A May Proceedings article by Under Secretary of the Navy Robert O. Work on the salience of maritime forces in the global era should be taken seriously by all sea-power advocates. However, lessons from recent conflicts suggest that this period will be a “naval century” for insurgents as well as nation-states.1 The long Sri Lankan Civil War, which began in 1983 and lasted until 2009, provides numerous examples of how the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) effectively operated in the maritime domain. Both government and insurgent maritime forces played key roles during the course of the war, and future combatants are well advised to examine the operations of those adversaries as they contemplate actions either to subvert or maintain the current world order.
Learning lessons from any particular conflict is never easy. Such analysis is a complicated process, full of opportunities to draw incorrect conclusions. Such misinterpretations can lead to faulty doctrine, massive expenditures of money on inadequate weapons, and in the worst case, defeat on the battlefield.2 National armies and navies often have organizations within their bureaucratic structures to conduct such analysis, but one should not neglect the fact that other parties are equally interested. Irregular groups, insurgents, criminals, and a host of other bad actors are trying to learn the lessons as quickly as any nation-state, as their measure of effectiveness may be survival.3
Deriving the lessons from the Sri Lankan Civil War is challenging, particularly from the insurgent perspective. After all, the government forces won decisively, the insurgency was crushed, and the LTTE’s maritime component, the Sea Tigers, was swept from the seas. Still, one should temper any initial depression as well as any triumphalism from the government perspective. The future of irregular warfare at sea is bright.
The Price is Right
The Sea Tigers were essentially created out of fiberglass and willpower, assets available to any budding maritime insurgent. The entry cost of creating a viable and highly lethal maritime force is lower than it has been for a long time—perhaps back to the American Revolution, mainly because of the expansion and diffusion of knowledge and advanced technology. In the days of John Paul Jones, it was by no means enough that an officer of the Navy be a capable mariner, but it was a necessary first step. The art and science of navigation required some education to master and, Nathaniel Bowditch aside, was beyond the purview of most able seamen. Today, the potential maritime insurgent can buy a decent Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver for a few hundred dollars at any electronics store. He can buy a better one on Amazon.com for a thousand dollars and then download a Kindle book on navigation. Putting waypoints in the GPS receiver is not as intellectually difficult as shooting morning stars and calculating one’s position using sight-reduction tables. The operational reach of any insurgent maritime force can now be much greater than beyond the green water of the littorals.
Building one’s own vessels is also practicable. If the insurgent has a few engineering students and a decent Computer Assisted Design program, small craft can be designed to precisely fit the operating environment. The insurgent needs to provide materials and a construction location out of sight and sound, but a fiberglass fleet of vessels can be built without a shipyard of dedicated naval architects and shipwrights.4 A means to transport the vessels to the water is required, but that can be done with trucks and trailers if the assembly area is deep in the jungle.5
Propulsion for the vessels is similarly attainable. Attach a few 250-horsepower outboard motors to the small craft and they will be very fast. One thousand–shaft horsepower for less than $70,000 is well within reach of the standard insurgent group.
Armament may be harder to acquire, but only marginally so. While AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades are ubiquitous, medium-caliber cannon are not. Still, if the insurgent group has the money, armament and ammunition of all types are available on the black market, especially in the ungoverned spaces of fragile states.6 Antiship missiles can be obtained if the irregular group has a nation-state sponsor.7 Even low-end torpedoes can be created when the college students have completed their ship-design assignments.8 The subsurface volume may be especially fruitful. Naval mines are easy to construct given a fair amount of explosives, and deploying them only takes a fishing vessel and time. Even submersibles are possible, as South American narco-traffickers have shown.9 None of these vessels will be transformational or win any prizes for naval architecture, but they will be good enough to get the job done.
Rebel Recruitment
Perhaps the hardest element of sea power to attain is the necessary number of people to man and operate the insurgent’s growing flotilla. If the insurgent has a coastal region in his operating area, there are probably enough fishermen disaffected with the government to swell the ranks. It will be up to the insurgent to provide the organization, training, and indoctrination to meld these human and technological assets into an effective maritime fighting force, but this is an achievable objective. Even a maritime special-operations force of limited capability can be created if the insurgent has a large enough swimming pool in which to train divers.10
Thinking globally but bombing locally allows the maritime insurgent to have an effect far greater than the mere pinpricks from his ambushes might suggest. In this new naval century, the magnitude and relative importance of maritime trade are expanding with a corresponding increase in significance to any particular government.11 Meanwhile, the margins of many nations for critical resources provided by trade are diminishing in an era of “just-in-time” logistics.
