Much has been written over the past months on maritime counterpiracy operations off the Horn of Africa. Many have questioned the effectiveness of the two major maritime forces in the region. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently told the Senate: “The international naval flotilla working to curtail piracy in the western Indian Ocean is failing to solve the problem; the naval ships that have been involved from . . . more than 20 nations just have not been willing to really put themselves out.” Clinton continued, “They’re happy to patrol, and they’re happy to say they are, and then kind of count themselves as part of the Coalition. But when push comes to shove, they’re not really producing.”
In fact, in 2010 only 10 of 49 successful hijackings occurred in the Gulf of Aden, and only 7 of those occurred along the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), where foreign naval forces such as Combined Task Force 151 (CTF151) and the European Union’s Operation Atalanta focus their patrols. While reasonable observers may differ about some of the finer aspects of these operations, there are several key points on which all should agree. And therein could be the basis for future coalition maritime operations.
Safeguarding vs. Eradicating
Some observers have gone to great lengths to discuss the history of piracy in the region to make the very idea of counterpiracy operations seem naive or farfetched. Most debates on the topic confuse the goal of such operations—intended to prevent pirates from successfully taking a ship—with the goal of eradicating these attempts altogether. If the goal of a maritime force is simply to safeguard a major shipping lane in the region using naval ships, it is easily achievable. All it requires is a sufficient coalition of warships operating in a coordinated fashion.
If the international community wants to guarantee the safety of the shipping that uses the IRTC in the Gulf of Aden, a force of approximately 25 warships would be required, some with embarked helicopters or unmanned aerial vehicles, with naval chiefs willing to provide a coordinated “zone” defense of the corridor. Warships would simply guard approximately 50 x 50-mile sectors of the corridor around the clock. Somali pirates are no match for naval forces. They can only operate in daylight, and then, only where modern warships and helicopters are not located.
As long as a warship has an organic helicopter capability, she can respond to a pirate attack moments after receiving a distress call from a ship in her zone. Unfortunately, the international community does not yet have a coalition large enough to work in such a coordinated fashion. But these nations are moving closer every day to achieving such a force.
The problem is not so much the number of warships required as it is the difficulty of coordinating operations. Each country has different mandates. Some are in the Gulf of Aden to protect World Food Program vessels, others are with the African Union Mission in Somali vessels, and still others protect ships flagged in a particular country or group of countries. If one warship is playing a “zone” defense while a neighboring warship is playing “man-to-man,” redundancies and inefficiencies will result.
Success with International Partners
Collaboration and de-confliction will inevitably improve and national mandates inevitably adjust to ensure maximum coordination. Given the usual bureaucratic delays associated with such matters, it may take years to assemble the proper coalition, but it can be done. The U.S. Navy is making great strides in this regard. I have witnessed the commanding officer of the Aegis guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG-61) smoothly hand off the chase of a suspected pirate skiff from a U.S. helicopter to a German naval helicopter belonging to a European Union task force, and then watch the German Bremen-class frigate Rheinland Pfalz close for the capture.
I also watched the commanding officer of the Aegis cruiser Vella Gulf (CG-72) call in a helicopter from the Russian Udaloy-class antisubmarine destroyer Admiral Vinogradov to provide air support while investigating a suspect skiff just as comfortably as he might have called in his own organic air assets. But the capstone event of all Coalition operations occurred in the late afternoon of 29 March 2009 as the German Rhön-class naval tanker Spessart was taking part in Operation Atalanta. The Spessart was attacked by a seven-man pirate vessel. Along with her regular 40-man civilian crew, she carried a 12-man security detail that exchanged small-arms fire with the pirates and repelled the assault. The Royal Netherlands Navy frigate HNLMS De Zeven Provinciën, Spanish frigate SPS Victoria and the USS Boxer (LHD-4) intervened and captured the pirates after a few hours’ chase. Thus, three task forces from seven nations carried out a successful joint operation in an extremely complex environment.
In March 2011 a request for assistance from a Japanese-owned merchant vessel in the Somali Basin led the Combined Maritime Forces warship USS Bulkeley (DDG-84) to secure the release of the vessel and her 24 crew members from a pirate attack. At the time the Bulkeley was assigned to CTF151. The ship was directed to intercept the oil tanker MV Guanabara and was supported by the Turkish warship TCG Giresun of NATO’s counterpiracy Task Force 508. Following confirmation from the Guanabara’s master that the pirates were on board and his crew had taken refuge in the ship’s “citadel,” the Bulkeley’s specialist boarding team, supported overhead by its embarked helicopters, secured the Bahamian-flagged vessel and detained the four pirates without exchange of gunfire. The Japanese government agreed to take the individuals into custody for prosecution.
