Re: U.S. rules of engagement prevent the Americans using their vastly superior fighting power to engage the pirates if there is any danger to civilians.

On Apr 11, 7:07 pm, "La N" <nilita2004NOS...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"vaughn" <vaughnsimonHATESS...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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"Jack Linthicum" <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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The French showed yesterday what happens when you go into a fairly
placid situation and start shooting.

  Yep, what happen is that the pirates lose every time.  It's just that we
won't always come out of every battle as a clear winner.

 If the world refused to give in and pay ransom, then there could be no
profit in piracy.  If they have no chance of profit, the dirtbags will go
away.  Perhaps they would find some new scam somewhere else, but there
would be no piracy.  (Yes, I realize that the price would be the
occasional dead hostage and I would probably have a different opinion if
the hostage were myself or anyone in my family.)

These Somalians make the Nigerians and their money-making scams seem so
likeable.

- nilita

Little op-ed from the New York Times gives everyone a reality check.
The pirates have nothing to lose, you can't scare them because there
are ten more waiting to get the job of the guy you kill. They chew the
local version of narcotic, qat, that contains the alkaloid called
cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant which is said to cause
excitement, loss of appetite and euphoria.

The civilized world means nothing to them, there are ten million
Somalis so something like 2 million potential recruits. All the
devastation you could work on this country would only come under
"local improvement". Someone has to decide to do one of two things:
get these people an economy thta doesn't require piracy or make the
commission of piracy more dangerous than anyone can handle. We already
know we can't do the latter and the fishing boats from everywhere take
away the former.

April 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Stockbridge, Mass.

PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a
failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so
piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand
Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like
insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts
among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client
states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the
third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has
erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or
their equivalents.

Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in
an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a
local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized
crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the
Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in
Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a
culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist
of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along
drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling
hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and
the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.

The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger
crafts, often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or
Taiwanese, taking the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship
to take a larger vessel, and then another, working up the food chain.
Eventually, they let the smaller boats and crews go free. In this way,
over the years, Somali pirates have graduated to attacking oil tankers
and container ships; the bigger the vessel, the higher the ransoms,
which the pirate confederations can then invest in more sophisticated
equipment.

As Braudel suggested, there is nothing new here. Piracy has been
endemic to the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of
Malacca, and particularly so after the Western intrusion into these
waters, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate
groups, sometimes known as “sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number
and audacity as trade increased, so that piracy itself has often been
a sign of prosperity. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who was the
victim of pirates off western India in the 14th century, informed us
that commercial ships in the Indian Ocean of his day traveled in armed
convoys as a defense. Slightly earlier, Marco Polo described many
dozens of pirate vessels off Gujarat, India, where the pirates would
spend the whole summer at sea with their women and children, even as
they plundered merchant vessels.

The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a
platform for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be
hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise
ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown
overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest
episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line
container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they
have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats.

So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the
Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to
destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates
in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American
resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us
asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only
dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling
more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-
fighting Navy.

In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis
reveals, it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for
patrolling the major sea lines, thus guarding the global commons. It
packs enough precision weaponry on its warships to project power on
land against adversaries like North Korea and Iran. But it still does
not have enough of a sea-based, counterinsurgency component to deal
with adversaries like Somali pirates and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features speedboats loaded with
explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s coastline, which could
ram ships on suicide missions.)

The Navy has plans to build 55 new Littoral Combat Ships to deal with
this deficiency. Yes, these fast, maneuverable ships have low drafts
and are thus suited for many different kinds of unorthodox missions
close to shore. But the oceans are vast, and ships cannot be in two
places at once. Without sufficient numbers of them, it’s hard to
believe that they will make much of a difference. Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, in his recent budget statement, indicated that only a
few of these ships will be built at first, even as he endorsed the
whole program.

In recent years the American public has been humbled by the limits of
our military power in dirty land wars. But navies have historically
been a military indicator of great power. That a relatively small
number of pirates from a semi-starving nation can constitute enough of
a menace to disrupt major sea routes is another sign of the anarchy
that will be characteristic of a multipolar world, in which a great
navy like America’s — with a falling number of overall ships — will be
in relative, elegant decline, while others will either lack the
stomach or the capacity to adequately guard the seas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12kaplan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
.

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