Bravo to the security men aboard the MV Maersk Alabama, who when approached and fired on by Somali pirates, fired back and drove them off.
Placing armed security men aboard ships vulnerable to pirate attacks has always been the obvious solution to the problem of piracy. How could anyone have thought that hugely expensive warships designed for real wars, operating under preposterous rules of engagement, was ever the solution to a profusion of scabby predators with small arms zooming about in small fast boats worth a few thousand dollars at most? There simply is no excuse for this having taken so long to implement, but kudos to Maersk for doing the right thing… firearms are a great deal better than relying on a hail of beer bottles.
But I would urge Maersk to invest in a pair of .50 cal HMGs per ship to discourage the more redoubtable of the Somali pirates from upping the ante by taking a Dushka off the back of a ‘technical’. An additional advantage of using heavy machineguns is it makes sinking the attacker and hopefully killing the pirates more likely, which can only be beneficial in both thinning out the herd and encouraging these predatory scum to find a less hazardous line of work.
And then there is always this humorous private sector approach… and the funny thing is, it would probably not only work but also be oversubscribed and profitable for a while, at least as long as the supply of ‘big game’ lasts.
Although in jest, the private sector approach is somewhat tempting, if only for the dirt cheap ammo…
Sounds like a growth industry. Now that Simon Man is back home perhaps he might take it on as a concept for pin money?
Yes, indeed, good for them.
But do not be thinking for a minute that the solution to the problem of piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa will be solved with a couple of Browning 50s and that will show the dusky-wallahs what-for, what-for! The Maersk Alabama got lucky – this time – in that the threat consisted of a half-a-dozen men in a very light vessel.
But the Somali pirates have deployed very heavy vessels in the past (taken by piracy, naturally) and they have access to much-heavier weapons than a Dishka off the back of a ‘technical’. When they show up in a ship that is more-or-less immune to 50-caliber fire – and with a T72 chained down on the working deck and lobbing 125mm AP/AE shells through the wheelhouse – then what are you going to do? You mount a couple of 50’s, they’re going to deploy a Mi24 (piloted by some soldiers-of-fortune, I suspect) and start raking your decks with 23mm cannon shells and bouncing 80mm HEAT/FRAG star-tails off the wheel-house windows.
If you want to put a stop to piracy, you have to take it seriously, as many a past naval power has learned to its chagrin when sailing these waters. These fuzzy-wuzzies will not be cowed by white man’s juju – they got all the juju you got, and more besides. Mounting some piddly machine guns and sonic weapons is not going to get it done. You need naval power that is more-than-a-match for anything that they might bring to the party, and you need a policy that is prepared to follow these folks to their home ports, anchor offshore, reduce their homes and their docks to #22A gravel or better, sow their fields with salt, and hang their bodies in chains to rot on the foreshore, as an example to others.
Nothing else works. But, in the current political climate – raining HE down on poor, dark-skinned Africans? Never going to happen. Maersk should develop different routes, or just stop sailing these waters. They’ve had two warnings with this one vessel alone.
llater,
llamas
The security team has to be able to carry their gear. They are placed aboard between ports, since many countries get all sorts of pissy about ships with firearms aboard.
Llamas is of course right, but it isn’t going to happen when you have a situation where a British naval tanker, with arms aboard, does nothing whilst two British people are kidnapped from their yacht. Hornblower it ain’t.
This is a good policy by the Maersk Line though. As long as there is so much easy meat, the pirates will no doubt give their ships a wide berth in future. If not, they will be reintroduced to the “high decibel noise device”.
llamas, that is a bit like saying Threat level II body armour is pointless because some enemies might use rifles. Everything I have read suggests the vast majority of them are just small boats and small arms/RPG’s, so the fact a few ‘heavies’ may exist changes very little.