These operations are exactly what then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen had in mind when he described his “Thousand-Ship Navy,” in which membership would be purely voluntary and have no legal or encumbering ties. It would be a free-form, self-organizing network of maritime partners—good neighbors interested in using the power of the sea to unite, rather than to divide. The barriers for entry are low. Respect for sovereignty is high. As a veteran of the Cold War, the profound significance of such collaboration is not lost on me.
From Corsairs to Fast Skiffs
We can learn much from studying the history of piracy. Trying to defeat the problem by building a maritime coalition has been part of our strategy for centuries. Thomas Jefferson, as the new U.S. Ambassador to France in 1785, first proposed a “coalition of the willing” to assist America in the fight against the Barbary pirates. More recently, U.S. Naval Academy Professor Virginia Lunsford laid out an excellent summary of piracy in the December 2008 edition of Proceedings. The current methods of Somali pirates operating from high-speed skiffs do indeed have much in common with the corsairs of North Africa who terrorized the Mediterranean from 1500 to 1832. While the focus has shifted from people to ships as the primary ransom targets, the technique of sneaking up on merchant ships via smaller, swifter craft is anything but new.
Then as now it was difficult to dissuade those on the fringe of civilization from engaging in piracy. Then as now the pirates’ center of gravity was their safe havens, or as Dr. Richard J. Norton so eloquently described it in the Naval War College Review in 2003, their “feral cities,” where the state government had lost its ability to maintain the rule of law.
While many factors contributed to their eventual downfall, it was not until the United States made war against Tripoli from 1801 to 1805 and France invaded Algiers in 1830 that the age of the North African corsairs essentially ended. For this reason, many are convinced that it is going to take ground troops to achieve victory over Somalia’s pirates. Indeed, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1851 has authorized the possibility of such operations. However, commentators must avoid comparing apples to oranges.
If the present goal is to eradicate all piracy attempts that stem from Somalia, history does support that this is going to take a coalition willing to deploy significant combat troops in Somalia for an extended period to stabilize the many lawless cities that exist along its coast. If, however, the object is simply to prevent successful piracies in the IRTC and escort key vulnerable ships, that is achievable, using only a coalition of willing warships. This won’t prevent all attempts in the region. But to suggest that a technologically advanced modern warship with an organic helicopter capability cannot prevent a successful attack within a 50-mile stretch of the IRTC is unreasonable. Comparing 17th-century battles between corsairs and European warships to battles between Somali skiffs and modern warships is futile. In fact, the relative firepower that each side brings to the equation today are so asymmetric that even to use the word “battle” to describe the potential conflict would be inappropriate.
The 'Flattened' World
As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman points out in his seminal work, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), globalization has leveled the playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors essentially have an equal opportunity to succeed. To remain competitive, not only must corporations adjust, but countries also must make a paradigm shift. Historical and geographic divisions are increasingly irrelevant. This also means that tomorrow’s “U.S. interests” could literarily be anywhere in the world. Commentators on counterpiracy have frequently pointed out that less than 1 percent of the shipping in the Gulf of Aden is being pirated and that only very few of those are U.S.-flagged vessels. These facts are true but immaterial due to the effects of globalization.
The flag country of a merchant ship is completely irrelevant in the flattened world we now inhabit. Tomorrow’s pirated ship may well be flagged in Panama, with a Ukrainian master, a Russian crew, carrying cargo from China bound for Canadian consumers, owned by a Brazilian conglomerate, insured by a British company, whose shareholders include U.S. mutual funds, which happen to rely heavily on pension-fund managers as their principal clients. To concentrate on the flag of a pirated ship is obsolete at best. It is similarly illogical to focus on the percentage of ships pirated while passing through a particular region. The costs of counterpiracy are not limited to the pirated ships themselves—they are ultimately passed along to the world at large. They are not borne by a single state’s economy or even the economies of several. They are shared globally.
