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A recurring complaint from the American political right is that academic historians are"liberal." I agree with the term, but not at all with the substance of it. Many of the liberal historians trained in American universities have an instinctive faith in state institutions. That faith leads them to adopt a triumphalist view of American history as a march of progress: Americans have done bad stuff, but the government usually gets in right in the end. Liberal historians are"liberal" in the sense that they aren't radical -- they basically buy the product, and they think it works just fine.
If you want to watch this worldview in action, you can't do any better than to read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, an ongoing advertisement for a whiggish narrative of American history. Marshall provides a wonderful example this week with his post on Ron Paul's suggestion that the United States fight pirates by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Marshall finds this suggestion almost too silly to contemplate:
Letters of marque and reprisal are used in"a classic stage of under-developed state power," Marshall writes,"in which we may not have the capacity to have a fully built out Navy but we can subcontract the harassment and capture of enemy shipping and commerce by setting up privateers to do the job for them."
There are a number of remarkable assumptions casually built into this statement: States develop through stages, like they're sequentially climbing stairs toward their perfect end state; there's a stage at which a navy is"fully built out," perfected and complete. (And then the admirals sprout stigmata and ascend to the right hand of the Lord.) Marshall later throws in the observation that Paul proposes to use private violence"rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce," appearing not to notice that the world's most powerful navy took five hours to get a single warship to the site of an actual recent pirate takeover -- in some of the most aggressively patrolled waters on the planet. Oceans: still big.
But as a statement from a historian -- and he has a PhD in American history from Brown University -- Marshall's post is just baffling. States rent violence. Routinely, persistently, unremarkably. You could notice that reality just by reading the newspaper. The United States military recently created the (now unravelling)"Anbar Awakening" with cash payments to Sunni paramilitaries, buying peace with paychecks -- while simultaneously renting violence from contractors like Blackwater and Triple Canopy to protect its facilities and personnel.
And nothing about the American leveraging of paramilitary and corporate violence is in any way historically remarkable or new. A nation initially settled by armed representatives of mercantilist corporations went on to routinely acquire violent power through proxies and auxiliaries who took their rewards in cash, guns, and land. With nearly a full century of lightly restrained filibuster armies behind us -- and Sunni gunfighters buying lunch in Ramadi with wads of U.S. dollars -- Marshall finds the idea of state-sanctioned private violence somehow antique, a relic from the days of powdered wigs.
There is no final moment of attainment at which states divorce themselves from the economic leveraging of private violence. The United States has used pirates and privateers to fight its battles, and will do so again.
You claim that my "...parsing of this is the equivalent of claiming that Iraqi insurgents can't possibly resist the United States because they can't afford M-1 Abrams."
Well, I don't maintain anything of the kind. What I do maintain, is that the sea is different from the land, and that this difference is ultimately founded on the nature of water, and that this difference ultimately finds political expression. Analogies between the sea and the land are usually false analogies. The same applies, I might add, for the air, and for outer space. Granted, there are "ambiguous zones" which are neither the one nor the other, eg. marshes, tidal zones, etc., but these are special cases, not encompassing very much area, and easily bypassed at need. If the Red Sea turns out to be such an area, it too can be bypassed, via the Cape of Good Hope.
The writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan are applicable to the sea, and not to the land. The reverse is true of the writings of Chairman Mao, to name one noted theoretician of Guerrilla Warfare. The significance of Iraq ultimately comes down to something like "Keep the empire within its bounds," not to a fundamentally different view of America's place in the world.
David Silbey -
4/24/2009
We are talking about ships, not boats
Actually, I think we're talking about private naval forces. I wasn't aware that they were required to have ships. Your parsing of this is the equivalent of claiming that Iraqi insurgents can't possibly resist the United States because they can't afford M-1 Abrams.
its remote-controlled water cannons,
Technological triumphalism has a mixed record, so I wouldn't be that confident.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/24/2009
We are talking about ships, not boats. There is a difference. An ordinary ship will be built of steel plates an inch thick. On land, that would be considered armor plate, and it would compare favorably to most fighting vehicles. A ship is built on the scale of an unusually solid building, not on the scale of an automobile. To a ship, an AK-47 is simply a mosquito bite. Pirates have sometimes fired light anti-tank weapons at ships, but these too have proved ineffectual. Something which would reliably punch holes in a ship would be something like a high-velocity anti tank gun, weighing a couple of tons, and with more than enough recoil to tip a small boat over. Even that would be marginal. The pirates have only been successful because they have been able to slip on board ships, and even then, their success has depended on the crews' total lack of resistance and the fact that the crews are studiously disarmed, having to obey the gun laws of the countries they visit.
