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Yet when I look at the map, it's obviously a Japanese fleet that the spotter erroneously called in as Allied. This is some severe FOW, and quite an annoyance to have to click around to find a certain hex, only to see it's just your xAK fleet or whatever that's causing the report...

It'd be alright if it only happened once in a while, but it seems like more than half of my spotting reports are just my own fleets. I know the planes are just calling in what they see without getting dangerously close, but there has to be some sort of deconfliction that should be performed before it gets up to the Admiral's eyes.

Why? Because IRL you have to get fairly up close and personal to ID something with the Mk 1 eye ball, which is all they would have had...

If your up close and personal, it gets a bit fraught whatever side it is you've found, because if you are not 100% in identifying them, just think how bad they are at ID'ing you. Shoot first etc...

You catch a glimpse of ship through the clouds, you then need to work out heading, speed, size, number of contacts and what they are. That's a lot of information to glean with a glimpse - so these FOW sighting reports are spot on. How would you deconflict, information was scant with only certain things being logged for opsec etc (USS Indianapolis is an example of this fact)

Hell we even got it wrong on occasion with 1/4 mile, 400 feet runs taking photographs - only to be told when we got back that we had misidentified the type once the photos had been developed...

My cats use to find "enemy carriers" near PH at my PBEM campaign, every day. Their names are Hornet, Wasp, and Yorktown.....

Talking of cats,  in WWII (this is a true story so don't laugh) the RAF,  faced with the problem of German night raiders bombing the heart out of UK cities, and precious few AI Blenheims (the first radar equipped ones,  they were slower than the bombers they were supposed to be catching) to go around,  anyway the RAF decided to train cats in the art of enemy aircraft spotting.  The plan was that once the cat could ID a german aircraft,  the Blenheims would take them aloft and then chase after the spot in the night-time sky where the cat was looking,  in the hope that it had actually spotted a German intruder...
Suffice to say, the plan was not a success...