If after scoping the approaching attacker, you see it has cannon, clearly it makes sense to not fire unless you also have a cannon. Moreover the bigger and more expensive the pirate ship, the more visible and vulnerable it is (i.e. heavy weapons do make it rather hard to pass off as a fishing vessel)… and if cannon armed pirates become common, well then a javelin ATGW ups the ante nicely too.
You mount a couple of 50’s, they’re going to deploy a Mi24 (piloted by some soldiers-of-fortune, I suspect) and start raking your decks with 23mm cannon shells and bouncing 80mm HEAT/FRAG star-tails off the wheel-house windows.
Unlikely
The capital involved and the specialised nature of the skills suggests that they’re unlikely to be able to afford it – plus pirates want to rob the ship’s safe.
They can’t do that if they kill everyone who has the combination (first, at least), or if they destroy it or set the ship afire.
There’s piracy in Somalia now because it provides a better risk/reward proposition than fishing. Making it considerably riskier and more expensive to be a pirate will be a significant deterrent.
(Plus, honestly, there’s nothing to stop Maersk, if they’re willing to mount dual-50s, putting a Bofors 40mm or 57mm on. And that will tear up the notional surplus HiND or boat-with-a-tank-on-it pretty well.
Notional mercenaries with a helicopter aren’t going to look too fondly on the idea of an automatic cannon with radar tracking, for the pay some Somali pirates can offer.)
Doesn’t matter what the pirates mount on a ship — their vessel’s hull will still be vulnerable to .50 BMG bullets. It’s a little difficult to lob 155mm howitzer shells off a sinking platform…
And for those few pirates who DO enter the arms race: why, they would be the perfect target for actual navy warships.
But as suggested earlier, well-armed “marines” on board passenger- and cargo vessels would take care of the majority of the problem.
I agree this is the best available approach given the level of political courage currently on display around the “civilized” world. Having some larger caliber weapons (in addition to the small arms and “sonic” weapons) will also help to ensure that a lot of these small attack ships are sunk (with all hands), to the betterment of mankind.
But as to the idea that the pirate-infested seas are too big to patrol, what we should be doing is deploying predator drones from centrally-located carriers. These could respond to an emergency call within minutes. even if the attack is occurring hundreds of miles away, and if properly armed they would be more than a match for even the larger pirate vessels. And I would charge a tidy fee for the service, so it could actually be a profitable (and quite safe) activity for the US Navy (does anyone else have Predators?). Burn and sink enough of these mother ships and the problem is solved.
Don’t the pirates have an entire shipload of Russian tanks?
That said, though, these seem more like targets of opportunity, like Drake in the Americas (…the first time). I don’t see the Somalis successfully sending a Hind against an oil tanker, or even getting it off the ground. “Technical” boats, perhaps even with cannon, are one thing, but helicopter gunships are another.
I’m also curious how much of a threat pirate cannon really are. They have no real chance to sink the ship, and even the bridge can probably be uparmored fairly easily and cheaply. Not only that, but trained naval gunners have a hard time hitting things at more than point-blank range; how likely is an old tank cannon strapped to a dhow on the waves operated by novices to be a serious threat?
I really doubt the effectiveness and wherewithal of these naval “fuzzy-wuzzies” runs to maintaining attack helicopters capable of reaching hundreds of miles off-shore. Frankly the main problem is one of wilingness of victims to get stuck in really. Moreover the objective of anti-pirate forces needs to be killing pirates summarily, not rescuing captives (which is a nice extra when suppressing piracy, not the logical prime objective).
If I were running a shipping line I would ransome my ship and crew if necessary, but would then fire any crewmember who had surrendered without any attempt at resistence. I’m trusting them with my ship and paying them to care for it; if they won’t put up at least a reasonable effort to protect it I don’t want them in my employ.
Also, the linked article states that a ship captured yesterday has a North Korean crew. I would be really surprised if Pyongyang sits still for that for very long. That one will be interesting to watch.