Of course, the merchant navies are coming up with weapons which are technically not weapons, but which have enormous power behind them, because they can draw upon the engine power of a ship, thousands of horsepower. On paper, the super-giant-water-nozzle is for fighting fires-- it's a safety device. It just so happens that it can physically slam a pirate around to the point of breaking every bone in his body. The ships already have water mains for firefighting, as a rule, and the water cannon is simple enough that almost any machine shop can make one. Apart from aimed water cannon, a ship can have dozens of fixed water cannon or semifixed water cannon (like a garden sprinkler, only on a larger scale) which function like minefields. The merchant navies have come up with a way in which they are allowed to shoot first and ask questions afterwards, a way in which they are allowed to kill enough pirates to create a deterrent. The water cannon may begin to become available in large numbers in weeks.
Once a Flag-of-Convenience ship has its remote-controlled water cannons, the Chinese and Filipino sailors will discover that it is safe, easy, and _fun_ to kill Somali pirates. Under the circumstances, they will probably be quite pitiless about it, using the water cannons to hunt down half-drowning men swimming in the water, dumping buckets of kitchen offal over the rail to attract sharks to the survivors, etc. After having done so, they might well keep quiet about it. As the farmer's maxim goes, in respect of feral dogs, etc., "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up." If the Somalis have not gotten word of the arrival of the water cannons, and do not realize the extent of what is happening, they might walk into a wholesale massacre, with thousands of Somalis being killed in a few days.
David Silbey -
4/23/2009
Obviously, governments employ mercenaries as a measure of desperation, as an expedient, not as a first choice
Why is that obvious?
The sums required to fit out a privateer were not out of step with the incomes of the social class which would do so, people who were prosperous, but not overwhelmingly rich.
And the cost of a high speed powerboat, ten guys with AK-47s, a GPS unit, and enough food and fuel for them to get into the shipping lanes?
I think you tend to confuse mechanical labor-saving with computer-based cybernetic labor-saving.
I don't think I do, actually. The size of crews on all kinds of ships has gone down substantially since the 18th century, in terms of person per ton.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/23/2009
Obviously, governments employ mercenaries as a measure of desperation, as an expedient, not as a first choice. To my knowledge, Sir Thomas More, in Utopia, was the first political philosopher to talk about the inter-relation of war and crime, to raise the idea that mercenaries tended to become brigands. That applies to privateers as well, of course, and to the likelihood of their becoming outright pirates, preying on all nationalities. The question to ask is why, against their better judgment, did governments in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries promote privateering.
The figures I have seen, in the writings of Basil Lubbock and elsewhere, suggest that, circa 1850, a clipper ship of about a thousand tons would have sold for something like $80,000, or about four million dollars in modern money (the rule of thumb for conversion between modern money and the gold-backed money of the nineteenth century is 50:1). That is the price of a very large house, a structure roughly comparable in size and complexity to the ship. Alternatively, it is the level of capital commonly employed in small business, or the capitalized value of about four professorships. With three hundred men or so aboard, that clipper ship would have made a satisfactory large privateer according to the standards of the Napoleonic wars. The sums required to fit out a privateer were not out of step with the incomes of the social class which would do so, people who were prosperous, but not overwhelmingly rich. If an aspiring privateer captain could recruit three hundred young men to sail with him, say from a town of six thousand people, he could also get a hundred or so people to buy shares in the ship. In round numbers, a modern warship carrying that many men might be about a hundred times more expensive, relative to personal incomes. Obviously, this hundredfold shift is important.
To put it another way, the cost of a privateer ship was on the same order as a year's wages for the crew, and indeed, the crew might also have been the shipbuilders in a rural area such as Maine where multiple and alternative occupations were the norm. Maine was full of men who were fishermen some of the time, farmers some of the time, and lumberjacks some of the time. By contrast, a modern warship costs considerably more than the crew will earn in a lifetime.
I think you tend to confuse mechanical labor-saving with computer-based cybernetic labor-saving. They are two very different things. Mechanical labor-saving derives its economy from its size. To take an analogy, in 1800, virtually the entire population were farmers. Now, less than a percent of the labor force grows the food for everyone else. There have been various changes which have ensued from this fact, including successive agricultural bankruptcy crises. Over the same time span, various kinds of industry were experiencing the same kind of detachment from hand labor which the Navy was experiencing. Many of them responded by becoming public corporations with professional management, rather than personal proprietorships. When metal mines got big enough, as a function of the geology, the independent prospector with his burro was superseded by the mining corporation with its large ore refineries, eventually using such methods as the cyanide process.
