Coast Guard remarks on piracy

RADM Salerno appeared before a Senate subcommittee yesterday to discuss piracy. He covered a lot of ground and a lot of what he said meshes well with the administration's approach to piracy. Out of the gate he stressed the breadth of the CG's international agreements and this is probably going to be their biggest contribution to the fight.

These agreements underpin a wide range of Coast Guard operations including counter-drug, migrant interdiction, fisheries enforcement, and Proliferation Security Initiative missions. The Coast Guard understands the domestic and international legal frameworks and the associated boarding and enforcement requirements necessary to ensure the successful negotiation and implementation of agreements to facilitate counter-piracy operations on the water and the delivery of legal consequences to the pirates ashore.

Since the administration favors the law-enforcement tack, these agreements can offer a starting point to begin accomplishing something in the legal realm with respect to piracy. After so many pirates have been released because of jurisdictional issues, it's important that we start building the multilateral agreements necessary to successfully prosecute them. This is an explicit benefit of the CG's dual role as military and law-enforcement.

While the Navy has the statutory authority to go after pirates and more than capable when it comes to assault, the CG teams detached to these ships in CTF 151 and elsewhere have the procedural experience when it comes to international crime that is going to be really important when these guys are tried in a Western democracy. Salerno rightly says a lot about the strength and importance of this particular partnership.

He also touched on something else that has been popping up in ADM Allen's remarks recently about the threat small vessels represent.

Small vessels are the vehicle of choice for pirates to conduct their attacks. These vessels are fast, readily available, relatively inexpensive, and blend in well with other small vessels commonly operating in the area.

Smaller vessels have been the vehicle for pretty much all maritime mayhem in recent memory including the bombing of the Cole, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard incident last year and you could even include the Chineese fishing boats recently. Small boats also represent the largest maritime threat on the domestic front too. When I heard Allen point this out for the first time I was dumbfounded how simple the connection was. Simple as it may be, there is no comprehensive solution to this threat here, in Somalia or anywhere and they know it.

As the piracy cases off Somalia have illustrated, there is a continuing need for maritime domain awareness - the ability to detect, classify,, and identify vessels at sea. We need greater awareness of maritime activities around the world, as well as along our coastlines, for both safety and security purposes.

There are some tools available that I'll discuss in a later post but as it stands now it's a vulnerability we have to live with for the foreseeable future. The law enforcement approach to piracy might be appropriate now but it won't do anything to remedy the larger threat in the long run. That's going to take a sizable coalition and they're smart to start floating this idea and get the discussion started even though they don't have the answer.