With the number of available targets rapidly increasing, the maritime insurgent can pick and choose those that would cause the most damage to the government. Elements of a nation’s maritime trade—not only the ships but also the ports, piers, cranes, and bunkerage—are vulnerable to attack. Insurgents may be able to seize a ship, sell off its cargo, and ransom its crew for a tidy sum, which can be used to sustain the insurgency. The ship itself could be retained and used for legitimate means, as well as drug and human trafficking to gain additional funds. Combining attacks on maritime trade with terrorist attacks on harbors or cyber-attacks on port infrastructure provides additional venues for the agile insurgent.12
The ledger comparing the low-entry cost of maritime capabilities with the damage that can be done favors the insurgent. The insurgent’s direct attacks can destroy the government’s military forces and maritime trade. The indirect effects of these attacks on the economy of the nation can be substantial as well. By reducing the commercial assets of a nation and raising the cost of commerce through rising insurance rates, the insurgent can lower the revenue available to the government that can be spent on counterinsurgency efforts. At the same time, the government has to shift additional resources to protect its own maritime trade, resources that are now unavailable to fund the army, police, or internal development to combat the insurgency ashore. This is a win/win situation for an insurgent. A few naval mines scattered in the harbor of a nation’s major port will cost much less than the efforts to sweep the area clear and reopen the anchorage.
This exchange can reinforce the information operations conducted by the insurgents. The images of distressed ships are very compelling to humans, as any of the numerous movies of the sinking of RMS Titanic suggest. The scale of such a disaster at sea strikes home to a receptive audience even without the dramatic license of Hollywood. To an insurgent, such images are tailor-made for any psychological operations (PSYOPS) and propaganda campaigns. The scenes capture the attention of all sides, further motivating the committed, persuading the undecided, and causing despair to the adversary. During the Sri Lankan Civil war, the LTTE used video from their successful maritime engagements to create effective PSYOP pieces. These videos became the main feature in the LTTE’s campaign to encourage the expatriate Tamil diaspora to contribute financially to the cause.13
Admittedly, the image of the bow of a Sri Lanka Navy Dvora-class patrol craft slipping beneath the waves is not on the magnitude of the Titanic, but it still drew in and incited the emotions of the target audience. Future maritime insurgents will do the same, using the videos of flaming government warships, one of the most vivid images of government sovereignty, to create new content on YouTube. A viral video may be used globally to solicit funds, perhaps using PayPal or similar electronic means. Such information operations synchronized with other kinetic actions enlarge the insurgent’s power across both the cognitive and physical domains, providing yet another area that the government has to protect.
Infiltrating Warfare’s Operational Level
An effective maritime force thus allows the insurgent not only to breach new domains (maritime) and modes (irregular, criminal, terrorist, information operations) but to have a greater presence at the operational level of warfare. An insurgent’s tactical actions are connected to strategic objectives, but the operational level is often less well defined or not very substantial in an insurgency.14 Insurgent maritime forces provide an opportunity to expand into this area, providing additional challenges to government forces by affecting the operational factors of time, space, and force.
During the Sri Lankan Civil War, the government force garrisoning the northern city of Jaffna was mainly supplied by the Sri Lanka Navy as the insurgents had interdicted all the ground lines of communication. The Palk Strait was too shallow for normal sea transport, and all sustainment had to be sent around the east coast of the island. Trincomalee was the main seaport of embarkation for the Sri Lankan armed forces using this sea line of communication (SLOC). The LTTE tried to interdict this route through attacks on the ships at sea and ground attacks to capture Trincomalee. Had the insurgents been able to cut this SLOC, the Sri Lankan garrison at Jaffna would have been isolated, unable to contribute to any offensive operations and liable to be overrun.15 By requiring additional forces to escort the supply ships, the Sri Lankan government had to shift resources away from the major ground offensives of the army, potentially delaying the start of those operations.
The LTTE also used the sea as a maneuver space, conducting numerous amphibious assaults and raids. The Sea Tigers provided a naval component for many operations ashore, a sophistication rarely seen in littoral insurgent groups.16 This capability is not easy to attain, but again provides new challenges for government forces that may find joint operations difficult to master. The maritime insurgent does not suffer from such artificial constraints arising from interservice friction.