David Silbey -
4/22/2009
The point remains that warships of the 18th century were the highly expensive machines, as are today's, yet in the 18th century, private navies were quite common, something that does not seem to be true today. In fact, given the labor saving abilities of machines, it should be _easier_ to build private navies today than in the past.
(You can probably assume that we don't need a 1000 word summary of naval warfare in _each_ of your comments)
Andrew D. Todd -
4/22/2009
In the eighteenth century, ships ran on human muscle, lots of it, of all different qualities. The slave galley was obsolete as a decisive instrument of battles, but it still had its moments, because it could move without reference to the wind.
Now, a big British battleship of the time would have been a "Ship of the Line," a "74" [gun ship], or a "third rate," which would have had a crew of about six hundred men, and a displacement of about fifteen hundred tons. The lower class of the ship were the so-called "landsmen" or "waisters." They had no sailor skills-- in fact, they had typically come from onshore jails, where the mortality rate was approximately that of a twentieth century concentration camp, and they had been allowed to volunteer for the Navy as their last chance of life, and more or less to save the government the trouble of hanging them, typically for offenses like theft. They constituted the majority of the ship's crew, and served as human winches. All the old sea chanties were originally cadences for hauling on ropes, or turning capstans. "Yo, ho, and up she rises..." is for hauling up the anchor from the sea bottom. The petty officers literally drove the waisters to their work, swinging whips, just like the overseers on the slave galley. The working-class elite of the ships crew were the "topmen," the able sailors. Of course the topmen could do things like splicing ropes, and they knew how to row a boat efficiently, keeping in stroke, but those were minor skills. Their main ability was to climb up the mast, a hundred feet or more above the deck, and take in or let out the sail. Particularly in a storm, this could be a task on the order of mountain climbing. The Navy obtained a sufficiency of topmen by the Press-gang, a legal form of shanghai-ing merchant sailors, either from the ports, or from ships at sea. Finally, there were a handful of ship's tradesmen, the ship's middle-class, for example, the carpenter, the cooper, the surgeon, the purser, the sailing master, and the sailmaker, and their mates, and the petty officers; and lastly, the officers.
The heaviest cannon in the ship, the 24-pounders in the lower gun deck, had crews of a dozen men each, most of whom did nothing except pull on the ropes to wheel the gun back and forth. The gun might weigh anywhere from one ton to two tons, and was mounted on a four-wheeled carriage. The Navy was experimenting with Caronades, guns mounted on lubricated sliding tracks, which could be handled by a crew perhaps a fifth of the size required for a conventional gun. A small craft like a Barbary Pirate ship would not have had such an elaborate division of labor as a ship of the line-- everyone pulled whatever ropes needed pulling.
It is this sort of unthinking labor-intensiveness that differentiates the world of the eighteenth century from the machine age. One of the unspoken assumptions of the machine age is that to do a bigger job, you just need a bigger machine, you don't need radically more men to operate it. The main difference is that certain peripheral tasks, which have previously been hand-labor get big enough that they require machines to do them. For example, when a steamship reached a certain size, it was found to require power steering (a "steering engine"), as the rudder forces went beyond a man's strength. In the late nineteenth century, some of the surviving sailing ships nonetheless adopted steam-powered motor-winches, especially for tasks such as raising the anchor. Five horsepower might be the equivalent of fifty men or so.
Of course, in the eighteenth century, ships normally exchanged cannon fire at a hundred yards or less, and naval combats often ended in boarding, and in a massive armed brawl, because, even at point-blank range, the guns were not powerful enough to wreck a ship instantly. That began to change in the 1820's, with the exploding-shell gun, though, of course, during the long peace of the nineteenth century, the changes were not consistently visible. By contrast, if you look at naval artillery duels from the Second World War, you find that they typically started at about twenty thousand yards, and by the time the range got down to ten thousand yards, one party or the other had sustained unacceptable losses, ie losing ships, and had turned and fled. At ten thousand yards or less, naval gunnery would be getting essentially 100% hits on a target the size of a ship, rather than merely one round for every couple of salvos. Ships commonly blew up, as the effects of exploding shells spread to their fuel supply and/or ammunition magazines and/or cargo. Long before anyone got close enough to board, one ship or the other would be literally destroyed.
