrics and spots a two-thousand-one-hundred-ton discrepancy, exactly the float of four hundred containers of suspected 358 loitering munitions.
The Only Thing They Never Expected
The old world is dying in plain sight.
The middlemen who once skimmed eight to twelve percent are being culled like obsolete nobility watching gunpowder make castles irrelevant. The new kings are the data aggregators: Hawkeye 360, exactEarth, Windward, Spire.
And the new currency is no longer dollars wired to Cyprus.
It is the ability to maintain plausible deniability.
Because that, in the end, is what the arms trade has always sold: the luxury of killing at industrial scale while pretending your hands are clean.
OSINT has not stopped the killing.
It has simply made the blood visible from orbit.
And that, more than any sanction regime ever drafted, is the one thing the actors in the illicit arms market never saw coming.
