Published 26 Feb 09

Strategic Interests

by J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist

A Sustainable Response to the Scourge of Somali Piracy

In last week's column I warned that the threat of Somali piracy is "not just ongoing, but incidents of attempted hijackings may actually increase, notwithstanding the increased attention which the international community has focused on the phenomenon." On Sunday, a Greek-owned, Maltese-flagged 75,707-deadweight-ton container ship, the MV Saldanha, bound for Slovenia with cargo from the Thai port of Sriracha was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden and her twenty two crew members taken prisoner. The BBC's Jonah Fisher, on board the Royal Navy's Type 23-classfrigate HMS Northumberland which was nearby at the time of the attack, reported that because a hostage situation had developed by the time the warship came alongside the merchant vessel, "there was little that Martin Simpson, captain of the Northumberland, could do." Instead the Royal Navy commander "was forced to watch as the Saldanha with its crew of 22 below deck drifted past the bridge windows and on towards the Horn of Africa." Fisher observed correctly, "The mandate of the European Union taskforce – of which the Northumberland is part – is to act as a deterrent and try and stop acts of piracy in process or about to take place. It does not have the mandate or capability to retake captured ships like the Saldanha." (The Northumberland subsequently came across one of the wooden skiffs used by the pirates who seized the Saldanha and, as Yachting Monthly reports, in one of the more bizarre episodes in recent journalistic history, allowed Fisher's embedded colleague from The Sun tabloid, Tom Newton Dunn, to do the honors and sink the boat with a 30 mm cannon.)

This recent incident underscores the difficulty with – some would even say the futility of – recent measures taken by the United States, the European Union, Russia, India, China, and other countries to counter the attacks on commercial shipping in the waters off of Somali coasts. Even landlocked Switzerland has gotten in on the act, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs issuing a statement on Wednesday that Swiss soldiers would be sent to assist the EU's Operation Atalanta naval force, although they will only protect World Food Program and Swiss merchant vessels, but would abstain from any offensive operations against the pirates. (This latest addition to the informal naval coalition highlights the difficulties in coordinating joint military efforts between nations which nonetheless insist on rules of engagement individually tailored to suit the tastes of their domestic audiences.)

While the two dozen or so cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and other surface combat vessels which various countries have dispatched to the region since the seizure last September of Ukrainian-owned, Belizean-registered freighter MV Faina with its cache of T-72 tanks and other armaments have made for great political theater and may have even proven useful in escort duty along narrowly defined sea lanes, there are simply not enough of them to make a real dent in the operations of the pirates. As I noted at the time, the November hijacking of the largest vessel ever taken, Saudi Aramco's Liberian-flagged very large crude carrier MV Sirius Star, which took place far beyond which was thought to be the range of Somali pirates, "revealed an entirely new operational capacity, one which may have been adopted in response to stepped-up naval patrols." The area that would need to be covered turned out to more than twice that which was previously thought, amounting to some 2.5 million square miles of open sea, a space for which, as Graeme Gibbon Books, managing director of the British firm Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd., told the Associated Press, "there will never be enough warships." And certainly it cannot be fully patrolled by the three ships – two U.S. Navy and one Royal Navy – who currently make up the multinational flotilla, Combined Task Force 151 (CTF 151), that was stood up in mid-January with the mandate of focusing solely on counter-piracy operations.

Now the United States Navy seems to be raising the ante. As the Virginian-Pilot reported over the weekend, the Nimitz-class nuclear supercarrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower sailed from Naval Station Norfolk on a five-month deployment that includes counter-piracy operations in the Arabian Sea and the western Indian Ocean. Joining the Ike are other components of its strike group, including the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Big Horn, and the Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Sacagawea, as well as the Mayport (Florida) Naval Station-based Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers USS Gettysburg and USS Vicksburg and the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate USS Halyburton.

Commenting on the sending of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, UPI's Martin Sieff argued that "in modern warfare, the only vessels that can do [the] job are aircraft carriers," noting that "nuclear-powered ones are actually much easier to deploy and much more effective for the job than smaller, conventionally powered ones." The veteran news analyst went on to list the other advantages of using a nuclear-powered carrier in the anti-piracy effort:

American nuclear-powered supercarriers, because they are much larger than the far smaller conventional carriers that the rest of the world operates, can carry a far larger and more formidable complement of aircraft. They therefore can patrol far larger areas of sea at the same time and launch fast response attacks with powerful squadrons far more often and easily. But nuclear-powered supercarriers have other advantages as well. Because they are nuclear-powered, they can stay at sea for an infinite period of time without being refueled. That vastly reduces the logistical problems of keeping them operationally active and deployed on station for long periods of time.