When steamships came into use, the ship's ghetto was the stokehold, deep inside the hull, where the stokers-- otherwise known as "the black gang"-- shoveled coal into the engine's furnace, doing heavy work in a minimally ventilated space with a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees or so. In 1940, the older ships built before 1920 still used coal-- but the newest ones had gone over to oil fuel. The stokers were notoriously the most savage of sailors. After 1940, with the disappearance of the stoker, ships had crews consisting entirely of tradesmen and officers.
Les Baitzer -
4/22/2009
Chris:
I got the point, thanks. In fact, I first heard it made nearly 40 years ago.
Will you have some time this summer that we could go over to Somalia and "rent some violence?" Local actors; Somalian problem, Somalian solution. I hear their unemployment rate there is higher than California's.
It could be a hell of business ... we could call it, "Piratehawk" ...
Chris Bray -
4/22/2009
Doing a bunch of scattered business in one place:
1.) There's no reason why an effort to reduce piracy must only be "naval warfare." Pirates go home. They can be killed or captured on land, on the docks, in their neighborhoods. Local actors are far more likely to do this effectively. American troops in Somalia would instantly run into a problem of legibility and sorting -- the pirates are probably not hanging out in a building with a "Pirate Headquarter" sign on the front of it. American military force, operating in a place where Americans would have difficulty figuring out who's who (because they'd be outsiders, not because they would be Americans) would lead to a heavy reliance on air support, and lots of large-scale killing that can be and should be avoided. Somalian problem, Somalian solution.
2.) If a necessary and appropriate task can be performed in an effective way by expensive and sophisticated means, but can also be performed in an effective way by relatively inexpensive and simple means, then I don't get the argument for doing it the hard way. A billion-dollar warship can kill teenaged pirates, but it doesn't follow that you must use a billion-dollar warship against teenaged pirates. Note that nothing I'm saying here is meant to imply that I (heart) pirates, hooray.
Chris Bray -
4/22/2009
Les,
You have a remarkable gift for missing the point.
Les Baitzer -
4/22/2009
Mr. Bray writes: "We just watched a billion-dollar warship carry some of the world's most highly trained commandos into proximity with a lifeboat, where they shot three lightly armed and untrained teenagers."
The interesting thing about a "lightly armed (Kalashnikov; RPG) and untrained teenager" is that when they shoot you in the brains, you will die, just like when you're shot in the brains by a 30 year-old fully trained commando. This applies to being shot by women or gays as well.
I never thought it was prudent to either "ask", "tell" or quibble about such things as "age" and "training." Armed people pointing guns at unarmed civilian Americans on the high seas deserve to be shot by American military commandos whenever possible.
I read today in the news that we have an ammo shortage in the US currently. Reports of the Maresk Alabama incident indicate the SEALS used three shots to make three kills.
As a taxpayer, I appreciate that type of efficiency, particularly in these perilous times.
David Silbey -
4/21/2009
When you have a job which is, by its nature, equipment-dominant, the best way to make money is usually to sell the government the equipment
And yet in the 18th century, naval warfare, which was still entirely equipment-dominant, witnessed _lots_ of privateers, letters of marque, etc.
practical mechanized method of patrolling villages.
The RAF in the 1920s took a pretty fair shot at it.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/21/2009
When you have a job which is, by its nature, equipment-dominant, the best way to make money is usually to sell the government the equipment. There are firms like Thorneycrofts in England, who are famous makers of torpedo/patrol boats for export. A boat like that can generally go at forty or fifty knots, planing along on top of the water, water-ski-fashion, and it can therefore patrol a lot of space fast. It has a nice sort of radar and infrared detection system, located on a mast maybe twenty or thirty feet above the waterline, which can see better than any human eye, especially at night. Since you cannot walk on the water, jobs at sea tend to be inherently equipment-dominant.
You can buy a decent pair of binoculars at Walgreen's for ten dollars. I'm not saying they are as good as the kind issued to American soldiers; they aren't, of course; but they work. On land, moving by "ankle express," you can take those binoculars up to the top of a hundred-foot hill, and you can see for miles. Unless you have the angelic gift of levitation, you cannot do the same thing at sea. On the contrary, sitting in the kind of boat, with an outboard motor, which you can get at Sears for a thousand dollars or so, most of the time you will actually be below the level of the wavetops, and that will impede your field of view considerably.