Personally, I like the idea of a pop-up Phalanx system. Or just an ordinary chain gun mounted in a container on the outside of the stack (with a side panel that opens to allow the weapon to fire). Pirates approach – bzzzzzt at 3000 rounds per minute, end of problem. You need to chop the pirates into bite sized chunks so that the sharks have few problems chewing them.
Let’s distinguish between ‘nuisance’ pirates, who can be dealt with by small arms (up to, say, a .50 BMG), and ‘threat’ pirates with larger/faster/better equipment, who can’t. I seriously doubt there would be many of the latter (capital costs) or that they’d last long; they’d be hard to hide, and big enough ‘game’ to be well worth going after with military units.
Have they attacked any Chinese ships, lately?
Sigvald wrote:
“The capital involved and the specialised nature of the skills suggests that they’re unlikely to be able to afford it – plus pirates want to rob the ship’s safe.”
WRONG. They don’t need working capital. They’re PIRATES. Just a few months ago, they took a ship carrying 20-something Soviet-era main battle tanks plus a host of other heavy wepaons. They’re not going to buy a T72 or a Mi24 with the legitimate proceeds from their on-shore noodle stands – they’re going to buy them with the multi-million dollar proceeds of their previous acts of piracy. Or they’re just going to take them at gunpoint from wheover has them. These heavy weapons are not what you’d call – rare – in the Horn of Africa. Neither are the specialists needed to work them.
They don’t want to open the ship’s safe – they don’t care about the p*ss-ant amount of cash on board, except as a trivial sideline. They ransom the ship entire, with its crew, for millions in cash – US dollars required.
Kim du Toit wrote:
“Doesn’t matter what the pirates mount on a ship — their vessel’s hull will still be vulnerable to .50 BMG bullets. It’s a little difficult to lob 155mm howitzer shells off a sinking platform…”
Er – no. The 50 BMG is a fine weapon, and I’m a big fan, but an ocean-going vessel like the ones that these jackanapes have proven they can take and use is essentially immune to the 50 BMG. A half-inch hole in one of these vessels is meaningless above the waterline and 50 BMG is ineffective through water. A heavy tender (like the one they took and used about 6 months ago to take a fully-loaded oil tanker more than 300 miles offshore) is plated 1 – 3 inches thick. 50 BMG would just bounce off.
“And for those few pirates who DO enter the arms race: why, they would be the perfect target for actual navy warships.”
My point EXACTLY.
“But as suggested earlier, well-armed “marines” on board passenger- and cargo vessels would take care of the majority of the problem.”
The problem is, you don’t know what you’re up against, until you’re up against it.
I expect one of two outcomes as a resuslt of the more agreressive responses typified by this latest incident. Either the pirates will melt away, or they will escalate.
Melting away in the face of violence and aggression – even apparently-overwhelming violence and aggression – is not what Somalis do. They kicked the US Special Forces right on their asses, for all their overpowering weaponry and modern technology. I do not expect that their response here would be different. There was a complete carrier battlegroup in sight from the beaches of Mogadishu. Ddn’t deter them, not one tiny little bit.
llater,
llamas
Several actually.
Llama, I don’t agree with sowing salt because it affords a torturous death to creatures who deserve to live, like field mice. I would go directly to reducing the pirates’ – and their supporting villages’ – homes to rubble and leave the mice alone. You are correct when you say that piracy should be taken seriously. So hanging a few of them from masts or whatever for the helicoptered TV cameras would not be a bad idea.
I note in this post, those guns were deployed but there were no dead pirates. This is not how to win.
John K, what’s the high decibel noise device? Wouldn’t it disturb sea life? What’s wrong with guns? Big ones that make ships sink?
I would go with the Kim du Toit approach, as always.
Boy on A Bike, I appreciate your concern for wildlife. It is always the innocent who suffer.
Cjf makes a very and telling interesting point.
Perry de H – Oh.
And what happened?
I assume that you mean the 1993 battle of Black Sea Street (AKA Operation Gothic Serpent).