While, once the strike group arrives in theater, the airpower launched from the Eisenhower – Carrier Air Wing Seven includes Strike Fighter Squadrons 83, 103, 131, 143, Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 121, Carrier Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 140, Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 40 (Detachment 3), Helicopter Anti-submarine Squadron 5 – will undoubtedly dominate the skies over the Gulf of Aden and nearby waters, it is not quite as certain that this display of American power will necessarily address the underlying challenge. Moreover, at a time when the Navy is struggling to maintain a fleet of around 300 ships, how long can the deployment of significant assets to what is generally viewed as a strategic backwater like the Horn of Africa be sustained? And, even when surface units are available for this area of operations, they generally are tasked with a variety of missions, including anti-terrorism and interdiction, which require a different modus operandi than efforts to counter piracy. Furthermore, even when engaged in anti-piracy operations, the time factor still presents a serious challenge as HMS Northumberland's vain rush to come to the rescue of the Saldanha highlighted: a helicopter was immediately dispatched and the frigate steamed at top speed only to be stopped two nautical miles from the hijacked cargo ship by a call from the distressed captain relaying a demand from his captors that all counter operations cease. (Pace Martin Sieff's subsequent argument that combating pirates is "an ideal role" for a supercarrier, while its aircraft can fly more patrols, fighter pilots are of little utility once the pirates have boarded their targets.)

As I commented in the New Atlanticist policy blog of the Atlantic Council of the United States several months ago, in the end the problem of Somali lawlessness at sea will only be definitively resolved when the international community summons up the political will to adequately address the underlying pathology of Somali statelessness onshore. Alas, so far that has not happened. So, if sending more naval vessels to the region is neither particularly effective nor sustainable and the international community has shown little stomach for trying to effectively address the problems arising from the collapse of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic and the failure of any unitary successor state to emerge, what might constitute a realistic response to the threat, at least in the intermediate term, that is, between that time in the next few months when either more urgent crises or simply required rotations take most of the current international naval presence away from the waters off Somalia and such moment in the as-yet-undetermined future when Somalis (other than those in Somaliland who constitute a separate case) manage to establish for themselves something resembling a legitimate government capable of fulfilling its international legal obligations, including preventing outlaws from using its territory to attack peaceful international commerce?

Before attempting to answer this question, however, one must first define the environment where the challenge needs to be met and defeated. If resolving the complex issues on land in Somalia is a burden that the international community declines to shoulder, even assuming that Somalis would somehow countenance by such an intervention by outsiders, and the securing of the vast blue waters east of the narrow Bab-el-Mandab straits too daunting and expensive an undertaking, then the piracy must be stopped in the "green" waters of the "littorals" where land meets sea along the longest coastline in Africa. Of course, as Martin N. Murphy, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and research associate at the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies at King's College, London (Dr. Murphy and I appeared together last November at a Heritage Foundation panel on piracy and maritime security broadcasted live by C-SPAN), pointed out two years in a study on insurgency and counter-insurgency on the water published in the journal Contemporary Security Policy, operations in the in the green-water environment pose unique challenges:

[T]he littorals offer good cover: a combination of the wild terrain associated traditionally with guerrilla operations and crowded environments more akin to the habitat of urban guerrillas ... Rough coasts and rough water can hide movement as effectively as rough country, particularly as they can frustrate and distort radar, sonar, and communications signals. Beaches crowded with people and offshore waters crowded with pleasure craft and fishing boats can offer insurgents the same sort of cover as city streets. It is small boats, after all, that are insurgents' preferred attack craft.

On the other hand, focusing on the littorals narrows the area needing to be secured. While Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) – a comprehensive, global system that promises improved situational awareness to a variety of stakeholders, including law enforcement and military personnel – is something of a pipe dream when thought of in terms of the high seas, it is far more realistic in if the environed as having the objective of a common operating picture facilitating interoperability on the part of proximate coastal nations.

A good example of regional cooperation, both multinational and interagency, having success countering piracy can be found in Southeast Asia, where there have been significant reductions in incidents of maritime piracy in recent years. While pirate attacks last year reached their highest level since the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center began tracking them in 1992, piracy continued to drop in Indonesia and the Straits of Malacca, with twenty-eight and two incidents, respectively, recorded in 2008. In 2004, sixteen countries – Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, the People's Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam – signed the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP), a treaty establishing the first-ever intergovernmental authority dedicated solely to addressing piracy issues. The pact, which went into effect in 2006 (fourteen of the parties have ratified the accord, Indonesia and Malaysia cooperate with it, but have not deposited their formal instruments of ratification), set up the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre in Singapore to facilitate the exchange of information on incidents of piracy and armed robbery, coordinate operational cooperation among the signatories, promote analysis of the piracy patterns and trends, and support capacity-building efforts.

Even as the nations in Southeast Asia were increasing cooperation among themselves, they were also strengthening their own internal coordination. In Singapore, for example, a Maritime Security Task Force was created under the permanent secretary of defense to integrate the parallel efforts of the Republic of Singapore Navy (especially the 180 Squadron of its Coastal Command), the Police Coast Guard, the Maritime and Port Authority, and the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority. Singapore's situational awareness is enhanced by its requirement that vessels registered in the republic install Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) on board as well as Harbor Craft Transponder Systems (HARTS), both of which reduce the number of unknown vessels along the country's littoral that require addition scrutiny from the military and security services. The operational centers of the four Maritime Security Task Force agencies feed their separate contributions to MDA into a central Port Operations Control Centre, from which they also receive an integrated picture. As part of its military's doctrine of flexible and calibrated response capabilities, the Singaporean Navy has created "Accompanying Sea Security Teams" (ASSeTs). Each ASSeT is a small unit comprising of highly trained personnel who can be placed on selected merchant vessel passing through the straits based on intelligence and ready to act against threats should they materialize. More recently, the Special Tactics and Rescue (STAR) Unit of the Singapore Police Force has acquired the maritime assault capabilities needed to board vessels, engage pirates at close quarters, and carry out assault diving operations.

