The Indian navy is taking on Somali pirates. The classic image of pirates is terribly, terribly romantic. The reality is less compelling, as William Langewiesche outlined in a terrrific Atlantic piece that is, for some unknown reason, not available on our website. Pirates are the muggers of the high seas; they prey on the helpless for personal gain, and generally don't particularly care who they're killing to do it. To be sure, they're undoubtedly, many of them, coming out of difficult situtations. But so are the crews from third world nations who patiently ride out boring journeys from port to port for paltry sums.
For India this isn't just an economic fight; it's a chance to flex their macho muscle on the world stage--much like the time a little former colonial power took on the Barbary Pirates, a feat still memorialized in the Marine Hymn. It's nice when God and Mammon fight on the same side.
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Arrrrgg! The recent cold weather is validation for us Pastafarians. (Global warming being inversely related to the number of pirates. More pirates - good bye global warming.)
Thanks, Ms. McArdle, for letting us know that actual pirates don't make rum and wear eye patches and walk on wooden legs with a parrot on their shoulder. Where would we be without you?
Is there some reason why the arming of merchant ships isn't being considered as a remedy?
To Rob: I'm not specifically sure why they don't arm merchant ships. I'm guessing they don't want the merchant ships (crewed by third world low-income men) to go all pirate as well.
I am sad and discomforted that our modern-day pirates could not maintain a Disney-esque flavor for the tourists. :(
What would happen if ALL of the shipping companies refused to pay the ransoms......how many ships can these ingrates capture before they figure out that they have the attention of the entire world, and they aren't going to get what they want.......wahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
@Rob and PaulW: After reading that some ships are losing a quarter of a million dollars by going around Africa instead of above it, I asked myself this same question in my blog a few days ago and think I came up with an answer: because the shipping companies are afraid that if they take responsibility for their own security when passing by Somalia, some might ask why they can't be responsible for their security elsewhere. Navies have provided and still do provide subsidies to international shippers in the form of protection from pirates and privateers, and like any industry, the shippers want to keep it that way.
All we need are Frederic and The Pirate King to come after General Stanley's daughters.
I've wondered when one of these pirate groups will decide to jam their hijacked supertanker sideways in the Suez Canal to really screw things up.
I would assume they'd be attacked by various Navies prior to getting there but the ensuing environmental disaster of a destroyed supertanker would lead to somewhat of a catch 22.
Do the pirates usually kill the entire crew? If not, that'd be one reason why arming the crews wouldn't work: for what they earn (which isn't much), why would they want to risk their lives protecting someone else's cargo? Better to surrender and get ransomed.
No, the pirates very rarely kill crewmen; they're part of the ransom. Arming the crew might work in some instances, but the pirates are very well-armed, and hardened fighters to boot.
Dan's answer is consitent with an article I read on the subject a few days ago. Anyone dying in these attacks seems to be rare. For everyone involved - crew, owners and insurers - it is presumably better to have the ship captured and ransomed that risk a firefight between the pirates and untrained crew.
k9, the pirates don't want to "screw things up"; they want to make a profit. Taking a supertanker into the Suez and jamming it sideways means you don't make any money and the Egyptian government executes you.
Right now, crews are kept alive not just for ransom, but because the navies in the area operate under rules of engagement designed to keep hostages alive. If they killed the crews, the various militaries would just forcibly board, probably not making any significant effort to take the pirates alive.
(The interesting thing is, under international law, any country may seize a pirated ship and punish the pirates in accordance with its laws, regardless of nationality of the ship, crew, or pirates. So if just one country decides to start ignoring the hostages in favor of wiping out pirates, well, there might be diplomatic fallout, but it would technically be kosher.)
the ensuing environmental disaster of a destroyed supertanker
Why should the attack have to destroy it? A team of SEALs or Marines helicoptered in should do the trick. Or just an itty-bitty bomb on the rudder(s) combined with a handful of ocean-going tugs with attitude.