The one where we captured the people we’d set out to capture, and despite being on the wrong end of numbers dished out about a 20:1 kill ratio? And this with some helicopter support, no fixed-wing support, and no armor support?
Sunfish wrote:
“I assume that you mean the 1993 battle of Black Sea Street (AKA Operation Gothic Serpent).
The one where we captured the people we’d set out to capture, and despite being on the wrong end of numbers dished out about a 20:1 kill ratio? And this with some helicopter support, no fixed-wing support, and no armor support?”
Indeed I do.
Some will quibble with your 20:1 kill ratio. I won’t bother.
The fact remains that these shoeless jackanapes willingly went up against an entire carrier battle group, with all that that entails. They killed 19 or 20 good guys, including 18 of the very finest that the US can field, and wounded a hundred more. I take second place to no man in my admiration for these troops and their skills – and yet Aidid and his merry men saddled up and took them on anyway.
Sure, they took massive casualties. But that only reinforces my point. They don’t care. A hundred dead – a thousand dead – they don’t care.
And for all the bravery, and all the military success that the coalition in Somalia achieved in ’93 – where are we now? We ran away. We caved. We appeased. We decided that the issues in the Horn of Africa were just not that important to us.
Just as we are doing now with this latest round of brigands. We cave. We appease. We pay the ransom. We negotiate.
A billion-plus dollars of US naval hardware floats around a tiny lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean for a week, negotiating with these scum. Can’t shoot them, says the President. Not until they really look like they’re really going to do something naughty! Might hurt their feelings! Might violate (gasp) their human rights!
Well, what lesson do you expect that they will take away from this?
In times past, a pirate captured in the act had a short apointment on the quarter-deck, followed by an even shorter appointment – with the yard-arm. Sometimes, when expedient, he would be taken whence he came and hanged in front of a large home-town crowd, the better to spread the message.
That’s what we should be doing now. This is not some sporting contest, where it’s no fair using any more weapons than they have. You come at any vessel on the high seas with weapons, whether it’s in a 20-foot ChrisCraft or a 200-foot ocean-going tender, you are going to meet Muhammad and the 72 virgins, right now. Your body, if recovered, will be dumped on the doorstep of whatever shack you came from, together with a link to the website where the video footage of your trip to Paradise may be downloaded. If you survive the sinking of your vessel, you will survive only long enough to be hauled back to the port from which you came, to be shot at the pierhead in full view of the assembled crowds.
Sound weapons? Pistols? It is to laugh. We all laugh at Barney Fife, but he was right – you gotta nip it in the bud! Pirates are hosti humani generis – enemies of all mankind, regardless of flag or baggage – and it’s time that we began to treat them as such. Right now, we are teaching them that they can expect a high success rate, relatively low risks, and the US (especially) is more concerned about their human rights and delicate feelings than about their threat to the peace and stability of the world and all its nations. Time for a change in the lesson plan.
“Sowing their fields with salt” is classical reference only. Punic Wars. I didn’t mean it literally.
llater,
llamas
Now tell us what you really feel about it, llamas. (I agree, BTW).
The Barbary Pirates were not suppressed, or even inhibited, by 500 years of ransoms and tribute. Losing men and ships meant nothing to them. Insh-Allah.
They were suppressed by the simple expedient of bouncing enough iron and explosives off the roofs of their homes – twice – that they did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the game was not worth the candle.
That, and the French army of occupation, which gave them a rule of iron. Literally.
It was the birthday of the US Marine Corps last week. Happy Birthday, USMC. Perhaps it’s a suitable time to remind the President what that line about ‘the shores of Tripoli’ is all about.
llater,
llamas
Is it just me or have the advocates of Somali-style “anarcho-capitalism” (like here) have gone oddly quiet? To us unsophisticated types piracy, kidnapping, ransom and protection rackets are indistinguishable from the kind of private enterprise justice or more febrile libertarian friends recommend. Or am I missing something?
