The Vast Majesty of Naval Warfare and Stuff

by Cliopatria

When I read earlier this week that Somalian pirates had failed in an attempt to board and take over an Italian cruise ship, I assumed that the unnamed"private Israeli security forces" on board were some heavy duty mercenary dudes, armed to the teeth. They apparently weren't. Later news reports say that those still-unidentified Israelis fought off their pirate attackers...with pistols. At sea. Pop, pop.

The reports further suggest that no one was shot, but rather that the private security personnel merely fired in the general direction of the pirates, or maybe in the air. They made some loud noises, and the pirates went away.

Clearly, only powerful nation-states can summon the armed power to play in this game, and anyone suggesting private solutions is craaaaazy.

Josh Marshall, April 15:

"Actually, Paul manages to say something even stupider -- which is that rather than having a powerful Navy, which keeps the oceans safe and provides a vast support to global commerce, we should leave it to the individual companies and ship owners to keep their shipping safe."

It's so stupid that it, you know, works.

Somalian pirates are a chickenshit problem that can be easily solved. They don't represent a problem that requires"naval warfare." They don't call for a"powerful Navy" that can provide a"vast support." They want money, and they want to live to spend it; they go away if you make some light gunfire noise in their general direction.

People who suggested that the shipping industry take responsibility for the safety of their ships were right. People who called the idea stupid were wrong.

See also this old favorite.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Andrew D. Todd - 4/30/2009

What a Somali pirate might be able to do, at no cost to himself, is to give every sailor his passport and other papers back, thus making the sailor a "free agent." Then too, there are known cases of riots for the purpose of destroying legal evidence of debt, certain communal riots in East Bengal during the 1930's, with Muslim peasants acting against Hindu zamindars (tax farmers or landlords, the distinction being obscure in India).

I think that all the more expensive ships, such as the cruise ships, the American-flag ships, and the container ships which haul containers for the big stores such as Wal-Mart, IKEA, etc., will be getting water cannon, simply to keep the insurers happy. The cannon don't cost very much to install, and, being overtly installed, they can be wired into a central control system, destroyer-fashion. This means that one man-- the captain-- can shoot the entire battery, directing a quasi-robotic system, and at need, he can do it from the engine room as well. Ships fitted with water cannon will find it advantageous to overtly display them, shooting jets of water high up in the air, to be visible at a distance of a mile or more. Once it becomes generally known that the system is robotic, and frankly inhuman, it is no imputation on a pirate's courage if he chooses not to attack a ship thus equipped.

I don't know if this is relevant, but there are certain tourist railroads in the American West, the kind which operate steam locomotives, which employ actors to play at being train robbers.

Another point: the United States Navy would naturally prefer that all ocean commerce was carried in ships expensive enough to support American sailors, that is, big, fast ships with highly automated/mechanized loading systems, which can turn around in a day or so at either end of the voyage, and which are fitted with suitably luxurious crew quarters. This kind of ship tends to run rather at odds with convoys, but it is also the kind of ship which would be politically easier to arm, since it travels over a definite route between two countries. The concept of "innocent passage" would be replaced by specific reciprocal agreements, of the type traditionally applied to airlines.

Chris Bray - 4/30/2009

With apologies for a slow response, this is an interesting take, and one that I'll remember as events unfold. The reporting needs to be about 10,000 times better -- it leaves more questions than it answers. (Do they still give the reporters telephones?)

Andrew D. Todd - 4/29/2009

I ran across a photograph recently, which showed a white Persian cat chasing a deer through a suburban street. It was almost ridiculous in the cat's insistence that it was really a panther, and the deer's acceptance of a prima-facie absurd claim. One kick from a cloven hoof, and you have a very dead cat. But that didn't happen.

http://www.guzer.com/pictures/cat_chases_deer.php

I think we may be dealing with something approximately similar. It is probably a mistake to understand this as a straight military encounter. Perhaps it should be understood as a form of theater. I have not been able to find a complete circumstantial account of the attack. However, a composite report runs as follows:

The pirates approached the MV MSC Melody in a rubber boat of the Zodiac type, fired Kalashnikovs at it for about four minutes, and then attempted to board, using a rope ladder and grapnel, on the port bow, presumably the foredeck. Passengers immediately reacted by throwing deck chairs down on the pirates, and the Israeli security team came up with fire hoses and pistols issued by the captain. They fired just enough not to convince the pirates not to board, and then stopped. The pirates pursued the ship for another fifteen minutes before departing.

Parenthetically, the ship is owned by the firm which owned the old Achille Lauro. That probably explains the Israeli connection.

One man behind a parapet is worth ten men in the open. When the parapet is substantially elevated, say the wing of a ship's bridge, and the men in the open are confined to a small boat, with no room to take cover, the ratio rises to a hundred to one. American Navy SEALs would have responded to the first automatic weapons fire with a single fusillade of their own which would surely have killed all the pirates, and sunk their boat, within a minute or so. One burst from a single assault rifle would have done it. For that matter, even a deer rife or a twelve-gauge shotgun, firing down into a small boat from, say, fifty feet above the water, at a range of maybe a hundred feet, must have been murderous in effect. Both weapons are conventionally considered as less restricted than a pistol, not more. It would be one thing if the Somalis were boarding ships in human-wave attacks of hundreds-- but they aren't. In almost every case, the boarding party is substantially smaller than the ship crew.

The Israeli security team seems to have done the absolute least required to prevent the pirates from boarding, and they seem to have deliberately refrained from capturing prisoners, or even compelling the pirates to throw their weapons overboard. In short, they were apparently concerned with not making the Somalis lose face. What emerges is that the Italians were forced to reveal a small part of their arsenal when the pirates actually started climbing aboard. Presumably they had a machine gun as well, but they did not have to admit it (plausible deniability). Cruise ships are the upper class of the sea, second only to naval sailors, and they probably have some privileges which other people don't have. For one thing, they don't need to visit any particular port, and that gives them leverage against port authorities who might ask awkward questions about a locker in the captain's cabin.

In the captures of third-world freighters, one has to suspect that there is an element of the pirates buying the ship from its crew, at the expense of the owner, particularly if half the crew is in a state of debt-slavery and therefore doesn't have anything worth stealing. All the pirates have to do, in that case, is to put on enough of a Sherwood Forest act to keep the ship crew out of trouble at home, enough to make the owner look like a heel if he tries to prosecute them for mutiny. Read Eric Hobsbawm's _Bandits_ and _Primitive Rebels_ for a discussion of the "Social Bandit." A fairly typical episode involved a Calabrian bandit cleaning out the cashbox of an estate he raided, and then handing out all the grain to the peasants. It may be that it is socially obligatory for a Somali pirate to give the ship crew a generous tip when they are eventually released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Melody
http://www.lloydslist.com/ll/news/msc-melody-uses-firepower-to-repel-east-africa-piracy-attack/20017643749.htm
http://www.cruise-addicts.com/news/msc_cruises/169255-MSC-Melody-captain-tells-battle-with-pirates.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1173805/Cruise-ship-opens-pirates-Somalis-attack-luxury-liner-AK47s.html
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/2369378/Nelson-woman-in-pirate-terror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Cruises
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Achille_Lauro