Is there some reason why the arming of merchant ships isn't being considered as a remedy?
I would guess there's an aversion by most countries in letting armed ships into their territorial waters. These are merchant ships, they want to dock at their destination, not be harassed (or possibly fired upon) by coast guards and navies.
FWIW, I'm not suggesting arming the crews, I'm suggesting arming the ships. A single not-especially-expensive laser guided missile--possibly built by battle-bot geeks in collaboration with rocket geeks--could clobber the "well armed" pirates a mile away, and be controlled from the comfort of the bridge. And an old-fashioned .50 cal machine gun with tracers could clobber them at a few hundred yards in the hands of a half-decently trained gunner, or at 1000 yards or more if radar-guided.
A firefight with small arms is a fool's game, but not-especially expensive alternatives exist.
@Rationalitate: Yeah, damn the navies of the world for keeping the seas clear of pirates! Damn them all to hell! The only people who could possibly benefit from oceanic crime control are the BIG SHIPPING CORPORATIONS, it couldn't possibly benefit anyone traveling by sea or the end consumers of shipped goods or people interested in basic justice for those who extort from others, and frankly, anyone who thinks otherwise is just a terrorist! Or a pirate...
*takes a swig of rum*
What really surprises me in both of the cited articles is the absurd governmental obsession with legal niceties. These are PIRATES fer crissakes! When they get captured, they ought to be summarily hanged -- or just tossed overboard. That might actually have some deterrent effect.
How about offering ship owners platoons of Marines, equipped with night-vision goggles and rocket-propelled grenades, to ride along on tankers from Hormuz to the Suez Canal?
Langewiesche's Atlantic pieces on modern piracy and other sea-going topics aren't available because they've been published in book form as "The Outlaw Sea," which is a little light, considering no new material is added, but is still worth reading. It has a section about the Baltic ferry Estonia which sunk with considerable loss of life, and to no satisfactory legal resolution, back in 1994. (Market Freedom ultimately takes the blame, unless you're a conspiracy theorist, in which case America bombed the ship.)
There's a section about the impoverished and life-and-limb-risking Indians of Alang, where old ships are run aground on the beach in order to be pulled apart for scrap.
And there's a section about the general anarchy that is the modern ocean, where piracy abounds thanks to low-profit-margin shipping includes small underpaid crews of questionable training, and also the problems of flags-of-convenience, the lack of unity in registry and tracking of vessels, and so on.
Langewiesche criticizes the attention to small piracy, which amounts to theft, generally performed by the poor, and the fact that little attention is paid to organized, possibly terrorist-funding piracy goes on on the large scale, where entire ships disappear under a new name and flag.
As for arming ships, numerous cruise ships are armed with sonic weapons that use microwaves to beam extremely unpleasant noise several hundred yards, while others get by with plain vigilance, something that can't be managed by 25 crewmen on a supertanker. There're no guarantees with sonic weapons, but non-lethal is better than nothing at all.
A couple years ago in the Persian Gulf, the oiler USNS Walter Diehl, which though a US navy ship appears to be an ordinary oil-transporter, was approached be several small fast craft that refused communication, the crew responded with .50-caliber fire which sent the boats fleeing. 50-cal will ruin anything up to a light destroyer, and tear through a modern cargo vessel without too much problem. I'd hate to make gunships out of loads of civilian vessels, but it will deter piracy the way Q-ships deterred submarine attacks.
They had an interview on the BBC with a ship captain who's vessel was seized by pirates. He said in addition to guns and RPGs they also bransihed knifes and (get this) swords!
They had him on his hands and knees opening the ships safe and they had a sword to the back of his neck. They said if the alarm went off he would be the first to die.
But these were indonesian pirates, not somali prirates.
They also had Admiral Michael Mullen discussing how to deal with the priate menace. Must be exciting and little surreal to be a young ensign on a destroyer sailing out of Diago Garcia with order to hunt down some pirates.