On the other hand, no one has yet found a practical mechanized method of patrolling villages.
Thorneycrofts also made an abortive excursion into cargo ships with the "FastShip" design, which no one was willing to actually build. It was a nice idea, but it did not make allowance for the hyper-abundance of cheap labor. The global merchant-marine is effectively immune to immigration controls, and tends to gravitate down to Chinese standards. In short, the FastShip was the kind of thing which defense contractors tend to come up with for civilian uses.
The legitimate merchant-marine of a developed country tends to shade off into that country's navy. If you want to become a sailor on an American-Flag ship like the Maersk Alabama, you join the Navy, and go into one of the "sailor ratings" (Boatswains Mate, Quartermaster's Mate, Machinists' Mate, [Diesel] Engineman, Boiler Technician, etc.), and when you get out of the Navy, after, say, eight years, you hire on with a firm moving government cargo. Of course, such a ship is not competitive in the commercial market, and the only stuff it moves is government cargo (such as food-aid).
This reminds me of an anecdote: A few years ago, on a Philadelphia street corner, I saw a couple of French sailors in their dress uniforms, complete with pom-pom hats. Later that day, I asked a friend who was the executive officer of the Philadelphia Naval Reserve Depot about the sailors. "Oh, yeah," replied George. "The Jeanne D'Arc is in port." He added, ruminatively, that the pom-pom hats would of course all be given to girls before the ship put out to sea again. I am sure that the ship's armory must have contained large numbers of tommy guns, apart from everything else, but of course it was a complete non-issue. The Philadelphia police understood, without anything ever being said, that the guns were safely locked up. That's the way it is, between friends. One could not envision the third-world sailors off a flag-of-convenience ship getting that kind of welcome. Rather, it is a case of "merchant sailors and dogs keep off the grass." In any case, the ship captain is likely to have impounded their passports, so they can't even go ashore. Effectively, they are slave-mariners.
Is it any particular wonder that when the Somali pirates come aboard a Flag-of-convenience ship, the slave-mariners won't fight?
The pirates tried to take an Israeli ship, but were met by the kind of predictably furious counter-attack which one expects from Israelis. If the Maersk Alabama had done a bit more in terms of rigging barbed wire, etc., it would probably not have been taken either.
David Silbey -
4/21/2009
Mr. Todd--
All the examples you mention are, nonetheless, patrolled in one form or another, but not, as far as I know, by private companies hired by governments. This contrasts with land warfare, where private companies (per Mr. Bray's original point) do do a fair amount of security. I'm trying to parse the difference.
As to the littoral stuff, this seems like a perfect opportunity to hire private companies, but the USN prefers to use destroyers for missions they are manifestly overkill for, or simply to neglect the jobs.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/21/2009
Well, the most extensive inshore operations I can think of in recent memory were those along the Mekong River and its delta, during Vietnam, and these were still tiny compared to the scale of the adjoining land warfare. Part of the issue is that inshore operations tend to be self-limiting. The only lake in the third world which figures in international commerce is Gatun Lake in Panama. The great rivers of the world are the Amazon, the Parana, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, the Ganges and Indus, the Yangtze and Huang Ho in China. In every case, they go into the heart of their respective countries, and it is difficult to imagine a scenario for patrolling them which does not involve grossly exaggerated imperialism. Lakes? Titicaca in South American, Nicaragua in Central America, the East African Rift Lakes, of course, Lake Chad, Lake Baikal and Balkhash and the Caspian and Aral Seas. All more or less irrelevant to international commerce. Ignore all the large bays and gulfs where the direct route past the bay or gulf runs a thousand miles from land. If you draw a route on a map, representing the shortest distance between two points by sea, that route tends to take you through the middles of oceans, not along their edges. There are only a handful of exceptions: Panama, the environs of Singapore, and Suez. The approaches to Panama are mostly peaceful, with the chronic exception of Haiti. Singapore is the center of a regional commercial empire, and is capable of managing its affairs without outside interference. That leaves Suez, and the Red Sea. The Navy has enough SEALS for the kinds of inshore jobs which fall within its business. It doesn't need to recruit auxiliaries.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/21/2009
A destroyer is neither necessary or appropriate for inshore operations. American destroyers have a draft of about thirty feet, largely due to their sonar bulbs. A major design requirement is hunting nuclear-powered submarines in the open ocean. Since the submarine necessarily requires considerably deeper water in order to submerge, the destroyer's draft is not an issue, and it makes for more efficient Sonar reception. However, particularly in areas like the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, which have a lot of shoal water, a destroyer's design makes it unsuitable. Sometimes it may be impossible for the destroyer to get closer than ten or twenty miles from shore, especially if there are coral formations. What you want in that case is a gunboat of about a hundred tons, something like a Russian Stenka, with a draft of five or six feet, and about the same order of armament as a tank, but also with sufficient speed and range to allow it to operate autonomously, rather than merely being a ship's boat.
