Somalia Piracy - Recrafting the Strategic Narrative

What is the current strategic narrative on piracy and do our policy and actions reflect that narrative? On one hand, Navy officials have expressed very clearly that piracy originating from Somalia is a strategic problem requiring a pro-active solution. What follows are a series of statements drawn from USNAVCENT articles.

CTF 151, a multinational task force established by Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) in January 2009 to conduct counter-piracy operations under a mission based mandate to actively deter, disrupt and suppress piracy in order to protect global maritime security and secure freedom of navigation for the benefit of all nations.

CMF, with headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, patrols more than 2.5 million square miles of international waters to conduct both integrated and coordinated operations with a common purpose: to increase the security and prosperity of the region by working together for a better future.

U.S. forces conduct Maritime Security Operations (MSO) to help set the conditions for security in the maritime environment. From security arises stability that results in global economic prosperity. MSO complements the counter-terrorism and security efforts of regional nations and seek to disrupt violent extremists' use of the maritime environment as a venue for attack or to transport personnel, weapons or other material.

So clearly, it appears piracy must be a problem worthy of eliminating (or at least supressing to a locally managed level) by whatever means possible. Contrast the above with the evolving and varying narratives below:

13 Dec 08: “Under the United Nations Security Council resolution passed last week, members of the international community must work together to aggressively pursue and deter piracy...” Land pursuit operations would carry a high risk of harming innocent civilians because of the difficulty of identifying those guilty of piracy, U.S. Fifth Fleet spokeswoman Lieutenant Stephanie Murdock said yesterday.

“This has become a very good business and the first thing we need is better intelligence on who’s behind it,” Gates said. More information is needed on the culprits to minimize any collateral damage from land pursuit, Gates said. “With the level of information that we have now we are not in the position to do that kind of land attack,” he said. With “adequate intelligence” only, land attacks may be carried out, he added.

16 Dec 08: CONDOLEEZZA RICE, Secretary of State of the United States, said that several factors were limiting the effectiveness of the response to piracy and armed robbery. Specifically, because there was no existing mechanism for States to coordinate their actions, the result had been less than the sum of its parts. The United States envisioned a contact group serving as a mechanism to share intelligence, coordinate activities and reach out to partners; it would work quickly on that initiative. Also limiting was the impunity; piracy currently paid, and pirates paid little for their criminality.

She said the United States believed that, with the agreement of the Transitional Federal Government, as authorized by the Council today, pursuing pirates on land would have a significant impact. Maritime operations alone were insufficient for combating piracy.

14 Apr 09: Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he doesn't see any immediate need to bulk up the military response to piracy on the high seas.

14 Apr 09: "There is no purely military solution to it," Mr. Gates said in an address to the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. "There's really no way in my view to control it unless you get something on land that begins to change the equation for these kids."... Among the advocates for more serious initiatives in Somalia has been Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, who on Sunday reiterated his ships could only do so much and "the ultimate solution for piracy is on land."

15 Apr 09: Clinton said there is a need for a more muscular approach to ending the threat posed by pirates, rather than continuing to tolerate it.

In addition to the above, it is frequently articulated that piracy is little more than an annoyance for shipping companies, who don't mind too much as their insurance covers the bottom line.

Still, dozens of countries have increased their efforts and coordination in an attempt to defeat Somalian piracy. The underlying rationale (or hope) is that cooperation will equal results. Yet from 2007 to present, pirates have expanded their reach from a couple of hundred miles off Somalia to well over 1,000, an area encompassing not only the Somali Basin and Gulf of Aden, but the majority of the western Indian Ocean and up into the Red Sea. Depending on what statistics one looks at, the number of successful attacks has decreased somewhat in the last year, but the total amount of revenue secured from ransoms continues to grow. Clearly, the rewards of piracy still greatly outweigh the risks associated with current counter-piracy efforts and the pirates can evolve their tactics faster than we can make decisions, adapt our own TTPs, and coordinate them amongst multiple agencies, two combatant commands, EU, NATO, CMF, and non-aligned maritime forces and their national caveats.

The case for more proactive and assertive operations against piracy must evolve and our actions must match our strategic narrative. Along these lines, here are some additional talking points for consideration:

- By allowing piracy to proliferate and expand, the greatest navy in the world has effectively ceded freedom of the seas to teenagers toting Kalishnikovs and RPGs. If our Navy cannot address this relatively minor situation, then how can we be expected to exercise sea power globally?
- Our failure to defeat piracy has greater strategic implications. Without trying to sound alarmist, it must be noted that piracy provides emerging strategic naval competitors with a perfect excuse to conduct unprecedented out-of-area deployments and improve their naval operations by watching the coalition and learning from their own successes and mistakes.
- Somali pirates negatively affect not only maritime trade, but pose a risk to increased regional instability.
- Similar to the proliferation of suicide bombers and IEDs, other non-state actors will realize the successful business model that Somali pirates have developed and emulate them in around the world.

Many of the above arguments have been made somewhere or another before, but we continue to ignore them.

I offer no solutions here and leave that up to the appropriate policy makers and planners. That said, a more assertive and decisive campaign to defeat piracy will need to be carefully designed rather than just evolved on the fly. This design should consider combinations of US unilateral and multilateral operations, military and non-military actions, kinetic and non-kinetic, both afloat and ashore. Finally, strong leadership is required to eliminate or at least minimize the self-limiting geographic, interagency, legal, and policy boundaries which heretofore have provided the excuse narrative resulting in the failure to decisively address the problem.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or any of its agencies.