Arming civilian ships is pretty dubious. But maybe you could put a real .50-cal on a certain percent of ships along with a few Navy folks to operate it and make calls on the rules of engagement. Then you could put a fake .50-cal on the rest of the ships as a deterrent.
This is nothing but a huge lack of willpower on the part of the ship owners, the insurers and the western navies. Bravo the Indians for showing us how easy it is to make these cockroaches die.
The pirates have rifles, RPGs, swords, knives and a few medium machineguns - in other words, nothing an M2 or DSHKM .50 cal couldn't easily fix. Part of the problem is the size of crews - these huge ships have 25 person crews, and rely heavily on automation. There really aren't any spare bodies to spare lookout duties. Still, if I were an insurer, I would insist that any ships I covered have a radar capable of detecting small craft and communications that can speak to nearby navy vessels. I would also hire some blackwater types and put them on bait ships in the areas where my ships had been hit.
What are you suggesting here? That the "situation" of the victims matters in some way? How is that? Surely you cannot be suggesting that piracy would be acceptable if the victim crews were rich white guys. Is it that you think piracy would be excusable if the crews were rich white guys? Understandable if the crews were rich white guys?
Or is it what I expect: that you're so conditioned by our liberal media monoculture to express "root causes" understanding for criminals based on their poverty, that you reflexively threw in an excuse for the pirates, but then wanted to make sure that you equally affirmed the victimhood of the victims, and noting their fashionable third worldliness was the best compliment you had to hand?
Perhaps the most interesting pirates of the last few decades were the Chinese Navy in the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party had the brilliant idea of reducing its military budget by instructing the PLA to go out and fund itself. The PLA already had some business interests - for example, it controlled telecoms in China, due to the natural synergies there (the military would have to monitor the communications systems anyway, so why not run them?).
But the PLA Navy got the bright idea of cracking down on 'smuggling'. They'd capture a ship in international waters, force it into Chinese waters, and then arrest everyone onboard for smuggling, since the ship wasn't supposed to be in Chinese waters. They had a simple way of getting confessions - if the crew admitted that they'd been smuggling, they were released instantly (although the PLA Navy kept the ship and cargo). Any crew member that didn't want to confess was held indefinitely - i.e., you got a life sentence unless you 'admitted' what you had done.
As a business model, it had a pretty high profit margin. But some ships managed to put out distress calls while still in international waters, and eventually international pressure convinced China to cut back to simply taking bribes for harboring pirates, rather than capturing the ships themselves.
Count me as one of those who is all for this. As a business model, considering the absolute dearth of credit out there, it ain't a bad idea for people from small countries.
Frankly I think it shows some ingenuity and business acumen. Don't even get me started with where some of our country's most prominent families got their fortunes from. (Bootlegging anyone?)
Hey, England built an empire on it. Why not let the Somalis do it?
Surely, libertarian McArdle isn't protesting this.
Langewiesche noted in his article a particular case of a captured ship being treated like a dead badger by several navies until one of them decided to press the attack. The ship used its main rifle to basically obliterate anything in the superstructure, but by then the pirates and hostages had moved to the engine room and switched to flank speed. (Probably reasoning that even if they couldn't outrun the pursuing frigate, they could complicate its attack. The grounding they risked was hours away.
Point being that unlike crews, pirates are on the lookout for Navy Seals and such. Every captured ship is a hostage situation, and while any Navy ship can ruin part of a captive ship, there's not a lot they can do to disable it without sinking it, which in the case of an oiler would be a massive spill. An oiler could ever be used as a weapon.
there's not a lot they can do to disable it without sinking it
They can't run a zodiac up to the stern and shoot a small missile at the rudders and/or screws? That's impossible? They can't pop the screws with a torpedo from a submarine (possibly using special reduced-power torpedoes or detonating them at some distance from the ship)? The SEALs couldn't drop in, secure a small fraction of the ship, and cut/blow up the steering hydraulics? Or locate the engine air intakes and drop emery dust down them? They can't rig up a net of sturdy cables to foul the screws?