David Silbey -
4/20/2009
And there are lots of situations where the naval equivalent of light infantry would work perfectly well: shore patrol craft, riverine warfare, combat/patrol on lakes. Yet governments still don't really turn to private contractors for those sorts of things, at least as far as I know.
Chris Bray -
4/20/2009
We just watched a billion-dollar warship carry some of the world's most highly trained commandos into proximity with a lifeboat, where they shot three lightly armed and untrained teenagers. Somalian pirates look to me like the equivalent of a light infantry problem at sea. A billion dollars worth of sophisticated technology; some dudes in a little boat.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/20/2009
In round numbers, a modern destroyer, with a crew of three hundred, costs about a billion dollars, or about three million dollars per crew member. Using another scale of comparison, that destroyer might have a tonnage of 7000-8000 tons, or about twenty-five tons a man.
Let's consider tanks. A tank costs a couple of million dollars. An Armored battalion has about fifty tanks and about five hundred men-- not just the crews, but also certain necessary mechanics, etc. That works out to a couple of hundred thousand dollars a man. Including the auxiliary vehicles, the equipment might weigh the better part of ten tons per man. You don't see Rent-a-Panzers either.
By contrast, irregular infantry might have five hundred or a thousand dollars worth of equipment per man, at most-- a tommy gun or assault rifle, several hundred rounds of ammunition for it, web gear, and maybe a steel helmet. The gun weighs less than ten pounds-- the ammunition might weigh fifty, depending on type and quantity. Rental violence on land persists in the form of irregular infantry, not armor, nor air power, nor helicopters, nor heavy artillery.
The real point is that naval equipment is what one might call "incipiently unmanned," and governments prefer to own that kind of thing outright. They don't have to mess with mercenaries, because they have "trusty and well-beloved" servants to take charge of the equipment.
David Silbey -
4/20/2009
The Military Sealift Command is part of the U.S. Navy, is commanded by a rear admiral, and is largely staffed by civilian contractors
That seems like a reasonable example. There's an interesting difference, in that companies like Blackwater (sorry, Xe) were not cloaked in a military guise like being commanded by a military officer and called "military..."
Of course, it is routine for governments to lightly arm private merchant ships for self-defense in wartime, often sending aboard a detachment of soldiers or sailors to man the guns.
That's not the privatization of war, though, as you're using actually soldiers and sailors to man the guns (ala WWII).
My thought in all of this is that there is something different between warfare on land and at sea. Renting violence on land has remained relatively commonplace, whatever the public perception. Renting violence at sea seems to have largely disappeared, at least for the larger states, and I'm wondering why?
Andrew D. Todd -
4/20/2009
Of course, it is routine for governments to lightly arm private merchant ships for self-defense in wartime, often sending aboard a detachment of soldiers or sailors to man the guns. Merchant sailors are very often enrolled in the Naval Reserve. Graduates of King's Point, the American Merchant Marine Academy, hold reserve commissions.
A peacetime military runs more officers through staff college than it needs colonels or captains, generals or admirals. A supply of potential commanders is not generally a limiting factor, unless the officers are resigning in protest on a wholesale basis. Even then, one can usually get them back in an emergency, by appealing to their better nature. Apart from ships, which take a long time to build, the most probable shortage a navy might encounter is going to be that of "ratings," or petty officers, that is, enlisted men of ten years or so of service who are skilled journeyman sailors. The manpower expedients usually have to do with finding ways to keep in touch with someone who has gotten too old to enjoy living like a teenager.
Over the last two hundred years, ships have been getting steadily bigger, and faster, and more labor-efficient. Comparatively high labor requirements have been a characteristic of obsolete ships, say fifty years old, run by cost-cutting, disreputable operators. The average merchant ship sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic, the main commerce-interception theater, in the first eight months of the Second World War was of 3400 tons, and had probably been built circa 1920 or before. There had been, first, a glut of production during the First World War, and then a long hiatus of construction due to the Depression. The German surface raiders, operating in the longer reaches of the South Atlantic, tended to encounter somewhat bigger ships, adapted for the long haul to India or Australia. The average size of the Atlantis's captures was 6600 tons. The United States was building Liberty ships of 7000 gross tons (*) to replace the merchant-marine losses. What it worked out to was that when two pre-war cargo ships were sunk, the survivors of the crews (50-60%) could go back to sea in one big new Liberty ship with at least as much carrying ability as the ships which had been sunk.
