Somalia redux

[unixronin]

SFGate has an analysis of the issues surrounding the Somali pirate problem.

In private, however, U.S. officials acknowledged there were way too few to counter a rising scourge of piracy along the lawless Somali coast.

Even as more Navy ships, including the guided-missile frigate USS Halyburton, arrive near the Horn of Africa, there will be fewer than two dozen international warships patrolling an area nearly five times the size of Texas.

“It’s a big area and you can’t be everywhere at once,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday.

[...]

Outside advisers have recommended expanding the task force mandate to hunt pirate “mother ships” far from shore.  These nondescript larger vessels shelter the small speedboats that pirates usually use to quickly close on a commercial ship and scramble aboard.

The only problem with this is that, until they attack, it’s very hard to tell a pirate gang mothership towing pirate skiffs from a fishing fleet mothership towing fishing skiffs.

Whitman’s statement is true, as far as it goes.  But you don’t have to be everywhere at once.  You just have to be where the pirates are.

But how do you know where the pirates are, or where they will be?

Well, the thing is, you don’t care where the pirates are ... except when they attack.  And in order to attack, they have to go where the ships are.  And you know where the ships are.

I have a modest proposal.

It goes like this:

1. Station two or three multinational “depot ships” at each end of the pirate-infested stretch of ocean off the Horn of Africa.  Patrol only the borders of the area, but keep air support on standby in case needed.
2. Every ship entering that stretch of ocean swings by one of the depot ships.  When it does so, a squad of Marines board.  (Or Royal Marine Commandos, or French Naval Commandos, or Legion Étrangére, or Spetznaz.)
3. When the ship leaves the dangerous area, it swings by another of the depot ships, where its Marine detachment disembarks, ready to board the next merchant ship travelling in the opposite direction.

To attack, the pirates have to come to the ships.  But under this plan, the Marines will always be there first, waiting for them.  Better trained, better armed, with the advantage of superior numbers and a superior tactical position.  It will go very badly for the pirates, particularly if the nations involved agree to return to the old standard of piracy carrying an automatic death penalty.  In the unlikely event that the pirates are able to muster a large-scale coordinated attack against a single ship in an effort to overwhelm its Marine detachment, the Marines on board call in air support, which simply sinks everything in the vicinity of the target vessel.

Piracy off the Horn of Africa will very rapidly become a very, very non-profitable proposition.

Comments

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Force can do either or both of two things: stopping attacks-in-progress and deterring attacks-to-come. Military shipping does a certain amount of the latter but seems to be ineffective at the former; the water hoses that ships nowadays are using, appear to be semi-effective at stopping attacks but absolutely useless at deterring them.

You're a pirate attacking a ship. You get sprayed with a water hose: unpleasant and uncomfortable, but not particularly harmful. Given the rewards of piracy, nobody is going to be dissuaded from it by fear of being sprayed with a hose. Nobody is going to get sprayed with a hose and give up piracy as a result.

Right now the pirates are making a ton of money at no real risk to themselves. The way to stop piracy is to change this: begin using force that does more than nonlethally stop attacks-in-progress. Specifically, begin using *lethal* force to stop attacks in progress. Dead pirates are no longer a threat to your ship - or any other ships, either. And hearing about pirates who went out a-pirating and never came back... will get others to quit. "It's too dangerous now. The money was good before, but now the odds are more than even that I won't come back alive from a pirating attempt. Nice while it lasted, but it's time to get back to farming."

What kind of force is needed for this? Not much, really: oceangoing ships are inherently pretty defensible. They're stable platforms firing from above at dinghies on the open ocean. The pirates are untrained thugs with limited weapons and equipment. You don't need complex systems: two US Marines with automatic rifles could do a perfectly acceptable job of protecting a ship against four pirates. (One could, really, but he's got to sleep sometime. Having two aboard means someone *always* on duty.)

Deploy a Marine battalion to the area. Pairs of Marines board ships that are going to be passing through. If a pirate attack comes, they defend the ship and shoot to kill. Pretty soon, pirates are going to start going out and not coming back. The danger in piracy will go from "negligible" to "high." The pirates still alive will find another line of work.

(Lethal defense of ships has been criticized on the basis that it'll provoke the pirates into lethal reaction. I disagree. One, they're not suicidal fanatics - they're in it for money and they want to come back alive. Any ship they take will have the time to get off a distress call. If pirates then kill the people aboard, they won't have hostages: when a military response comes, they *will* die. Two, dead pirates are physically incapable of reaction.)

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Another thought: right now the pirates can reasonably assume that once the operation is over, they're safe. Rob a bank in the US and you'll spend the next decade worrying about Federal investigators; pirate-attack a ship and you're home free as soon as you've gotten the ransom. That can be changed.

We install cameras on ships - a whole bunch of them. Pirate attack happens, the individuals in question are photographed from as many angles as possible and those photos satellite-transmitted off the ship. Audio recorders can get voice samples, too. When a ship is ransomed back, detectives go through it looking for other evidence - fingerprints, hair, etc. Crews get questioned for other info, such as names they might have heard.

We make Wanted posters. Airdrop them into the pirate regions of Somalia: wanted alive for piracy, or (in cases where we don't need them alive to confirm they're the right guy), dead. $50k per head at any US consulate/embassy in the region, or we can pick them up at your location if we get enough notice to do the recon and ensure it's not a trap.

No statute of limitations - poster is valid until the guy or his head is brought in, now or twenty years from now. Raise the rewards as needed to allow for inflation; periodically re-issue the posters.

Rob a ship and you'll spend the rest of your life wondering when someone's going to come after you. That'd deter *me.*

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I like this idea too. For the survivors. :)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's pretty much exactly what I just said.