Troubling Report on Canadian Navy Operations

This is just ugly, not because the Canadians find themselves unable to conduct meaningful operations due to ambiguity in international law dealing with piracy, but because the Canadians are sending their ships half way around the world without the necessary equipment and training to successfully do their work. From the Toronto Star.

Documents obtained by the Toronto Star show there were problems getting vital equipment and supplies for the frigate, along with fierce internal military squabbles.

Canada and other countries can't detain and prosecute the armed Somali pirates because of a loophole of international law that is now on United Nations Security Council's agenda. Under the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, the Canadians made an impromptu decision to give the Somalis blue NATO backpacks loaded with bottled water as they sent them back to the coast in their pirate boats.

The post-operation report on the NATO-led mission showed the most vital part of the Winnipeg's mission - boarding pirate skiffs to search for and seize weapons and gather intelligence - was perhaps the most disorganized.

A request for replacement handheld radios was refused and evidence-gathering video cameras, which "succumbed to catastrophic failure" upon arrival in the Gulf of Aden, were not replaced because of "significant bureaucratic roadblocks."

Members of the naval boarding party, the rifle-toting team that searches the pirate boats, were denied military-issued boots, hats and uniforms necessary to do their jobs.

It gets worse.

"It cannot be overstated how critical Winnipeg's embarked Sea King was to mission success," he wrote. "The helicopter was integral to every major piracy event that Winnipeg was involved in."

Later in the report, he concludes "it should not be acceptable to jeopardize mission success by reducing flight hours during the Counter-Piracy commitment."

Despite the headaches and disagreements, Baines dubbed the mission an unqualified success, noting in part a level of national and international media interest "that is unprecedented in recent naval operations."

So let me get this straight. The Canadian Navy was forced to operate within a catch and release system for piracy, meaning that instead of arresting pirates who attacked ships, they would given them bottled water and send them back to Somalia. The Canadians suffered from shortages of equipment for their boarding teams, from radios to uniforms to boots to evidence gathering cameras... meaning there was no way they were conducting operations the same way they had trained for operations. Never mind instructions from home telling the Navy not to use the helicopter - the single most important anti-piracy tool available to warships - to scare off pirates.

And at the end of the day the CO is forced to declare the mission an unqualified success? Maybe before the Canadian government sends HMCS Fredericton (FFH 337) to help with terrorism off Yemen, they can make sure the sailors have everything they need for those operations first. Pirates may not shoot back, but terrorists might.

When a country can't get proper equipment to sailors providing maritime security operations, that is a serious problem. MSO is the tip of the spear at sea.