(*) There are four different measures of ship tonnage, and not everyone uses the same system, making for some confusion. Depending on whose system you use, a Liberty Ship's tonnage can be as high as 10,000 tons.
The point of stress and strain was in finding ways to build new ships at unprecedented rates. The identifiable business influence was that of Henry J. Kaiser, and his Six Companies, and it operated on land, not at sea.
Depends on where you draw the boundaries around "naval warfare." The Military Sealift Command is part of the U.S. Navy, is commanded by a rear admiral, and is largely staffed by civilian contractors. It's a military frame filled in by private labor. Maybe someone can think of a better example....
David Silbey -
4/19/2009
Actually, the reverse is true. The standard procedure for converting merchant ships into warships, adopted in the world wars by both England and Germany, was as follows
But that doesn't seem to be what Chris Bray is aiming at, which is the hiring of private companies to wage war. Purchasing ships is, at least, giving a fig leaf to the situation.
As to the example given, that seems like a reasonable one, though it reinforces rather than undercuts Marshall's argument. Do we have any recent examples of private companies being hired for naval warfare?
Chris Bray -
4/19/2009
Also, I think this distinction can be overdrawn; pirates can step ashore, and the distinction between forces that deliver violence at land and sea can be blurred. The pirates who fought for Andrew Jackson at New Orleans seem like the easiest example. Somalian pirates are motivated by a desire to get cash, and their fellow pirates have lots of cash at home. U.S. military forces would have extraordinary difficulty on shore as they tried to sort pirates from everybody else. Somalians would be less likely to have that difficulty.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/19/2009
Actually, the reverse is true. The standard procedure for converting merchant ships into warships, adopted in the world wars by both England and Germany, was as follows: 1) the government purchases the ship under eminent domain, paying for it with a war bond or whatever; 2) the officers and men are enrolled into the navy, most stay with the ship, but the older and more infirm ones get posted to shore duty; 3) the ship is fitted with suitable armament; and 4) some officer of worth and merit is appointed admiral, or commodore, or flotilla-captain, in charge of a group of such ships. The navy manages the process, in short. It doesn't just let people sail away by themselves. This procedure was most commonly used to convert fishing vessels into minelayers or submarine-chasers. It was also used, to convert a German freighter named the Goldenfels into the cruiser Atlantis.
David Silbey -
4/19/2009
The examples you cite are land warfare, rather than sea. I tried to think of some sea examples of hired violence in recent years, but couldn't. Is there something different going on between military and naval arenas or am I just not thinking of the relevant examples?
Chris Bray -
4/19/2009
I appreciate everyone's comments...
"There are no profits in capturing motorboats armed with AKs," but Somali pirates have made tens of millions of dollars in the last few years, in the poorest country on earth. It's at least possible that wealth of that kind would make them targets for sponsored/supported anti-pirate pirates. Or maybe not, but they do have more stuff to take than just motorboats.
I meant to use "liberal" not precisely in the contemporary political sense -- Josh Marshall supports particular political policies that Democrats support and Republicans oppose -- but rather in a more general sense that he believes the American government is a moral actor that moves toward greater moral accomplishment over time. I usually find it pretty hard to believe that states are moral actors at all, in the same sense that I don't believe a rock can cry -- I just don't think that particular object works that particular way. And I wouldn't argue at all with the statement that most Republicans also hold a whiggish view of American history.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/18/2009
If you can locate copies, look at Jim Morris and Kevin Moran, Lost At Sea (cited below). It is an immensely unflattering portrait of the international shipping industry as it has evolved under competitive forces, straight out of B. Traven's classic novel _The Death Ship_. The kinds of ships which the Somalis are pirating are almost all "Flag of Convenience" vessels, characterized by all the baggage of a third-world industrial zone, safety hazards, environmental hazards, poor pay and labor exploitation, etc., etc., etc. We are talking about a bunch of "Cheap John" shipowners, loyal to no nation, who want the United States Navy to bail them out of the consequences of their avarice, and who can always find venal pundits to talk nonsense about Rampant Islamicism.