Maybe impossible to do without being noticed, or impossible without endangering the hostages, or impossible with currently used high-power armaments, but certainly nothing even remotely resembling actually impossible.
If the US hadn't withdrawn from Somalia in the mid-90's, how would that have changed the modern piracy epidemic?
I am assuming the huge rise in piracy is related to the fact that the country has no real government.
Wow. Remember the 90's? When it was the GOP that hated military interventions (or possibly just hated everything Clinton did).
Perhaps modern industrialists should follow the example of the old colonialists: Hire mercenary ships full of vicious bastards of your own, specifically to hunt down pirates. In addition to their pay, they are allowed to keep whatever they take off their prey.
Can the US still give out Letters of Marque? It is in the constitution... let Blackstone or whomever hunt the pirates down, perform whatever high seas justice in necessary, then salvage the boats ourselves.
When the US get the benefits of the piracy, I guaran-damn-tee the rest of the world would figure out some novel pirate fighting techniques. We just need to apply the proper incentive. I think we could all agree that the US getting $100 Million in oil for free would be a pretty big incentive to all the countries and companies that ship through the middle east to solve the problem.
Ann, what DON'T you know about China?
Kristian --
The U.S. did not join the 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, and the Declaration explicitly says it does not apply to non-parties, so it's still legal for the U.S. to commission privateers (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't decide to invent new international law obligations out of thin air, as it seems to recently be wont to).
Klug -
I lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s and heard a lot, in real time, about these incidents. We'd hear when a ship sent out a distress signal in international waters but was being escorted through Chinese waters by the time anyone else got there, and would later hear how long the captain had been held before he 'confessed' and was automatically set free.
I also used to enjoy the stories about all the yachts and limousines that were stolen in HK and then would reappear in the possession of top Party members in the mainland. HK executives would tell stories of riding in a limo with a Party member and recognizing a stain on the carpet or something else that made them realize that the limo used to be theirs before it was stolen. The yachts were pretty easy to track down, but obviously no one could get them back once they were in the hands of a CCP member.
Growing up in the US, I was used to the rule of law and naturally assumed that it was common around the world. It was this naive American assumption that led to so many US businesses losing money in their dealings with China in the 1990s. Poor countries typically have dysfunctional governments, and Americans should be more aware that not everyone is like us.
I don't know much (anything) about maritime law - but I don't see why the various navies operating in the area don't deal harshly with every hijacked ship. I would think that after all of the pirates end up dead two or three times - the pirates would find something more profitable to do. I realize that hijacked crew members may end up dead as a result and that ships might be lost, but wouldn't it be better to act decisively a few times rather than put up with this continuing menace?
Isn't keeping the peace on the high seas - the point of having an enormous blue water navy?
Perhaps modern industrialists should follow the example of the old colonialists: Hire mercenary ships full of vicious bastards of your own, specifically to hunt down pirates. In addition to their pay, they are allowed to keep whatever they take off their prey.
Numerous legal problems with this, given that the mercenaries would be operating without letters of marque and without proper registry, to attack foreign-flagged (or unflagged) shipping, they'd be pirates themselves. Plus they couldn't keep the booty without taking it to a prize court, because after all it really belongs to whomever they stole it from. Never mind the violation of territorial waters (a concept that basically didn't exists in the age of sail, when the only water that was "yours" was that which was literally under the guns of your shore batteries).
And besides, while the nations of the world may well be content to tolerate appealingly poor brown-skinned pirates, the moment an eeeeeeevil CORPORATION starts doing anything about it, they'll get their asses handed to them.
The analogy with the Barbary states does not strike me as being that reassuring. If I recall my NAM Roger, pretty much every trading state oscillated between a) accepting it, b) convoying shipping, c) retaliating, d) paying off the authorities, e) bribing carefully selected officials. And then they would go through the cycle again (possibly in different order).
