The April seizure of the U.S. merchant ship Maersk Alabama and the protracted captivity of her captain dramatized a growing piracy problem off the Somali coast. U.S. Navy SEALs eventually rescued the captain and killed three of his captors. Several countries have contributed ships to patrols off Somalia, and there have been other battles, often successful, to resist or capture pirates. No one has suggested that these successes will solve the problem. Pirates still bring their prizes into Somalia, and they continue to profit heavily as ship owners pay substantial ransoms.
In a country without effective government and without much of an economy, piracy has become by far the most profitable Somali industry. It has something of the flavor of another criminal industry, drugs, that dominates the economies of other turbulent countries. In both cases, those involved claim with some justification that they have no other way to support themselves. For example, during the hostage standoff in April, a British newspaper carried an interview with a Somali pirate who said that aggressive foreign fishermen (mainly Chinese) had pushed him into piracy by wiping out his fishing trade. Since piracy off the Somali coast is a fairly safe occupation, it does not matter whether this is true; piracy brings much better returns than fishing ever did.
The piracy problem has been growing quietly for decades. It threatens the world seaborne trade, which, as the current U.S. naval strategy points out, is a major contributor to world prosperity (and likely to be a vital force in world economic recovery). To the extent that prosperity tends to defuse political fury around the world, the U.S. Navy can rightly argue that protecting world trade helps protect the United States from the sort of instability that fuels terrorism. Although terrorists always claim they are attacking to right some perceived political wrong, prosperity tends to reduce their support at home.
What can we do to solve the problem? Pirates now operate freely from Somalia because there is no effective local government. A real government in Somalia would have to take into account whatever retribution nations furious about piracy might threaten. To avoid this retribution, that government might try to control pirates operating from its shores. Without such a government, it is not clear that any military action against Somalia would have much effect on pirates, unless it was so violent that it simply wiped out most of them. In the 19th century Britain's Royal Navy periodically destroyed villages supporting pirates in the Far East, but such action is no longer acceptable. In the early 1990s, when Somalia collapsed into failed-state status, some recommended it become the first United Nations colony. The piracy problem suggests that they were not entirely irrational. At this point Somali piracy still seems irritating rather than serious enough to encourage so radical a solution.
The Numbers Game
Many have suggested augmented naval patrols. The problem is numbers. Anyone who follows navies knows that the number of ships in all major navies has declined dramatically in recent years. In 1980 many found the call for a 600-ship U.S. Navy unrealistic. They forgot that around 1960 the Navy had about 1,200 active ships. Now the figure is just under 300. This is not primarily a reflection of what the British call "sea-blindness." Instead, it is the consequence of a rapid increase in sophistication. Individual ships cost a lot more because they are expected to do a lot more. The post-Cold War U.S. Navy consciously chose unit capability over numbers. America's national strategy required it to deal with no more than two major crises at the same time (in effect, Atlantic and Pacific). To the Navy, the message of 9/11 was that this assumption was entirely unrealistic; many local crises could erupt more or less simultaneously, because they would be unrelated. The Navy produced a briefing in which four such crises marked "a bad day in 2003." Numbers of ships clearly mattered, because sea power might well have to be spread around, but many of the crises would not require great sophistication.
In the United States, the attempt to reduce numbers has led to the concept of the littoral combat ship (LCS) with its modular combat system. The idea is that the ship's hull—which sets her fixed cost—need not be very sophisticated, hence need not be very expensive. When necessary, advanced capability could be added in modular form. In a world requiring numbers but not sophistication, it would not be necessary to buy modules for every ship and for every possible task. Some believe that the LCS evolved away from this basic idea; for example, its high design speed makes its basic hull expensive. The LCS has also become a carrier of unmanned systems, and it can be argued that a somewhat larger ship would be a more efficient carrier.
However, the basic idea of a minimal platform fitted for, but not necessarily with, more expensive features is probably the only hope for navies that must reconcile the need for numbers with the need to occasionally handle high-end crises. Much of the time the ship simply does not need all possible capability. Off Somalia, for example, the main requirements are probably for a helicopter, a boarding party, and enough guns to deal with pirates who try to get too close. The ship also needs enough of a command and control system to make sense of the area surrounding her.
In other places an unsophisticated LCS would become an early casualty, but the modular systems can be added to solve that problem. It may be that the push to sophistication has gone too far, that numbers really are badly needed, and that we will be seeing more relatively simple long-endurance patrol ships with the upgradeability built into the current LCS. Even then it is unlikely that we will see the huge numbers of the past. Remember that in 1945 the U.S. Navy had 5,000 commissioned ships.
Shrunken numbers are acceptable because navies don't try to cover the vastness of the sea. They generally do not patrol. Instead, they move their considerable power to particular places where it is needed, or where enemy ships are detected. Many navies, such as ours, rely heavily on what amounts to ocean surveillance in order to decide how to use their limited resources. That makes perfectly good sense in a war. It does very little to intercept pirates. Navies are designed to concentrate their power against assigned objectives. In the case of pirates, the equivalent to attacking assigned targets would be either to attack the concentration of pirates at home in Somalia or to locate and destroy their craft offshore. The problem has not yet assumed proportions that would cause any Western government to do either.
There are exceptions. A few years ago pirates operated freely in the Malacca Strait. The local governments recognized that the problem affected all of them. They organized joint patrols and joint surveillance, which made it possible to vector their forces to intercept pirates. That the strait is a limited body of water was crucial. It also helped that the local governments were quite ready to punish any pirates they caught as there was no failed state to offer them sanctuary.
Pirates are maritime criminals, and navies' approaches to them recall the way in which cities try to control crime. Patrols are the equivalent of the policeman on the beat. They tend to deter crime and reassure the citizenry. The successful approach in cities like New York has been to announce zero tolerance and arrest (and jail) criminals for petty crimes. The logic is that criminals essentially announce their presence (and identify themselves) by constantly committing such minor crimes. Sweeping them up eliminates their ability to commit more significant crimes. That is the police equivalent of pre-emptively identifying and catching or sinking pirate craft. The maritime equivalent to zero tolerance would be to make it a crime to take to sea with heavy small arms of the sort pirates use. Will that eventually be the reaction to the Somali pirates?