Some years ago, there was a proposal to restart the Philadelphia Navy Yard to produce "FastShips," essentially 20,000 ton torpedo boats with planing hulls for carrying cargo, rail-ferry-fashion, at fifty knots or more. Such a ship, of course, would be able to pay developed-country-wages, and would be able to handily outrun pirates. The proposal never came to anything.
=========================================
Lost At Sea Series:
Back in 1996, there was a series of articles published in the _Houston Chronicle_, "Lost At Sea," by Jim Morris and Kevin Moran, with Armando Villafranca. It is in effect, a book in installment form. viz:
10:19 PM 8/15/1996
Lost at sea: Uneven regulation and a ready supply of cheap labor have added a hard reality to the romance of going to sea
11:45 PM 8/19/1996
Danger Aboard: When seafarers are injured on the job, they face medical and legal complications
3:24 PM 12/13/1996
New rules pushing towboat industry: Aftershocks still being felt in wake of deadly 1993 accident
8:32 PM 8/21/1996
Panama Canal pilots worry as U.S. control nears an end
6:29 PM 8/18/1996
Port chaplains tend the human side of shipping: · Maritime ministries form a worldwide network of care for sailors, with churches in every major port -- and clout with the industry
5:19 PM 9/27/1996
Cruise workers must endure long hours for others' leisure
4:47 PM 9/28/1996
As cruise industry grows, so do concerns about passenger safety
7:12 PM 11/22/1996
Dangers Afloat: Safety rules will be tightened for passenger vessels
5:52 PM 9/30/1996
Ship Shape: U.N. agency takes on the complex task of regulating the far-flung shipping industry
10:21 PM 8/15/1996
`He felt only pressure': Despite misgivings, captain took job aboard doomed freighter
8:42 PM 9/29/1996
Incident illustrates potential for disaster in shipping industry
4:45 PM 12/20/1996
Offshore Risks: Safety concerns rise with return of oil, gas boom
6:16 PM 8/20/1996
U.S. merchant fleet rapidly fading away
6:35 PM 8/21/1996
`Flags of convenience' give owners a paper refuge: Banners don't always represent a nation -- and they can mean a way around shipping regulations
10:05 PM 8/15/1996
Pressure to set sail: Coast Guard bears burden of safety against a tide of owners and crews pushing to keep the cargo moving
9:30 PM 9/18/1996
Legislation pushed to curb foreigners' use of U.S. courts
9:18 PM 10/2/1996
Foreign seafarers retain access to courts in U.S.
9:02 PM 9/13/1996
Vessel is docked until it's shipshape
9:47 PM 12/30/1996
Greek craft seized while in Galveston
6:21 PM 8/18/1996
Stranded: From backwaters to major ports, seafarers are abandoned with no pay and only promises from owners
9:04 PM 12/19/1996
Stuck on a ship to nowhere: Crew stranded in Houston as tanker seized over debt
8:43 PM 9/29/1996
`We're kind of overloaded with what we're doing': · Increased ship traffic in Houston and other U.S. ports puts a strain on `ancient' control system
(articles downloaded in 1999)
Alan Baumler -
4/18/2009
Despite the fact that you know a lot more about this topic than I do, it seems to me that Marshall's post is one of the -more- historically informed on this topic. He certainly has a clearer picture than Ron Paul.
As Marshall points out, the main reason that letters of marque will not work is not that it would violate some iron law of historical development. It is that the idea behind a letter of marque was that someone would want to take one out because they could haul enemy ships to a prize court and keep the profits. There are no profits in capturing motorboats armed with AKs.
As for his 'liberal' assumptions, I have two problems there. One you seem to be reading a lot into him. He says that privateering is
" a classic stage of under-developed state power, in which we may not have the capacity to have a fully built out Navy but we can subcontract the harassment and capture of enemy shipping and commerce by setting up privateers to do the job for them"
This seems to me to be a fairly accurate statement. Western states -did- habitually use privateers for a long time. Now they -don't-. You assume from this that he is some sort of very vulgar Marxist while also being an anti-libertarian state-worshiper. I just don't see that in his post.
I'm also not sure why you would call the view you impute to him 'liberal' in the culture wars frame you set up at the beginning. I would guess that both American Republicans and Democrats have a fairly whiggish view of American history. Republicans more so, if anything.
Ron Paul and the Libertarians would of course not agree, seeing American history as an endless series of disasters, I suppose, but I don't think it helps to define everyone outside the LP as a liberal.