This was enough to get them to stay away from 18th century Britain and France, but nobody else. The problem did not go away for good until the French conquered Algiers. And to control the hinterland required a seventeen year long guerrilla war.
Anyone feel like nation-building in Somalia?
"Isn't keeping the peace on the high seas - the point of having an enormous blue water navy? "
Nope. I think the point is to protect America and project our power where needed. Keeping the peace may sometimes fit into that mission, and other times not.
Of course, if you have the mind of a lawyer you could fit anything and everything under the sun under the phrase "protect America".
But generally I think the US seems quite happy to let someone else step up and take care of this until the international community begs us too.
Every time we act without the international community begging us to do something we end up getting hated on anyway.
RobB --
Well, that's the thing about the no flag rule I mentioned above. As soon as any nation decides that keeping the hostages alive isn't worth the disruption to commerce, they can start storming these ships and hanging the pirates.
I'm not sure how programmable the Mark 50 torpedo is, as far as letting it detonate near but not on the screws. That's the modern US Navy torpedo for surface vessels. Heaven knows what other nation's navies have. US Subs have the Mark 48 wire-guided torpedo (well, it has a brain, too, but it's steerable for a short duration while the wire spools out), but that would mean having a submarine in the area of the pirate ship.
SEALs cutting the steering hydraulics? Well, nice if you can do it, but chances are, the pirates have already retreated to the engine-room at that point, which means the SEALs are in an all-or-nothing firefight in closed spaces against superior numbers.
I like the emery dust in the intakes idea, as well as the screw-fouling idea, but both of those only work when you have that sort of gear around and the ship is moving fast enough that it can't evade the attack.
Assuming any of the above worked, you've stopped the ship. Now what? You still have a hostage situation, the pirates have all the food and water they need for a long-haul. Gone are the days when sinking a vessel is an acceptable outcome. There's no safe way to tow a vessel that doesn't want to be towed.
If you bring back letters of mark, you'll have to bring back the prize courts which will award the letter-holder with either the captured vessel and its cargo, or its value should the state decide to buy the vessel.
But you can bet that the Saudis won't accept that a few pirates are reason enough for the entire value of a $100M cargo and a pricy ship to transfer to some guy with a private navy.
Likewise, I can see a lot of greedy lawyers generating a lot of liability for a potential letter of mark shipowner and crew.
There's no safe way to tow a vessel that doesn't want to be towed.
If the pirates have retreated to the engine room, then the SEALs can just secure the deck, superstructure, and hatches and let it be towed. Obviously pirates who are shooting at tugs pose a problem.
The hostages are always a problem of course, but the original hypothetical had the pirates trying to block the Suez Canal, which should be eminently preventable with a little creative thinking.
Of course, if they blocked Suez, then nobody would come around the Horn of Africa, so it would be a supremely stupid strategic move on their part. Maybe we should just let them do it.
If the pirates have retreated to the engine room, then the SEALs can just secure the deck, superstructure, and hatches and let it be towed. Obviously pirates who are shooting at tugs pose a problem.
Again, this assumes that a whole lot of risky stuff went right and both steering and engines are disabled. Otherwise, the pirates are completely able to fight a tow and force any towing vessel into serious hazard. I don't see this as practical. I don't have a better solution, but this is not something I'd count on going right.
Why don't the Saudis just issue a Fatwa and then hire a team from Blackwater made up of ex-SEALS or SBS? Yes, it is not a risk free enterprise, but these pirates are not exactly fighters par exelence.
Holdfast, I was going to follow up to my comment that not every navy has anyone nearly as good as SEALs, but hey, for the right price, they could. I'd be in favor of a mercenary solution. Why risk our Navy on a risky situation with questionable value as a national interest. I mean, US Flag vessels, yes. Saudi oilers? It's only our problem as much as it's everybody's problem.
this assumes that a whole lot of risky stuff went right and both steering and engines are disabled.
If the SEALs control the deck, they rappel overside with a little demolition and make sure both are disabled.