Finally, the sea allows the maritime insurgent new space to use as a haven from the government forces. The LTTE used its own collection of small merchant ships (the “Sea Pigeons”) to store armaments and equipment, an insurgent sea-base safe and secure (almost) from the Sri Lankan government. When required, the Sea Tigers would move these ships close in to shore where smaller craft would take the supplies to the beach for distribution. The Sri Lanka Navy was not able to cut this supply line until late in the war.17 The sea is a huge area, and without some independent queuing a single insurgent ship will rarely be located. Future maritime insurgents with similar capabilities will be equally aggressive in exploiting the maritime territorial boundaries of fragile states, hiding behind national pride and international passivity to conduct their own nefarious operations.
A Word of Warning . . .
Some caution, though, is warranted before a new century of maritime insurgency is proclaimed. Paradoxically, expending the time, energy, and resources to compete against government forces may be counterproductive to the insurgents’ overall efforts. Government forces probably can outspend and out-resource the insurgent at sea. The government forces’ discipline and firepower can be as dangerous at sea as on land, and engagements may occur where any collateral damage may be minimal or at least hard to videotape. The insurgents’ maritime fighting force may be lethal against soft targets but really is not that powerful against an alert adversary. When the Sri Lanka Navy finally developed the forces to overmatch the Sea Tigers, numbers were decisive.18
Becoming too dependent on the sea for supplies for an expanding insurgency can be fatal. If the government force can cut the insurgent’s SLOC, the insurgent will find that he who lives by sea control can die from sea denial. Insurgents should not allow their logistics train to become a critical vulnerability open to attack. The destruction of the Sea Pigeons truly cut the LTTE’s maritime supply lines. Combined with the ground offensives of the Sri Lanka Army, the LTTE ground cadres gradually ran out of ammunition for their heavy weapons and lost much of their combat power.19 The insurgents may have an impressive artillery park, but without ammunition the guns are just future Veterans of Foreign Wars Post ornaments.
Insurgent forces should be focused on controlling the essentially land-based population. Using the sea to attack the government and assist the fight is an effective course of action, but becoming too enamored with the maritime domain is counterproductive. Tactical or even operational successes should not blind the insurgent to the strategic realities of the conflict. The prudent maritime insurgent should be well aware of these opportunities and risks as he evaluates his prospects in this new naval century.
1. Robert O. Work, “The Coming Naval Century,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 138, no. 5 (May 2012), 24–30.
2. Milan Vego, Joint Operational Warfare: Theory and Practice (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2009): xi–43.
3. “Lessons learned from the armed Jihad ordeal in Syria,”
www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/lessons-learned-from-the-jihad-ordeal-in-syria-english-translation.
4. Will Hartley, Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism, Issue Thirty (Alexandria, VA: Jane’s Information Group, 2009), 424–425.
5. Tim Fish, “Sri Lanka Learns to Counter Sea Tigers’ Swarm Tactics,” Jane’s Navy International, March 2009, 23.
6. “A Perfect Desert Storm: Political Extremism, Libyan Weapons and Changing Weather Patterns are Causing Turmoil in the Sahel,” The Economist, 17 March 2012, www.economist.com/node/21550324.
7. Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, “Arming of Hezbollah Reveals U.S. and Israeli Blind Spots,” The New York Times, 19 July 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/world/middleeast/19missile.html?_r=1.
8. “Robosub Overview,” The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Foundation, www.auvsifoundation.org/FOUNDATION/Competitions/RoboSub/RoboSubOverview/.
9. Ashley Milburn, “The Evolution of Maritime Drug Trafficking Technology,” Maritime Security Challenges 2012, http://mscconference.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/the-evolution-of-maritime-drug-trafficking-technology/.
10. Kavan Ratnatunga, “Return to Mullaitivu,” Sri Lanka Sunday Times, 1 April 2012 http://lakdiva.org/suntimes/mullaitivu/.
11. U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), 5–6.
12. Ibid., 6–7.
13. Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoffman, William Rosenau and David Brannan, Trend in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements, RAND Report MR-1405 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 41–46.
14. Milan Vego, Joint Operational Warfare, II-18–II-19.
15. Sergei DeSilva, “Good Education: Sri Lankan Military Learns Insurgency Lessons,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, December 2009.
16. Raj Vijayasiri, “A Critical Analysis of the Sri Lankan Government’s Counterinsurgency Campaign” (master’s thesis, Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1999), 42–47.
17. Tim Fish, “Sri Lanka Learns to Counter Sea Tigers’ Swarm Tactics,” Jane’s Navy International, March 2009, 24–25.
18. Ibid.
19. Paul A. Povlock, “A Guerrilla War at Sea: The Sri Lankan Civil War,” Small Wars Journal, 9 September 2011 http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/a-guerilla-war-at-sea-the-sri-lankan-civil-war.