Piracy's Price
Fully 90 percent of the world’s commerce and 65 percent of all oil shipments are transported by sea. In addition, 70 percent of the world’s traffic in terms of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean. The Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca are the principal gateways for such commerce. More than 30,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden each year, including approximately 11 percent of the world’s petroleum products. Because of the piracy problem in the Gulf of Aden and the Somali Basin, maritime traffic there takes numerous precautions. The ships’ owners may increase the size of their crews to include more lookouts, add passive protective measures such as fences and concertina wire along their beams, activate fire hoses to make the hulls harder to scale, post warning signs in the Somali language, hire security guards, pay for escort services, travel more circuitous routes and at faster, less economical speeds—all in hopes of becoming a harder target.
Such measures entail costs that must either be absorbed by investors in the form of lesser profits, passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices, or both. Investors and consumers are a diverse lot not easily susceptible to geographic stereotypes. When a ship is pirated, insurance money is likely to pay the ransom. So this particular cost of piracy is actually going to be spread throughout the maritime community via increased premiums. Insurance money will also pay for the delayed cargo. (Today’s companies cannot afford to get cars, clothes, and holiday presents to market three months late.) Piracy drives the premiums up, and, again, the investor, the consumer, or both must pay. Experts disagree about the total cost of piracy last year, but estimates range from $1 billion to $16 billion. There is, in the end, no sense in getting caught up in this particular debate. Even if the figure is only $1 billion, it necessarily includes substantial U.S. interests.
Some observers have tried to focus on how much money is being spent by the United States on counterpiracy operations to question whether the losses associated with piracy can truly justify the expense. At first glance, this seems reasonable. In fact, it is not. The argument fails to account for the fact that such costs to taxpayers represent “sunk” costs: the operating costs of a naval warship have already been obligated whether or not she is used for counterpiracy operations. Officers and crew are still going to be paid, fuel expended, maintenance expenses incurred, etc. The comparison of the cost of counterpiracy operations to U.S. taxpayers to the cost of piracy itself would only make sense if what was being proposed was to build a whole new set of naval warships for such operations, and that is definitely not the case in the United States. Thus, there should be no debate over our role in counterpiracy operations; allowing the free follow of commerce on the high seas will always be one of the cornerstones of our maritime strategy, as it has been since the creation of the United States Navy.
Shifting Centers of Power
There are complementary geopolitical reasons for the United States to engage in counterpiracy operations in the region. As the Center for a New American Security’s Senior Fellow Robert D. Kaplan explained in “Center Stage for the 21st Century: Power Plays in the Indian Ocean” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2009), the Indian Ocean is to the 21st century what Europe was to the 20th in terms of power politics. China will soon supersede America in terms of the number of naval warships it possesses, and India is not far behind. Both nations will necessarily act to protect their interests in the region, and tensions between the two may be inevitable. The fact that China has developed a closer relationship with Pakistan, while India has done the same with Iran, adds enormous complexity to the diplomatic situation.
A new incident in Tibet, the Kashmir Valley, or the Strait of Hormuz could soon have far deeper ramifications as China and India may choose to engage in the same brinksmanship that the United States and Soviet Union did during the Cold War. This should concern U.S. citizens. China and India are close neighbors with large military forces and no shortage of nuclear weapons. It is in our interests to do everything possible to promote stable relations between the two. And what’s the best thing the United States could be doing right now in this regard? As odd as it may sound, the answer may be to combat piracy in the region.
As the ancient Arabic proverb goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” If one’s enemies happen to be pirates, then every state is your friend. It doesn’t matter what region of the world you are from or what religion you practice, no one sides with pirates. India, China, and the United States, along with many others including some of our very closest allies, are in the Gulf of Aden right now engaged in the very same fight against piracy. Since the fall of 2008 more than 30 countries have contributed maritime forces to combat piracy there. At the moment their efforts are not yet fully coordinated, but it is just a matter of time before they are. The potential diplomatic dividends from an effort that brings India, China, the United States, along with a host of other states, closer together is difficult to overestimate.
Together, the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps are positioned to help create a partnership of states to combat piracy. Since the establishment of CTF151 the Coalition has been commanded by the navies of the United States, Turkey, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and New Zealand, with outstanding success. Such coalitions represent the future of maritime operations in general, regardless of whether our potential foe happens to be pirates, drug smugglers, slave traders, or terrorists. The maritime environment is too large for a single state to fight alone; we must ask for the continued support of the Coalition of the willing.