On a bilateral level, the Singaporean Navy operates a system in conjunction with its Indonesian counterpart that provides them both with real-time radar surveillance of the Singapore Strait. On a multilateral basis, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, together with Thailand as an observer, have a joint air patrol over the Straits of Malacca in an operation dubbed Eye in the Sky that enables surveillance aircraft to fly up to three nautical miles inside the territorial waters of the partner states. Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, which in late 2004 consolidated several of its security agencies into the coast guard-like Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, have also jointly launched the Trilateral Coordinated Patrol to police their respective territorial waters in a coordinated fashion.

As part of its security cooperation with Southeast Asian partners, the United States has steadily increased the anti-piracy component of the exercises it has conducted with regional forces. Since 2004, for example, the annual Cooperation and Readiness Afloat (CARAT) exercises that pair U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard elements with their counterparts from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand have included an anti-piracy dimension. Likewise, the annual Southeast Asian Cooperation Against Terrorism (SEACAT) exercise, which aims to enhance maritime security and interoperability between U.S. forces and those of the six participating countries – Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand (Indonesia is an observer) – against terrorist threats has begun to incorporate interception scenarios involving transnational criminal challenges, including piracy. These security cooperation engagements have helped to harmonize maritime doctrines of the participating nations and to encourage them to account not just for naval activities, but those of other government agencies as well.

Of course, Southeast Asia is not East Africa, but many of the lessons learned are certainly applicable. With the sponsorship of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), an East Africa and Southwest Indian Ocean Maritime Security Conference has been held annual since 2006, bringing the nations of the subregion together to discuss issues of common interest, including maritime piracy. As I chronicled here three weeks ago, as part of its security cooperation with partners in the subregion, the United States has enabled the forces of Djibouti to "effectively multiply their maritime capacity several times over by acquiring four 44-foot patrol boats equipped with global positioning system (GPS) and other modern naval systems." Earlier, the United States had helped Kenya to acquire five Defender-class small response boats capable of search-and-rescue, port security, and constabulary duties as well as an Archangel-class fast response boat. The Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate USS Robert G. Bradley is currently making its way up the eastern coast of the continent conducting training exercises with naval personnel from Djibouti, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania as part of the first East African iteration of Africa Partnership Station (APS).

As I reported last week, countries in and around the Horn of Africa "are beginning to adopt a more proactive posture, recognizing the threat that the ongoing attacks have on their own interests." At the beginning of February, after a four-day summit in Djibouti organized by the United Nations specialized agency dedicated to promoting cooperation between governments and the shipping industry to improve maritime safety, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Maldives, Seychelles, Tanzania, and Yemen as well as representatives of Somalia's "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG) signed an accord strengthening their anti-piracy cooperation and establishing three information centers in Mombasa, Kenya, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Sana‘a, Yemen, as well as an anti-piracy training center in Djibouti. A $1.6 million Maritime Crisis Centre was previously established in Mombasa by the IMO in 2006 to receive data from AIS technology aboard ships in East Africa and to relay the information to patrols. The operation in Mombasa is linked to a similar one in Cape Town, South Africa.

Hence, as in Southeast Asia, increased capacity by willing partners as well as cooperation between neighboring states can significantly advance maritime security along the East African littoral – and do so in a far more sustainable fashion – than simply increasing the number of naval vessels from the United States and other outside powers throughout the region in deployments which simply cannot be sustained. However, given that the naval and coast guard capabilities in the region are neither as advanced nor as robust as those in Southeast Asia, the United States and the rest of the international community needs to do more to assist in the building up of counter-piracy coalition, partnering, as appropriate, with states in the area, effective and legitimate authorities in the territory of the former Somali state, subregional organizations, and the African Union. With its emphasis on "smart power" – defined a few years ago in Foreign Affairs by Suzanne Nossel, who served in the Bill Clinton administration as deputy to the ambassador for UN management and reform at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, as "U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals, through alliances, international institutions, careful diplomacy, and the power of ideals" and by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at her confirmation hearing as "the full range of tools at our disposal: diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural" – the administration of President Barack Obama ought to find that strengthening the ability of America's regional partners to assert basic control over the littoral is the most effective path towards nurturing and sustaining maritime security in otherwise perilous waters off the Horn. Foreign Military Finance (FMF), Section 1206, Section 1207, and other security cooperation funds should be made available to begin now the task of building adequate regional coastal security forces.

In short, coming to the assistance of local actors who recognize the challenge that Somali piracy poses to their interests and are willing to work against it will not only serve the broad national interest of the United States in mitigating the threat and protecting the freedom of seas (and do so economically and efficiently), but it will help reduce the chaos in Somalia itself which, along with opportunity, is the primary cause of the scourge in the first place.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.

© 2009 J. Peter Pham

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