The Force Structure Excuses Grow Old - UPDATED AND CORRECTED

I have made a mistake, completely my fault. This corrected image (green arrow) shows the correct location of the attack. The attack actually occurred~1200 nautical miles from Mogadishu and about ~715 nautical miles from Mumbai.

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For subscribers to Proceedings magazine, there is an article in the January 2010 issue by Commander Stephen J. Coughlin discussing the Cyclones. The article, Good Things Come in Small Packages, is essentially a brief history and short support for the PC as a platform. If you can't read the article, it is time to renew your subscription for the new year.

The article does not take on one of the primary complaints about PCs, specifically the lack of range and endurance. There might be a good reason though, because that argument is getting harder and harder to make.

There was a report tonight of an unsuccessful pirate attack against a merchant ship 525 nautical miles southeast of the Seychelles. The attack apparently consisted of more than one vessel, with one of the vessels potentially a mothership. RPGs were fired at the commercial vessel, but the ship was able to avoid capture.

What is interesting is that the location of the attack was about ~750 nautical miles from Diego Garcia, but ~1220 nautical miles from Mogadishu (see pic above). Can someone explain to me how a bunch of dudes with machine guns in speedboats can operate ~1220 nautical miles from Mogadishu, and the worlds only superpower cannot build a ship less than 3,000 tons without complaining about range and endurance.

Either the Somali pirates have a better small vessel logistics model than we do, or the range/endurance complaint by USN officers for small vessels is bullshit. If pirates can operate motherships and skiffs for 2500+ nautical mile round trip piracy operations to hijack commercial ships, surely the worlds largest Navy can come up with a plan to operate smaller vessels without complaining about endurance.

As I was reading the January 2010 issue of Proceedings, the Surface Warfare issue, I found it entertaining that no less than four articles are discussing force structure. I'll pick up Captain Addison's article in more detail next week to start the new year, but I note his article really gets to the heart of the matter.

Right now in the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden we have irregular warfare at sea in spades with a full gambit of human trafficking, drug smuggling, arms smuggling (unless we refuse to believe arms to Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, or Afghanistan move by sea), and piracy all over the place, and while the seas are overrun with IW problems in the region where our Army is struggling on land... SWOs are looking to justify the same force structure they developed during the cold war.

The question for Congress leading into 2010 is very simple. Is the Navy part of the IW problem, or part of the IW solution? If the Navy's inability to successfully deal with IW at sea is contributing to the problems in the region from Iraq to Yemen to Somalia to Afghanistan, then who should be held accountable and what needs to get done? If the Navy is part of the IW solution, then why is Al Qaeda expanding regionally while growing stronger?

At some point force structure has to stop being the excuse why the Surface Navy can't contain the IW problems at sea in the CENTCOM AOR. If the Navy can't break up the black markets moving drugs and arms by sea in that region - activities that represent the economy of the enemy - how do we expect the Army to stop the violence on land short of killing every enemy?