I am very much a ‘nightwatchman state’ minarchist precisely because I have no problem with a state that confines itself almost entirely to security issues (i.e. fires, plagues, terrorists and threats of invasion), and thus owns warships and jets and drops bombs on barbarians of the sort preying on ships in the Indian ocean.
Although I am very very very strongly in favour of private sector solutions to security problems wherever feasible (such as letters of marque, private military companies, bounty hunting and even the hypothetical ‘protection agencies’ ana-caps like to talk about), I have yet to be convinced these anarcho-capitalist approach to a dangerous world are the entire solution to certain types of threat, and anything less than an ‘entire solution’ to that sort of problem is no solution at all.
Sure they do. The trick is to keep doing it every time they poke the beehive.
The Somali pirates are not doing it to get their 72 virgins in heaven, they are doing it to get piles of cash in this world. When the majority fail to return because most merchant ships are armed and any naval ship that spots a bunch of Somalis in a fast boat with RPGs simply sinks them (and anyone luck enough to be captured is publicly hanged if convicted of piracy in the customary manner)… well I suspect the problem will largely go away. It is just about changing the risk-reward ratio and not acting like weak morally confused fools.
Our genial host wrote:
‘When the majority fail to return because most merchant ships are armed and any naval ship that spots a bunch of Somalis in a fast boat with RPGs simply sinks them (and anyone luck enough to be captured is publicly hanged if convicted of piracy in the customary manner)… well I suspect the problem will largely go away.’
Well, in my silly-ass way – I think that’s just-about exactly what I have been saying right along.
A couple of 50s on the bridge wings will not provide this salutory result. You need naval forces, lots of them, with plenty of commo, plenty of intel and plenty of mixed assets. Big rifles – “one-shot wonders” – missiles, UAVs. Helicopters. Is the A10 carrier-capable? Let’s make it so . . . The Harrier/AV8 would be an excellent asset for this work.
The mission goal should be the day that a half-a-dozen Somalis get into a speed boat for a 3-hour tour with their AKs and their RPGs, and just as they clear the harbour mole, a JDAM from a plane they never even saw or heard lands just behind the cooler on the fish deck, and all of their families and countrymen see them and their boat converted to a fine haze on the water. Do that a few times, but every time, and pretty soon, they will seek another line of work.
(sound of crickets chirping)
NGTH.
llater,
llamas
The statement by tonathenethenathlon is so idiotic that it doesn’t merit any response.
Verity:
The high decibel noise device is mentioned in the article. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’d say an M2 Browning fits the bill.
My solution is simple, if a bit extreme: 475kT airburst over any Somalian town these scum call home. Cheaper and more effective than sending in a Marine Expeditionary Force as a sort of latter-day Einsatzgruppe.
The problem of modern piracy is a very difficult one… and simply strapping a couple chain guns to a deck of the treasure ship isnt going to do much to reduce it. As it has already been said here, the international community has to take it seriously, and raise the cost of being a pirate too high to make it attractive to desperate thugs.
Unfortunately most of our civilized nations have gotten so civilized they pale at the thought of vigorous, violent, and consistent retaliation from merchant mariners and well-drilled marines.
Not much other than kill the great majority of would-be pirates and raise the cost of doing business as a pirate by a much greater proportion than it raises the cost to merchant shipping.
Full agreement with post – and lots of nice comments.
David: Nukes are a bit extreme.
How about just carpet bombing those walled mini-mansions in Somalia that the piracy is paying for.
I’m kinda surprised some of the merchants effected aren’t getting together … Somalia’s no-government situation looks ripe for takeover my corporate mercs … a 21st Century East India Company?
The East India Company then mutated into the worst of both worlds – a corporation that is also its own government. Hence, no competition. Hence, no free market forces.
Bad.
I think Darryl hits the nail on the head there… we’ve grown soft, and unused to piracy. Naval ships and letters of marquewill come again, in time.
