Did some reading on the Argentine Naval Prefecture (their version of a coast guard) and they seem very much under-equipped for the job. Argentina's EEZ is reall

Did some reading on the Argentine Naval Prefecture (their version of a coast guard) and they seem very much under-equipped for the job. Argentina's EEZ is really big, and they've got 5 small maritime patrol aircraft (couldn't find any info on what optics or radar they are equipped with) along with a handful of aircraft with the Naval Aviation force. To patrol a large area like this aggressively you need a large fleet of capable maritime patrol aircraft. A P-3 Orion would be very useful (Argentine navy has 4 of the older B variant but they are apparently non-functional) though probably overkill. Ideally you want a MALE UAV with a good surface search radar (IR sensors are cheaper, but don't have the detection range of a radar and have degraded performance under cloud cover), off the top of my head the only one available for this would be a naval variant of the IAI Heron. Another option would be using over-the-horizon radars, but that's expensive and you'd need quite a few of them. You can supplement that data with radar and ESM from offshore patrol craft and maritime helicopters (either land-based of ship-based). Coordinating multiple UAV patrols across a wide area and cross-referencing that with other data is a nontrivial task, and because of the distances involved most of that will have to be through satellite. You'll want multiple command centers with the ground control stations for those UAVs, a data processing center, and operators who can identify suspicious craft and coordinate an interception. Because of the distances and numbers involved, you probably won't be able to have enough vessels on station and ready to intercept ships quickly. Better to use helicopters. You want a decent radius of action (over 100 nmi) and equipped with a surface search radar, FLIR, satellite data link and target sharing, room for a boarding team, plus sufficient armament to support the boarding team against small arms fire and the capability to shoot out the rudder if needed (a 20mm autocannon would work well for both, alternatively a machine gun on the door and a hellfire-type missile). Good candidates would be Seahawk or Lynx helicopters. Land-based helicopters won't have the range to reach targets in a large portion of the EEZ, which is where cutter-class ships would come in to play. A more exotic option would be to convert a cargo ship into a helicopter carrier, but to my knowledge no coast guard has done anything like that. Anyway, that's a rough sketch of what you would need to make illegal fishing operations extremely risky. As you can see, it is expensive (multibillion just for acquisitions, and maintenance and sustainment would probably be in the hundreds of millions annually) and requires a lot of work to get right.