The moral of the story is that small arms appear to be sufficient to deal with the current threat. If and when the threat escalates, then the response should change.
But a “shipnical” would look very different to the current trawlers that act as motherships. A boat that carried 50-cal proof armour and an anti-tank gun would have engineering problems in terms of speed, not to mention being vulnerable to air strikes.
I think that a number of special forces sniper teams (preferably with M82s) deployed backwards and forwards on Liberian and Greek registered rust-buckets, the slower the better would solve the problem.
Issues which cripple the anti-piracy response are easy to identify.
The reason most MVs are unarmed is that anti-gun legislation in each port visited has to be obeyed. The reason no main-stream politician is advocating putting M82s on board multiple ships, is that they are more interested in keeping these guns out of circulation than keeping world trade flowing.
The other major issue is the rules of engagement issued when engaging pirates. If lawyers wanted to guarantee never solving this problem, I don’t think they could improve on “have to encounter direct threat to life” in combination with not hurting hostages. This makes the window for use of force start when they open fire and close when the first hostage is taken.
I’ve never heard of any pirate vessel with a tank strapped down on it, llamas is full of it, IMHO. Nor do they have the technical knowhow and access to replacement parts to maintain Mil helicopters (and even then, those puppies have limited range and carrying capacity).
If those sorts of weapons are appearing, then the commander of the local carrier group should be handing out his sat phone number so ship captains can call in air support missions. Somalia is within range of our Gulf carrier group, and the Somalis know it.
Mike Lorrey wrote:
‘I’ve never heard of any pirate vessel with a tank strapped down on it, llamas is full of it, IMHO. Nor do they have the technical knowhow and access to replacement parts to maintain Mil helicopters (and even then, those puppies have limited range and carrying capacity).
If those sorts of weapons are appearing, then the commander of the local carrier group should be handing out his sat phone number so ship captains can call in air support missions. Somalia is within range of our Gulf carrier group, and the Somalis know it.’
Are you always this dense, or is it just today? It’s like you didn’t actually read anything that was posted.
Indeed, you have never heard of a T72 chained to the working deck. But the Somali pirates have access to MBTs (by piracy) and they have access to heavy ocean-going vessels (by piracy), which they have already used in piracy. It is but a short step to marry the two, and I was suggesting this as a possible next escalatory step.
You don’t think that “they have the technical knowhow and access to replacement parts to maintain Mil helicopters”?
Then you are either ignorant, or stupid. Which is it? You obviously don’t know that Africa already contains plenty of Soviet-era attack helicopters, which are in regular use. Here’s a list of African nations known to operate Mi24/25/35s:
Zimbabwe
Yemen
Uganda
Syria
Sudan
Senegal
Rwanda
Nigeria
Niger
Namibia
Mozambique
Mali
Libya
Ivory Coast
Guinea
Ethiopia
Eritrea
Djibouti
Chad
Burkina Faso
Angola
Algeria
Note that some of these nations are well-within the sphere of the current unrest in Ethiopia/Sudan/Somalia. In addition to that little lot, these helicopters have regularly appeared in various low-level African conflicts, supplied and operated by mercenaries from the former Soviet bloc – exactly as I suiggested.
Self-evidently, the capacity to operate and maintain heavy attack helicopters is as common as muck in Africa. The Somali pirates already do buy, hire or steal whatever they need to operate at their current level of armament – but you believe that there is some magickal line that they cannot cross?
Your comment about ‘the local carrier group’ is to laugh. As discussed above (had you but bothered to read and understand it) the Somalis are not scared of ‘the local carrier group’. They have thumbed their noses at such threats before and got away with it. They know that no US President will use that level of military force against them, and especially not the current president.
Tchah!
llater,
llamas
one radar tracking chain gun could shred almost any ship smaller than the massive transports. even a good sized transport stands no chance against it when fired at the water line