GAO Piracy Report

I'll have more on this in my WPR column on Wednesday, but to preview here are two interesting passages from the GAO report on US anti-piracy operations.

On cost-benefit analysis:

The Action Plan’s objective is to repress piracy in the interest of the global economy, among other things, but the effectiveness of U.S. resources applied to counterpiracy is unclear because the interagency group responsible for monitoring the Action Plan’s implementation was not specifically charged with tracking the cost of U.S. activities or systematically evaluating the relative benefits or effectiveness of the Action Plan’s tasks and neither the interagency steering group nor the federal agencies involved have performed these tasks. Our prior work has shown that federal agencies engaged in collaborative efforts need to evaluate activities to identify areas for improvement. Moreover, as pirates have adapted their tactics, the Action Plan has not been revised.

The U.S. government is not systematically tracking the costs or the benefits and effectiveness of its counterpiracy activities to determine whether its investment has achieved the desired results or should be revised. According to officials at State and Defense, the interagency Counter-Piracy Steering Group, which is jointly led by these two agencies and charged with monitoring implementation of the Action Plan, has not been systematically monitoring the cost or evaluating the benefits or effectiveness of U.S. counterpiracy efforts- 31

And on the interagency cooperation in the tracking of pirate revenue:

However, the NSC did not clearly identify any agency with specific responsibility for disrupting pirate revenue. As a result, officials at Justice, State, and Defense agree that information their agencies gather on pirate finances is not being systematically analyzed, and it is unclear if any agency is using it to identify and apprehend pirate leaders or financiers. In addition, though Justice, State, and Defense officials reported that Somali piracy exhibits characteristics of international organized crime, currently pirate attacks prosecuted by the United States are not investigated by the FBI’s Organized Crime Section but instead by the Violent Crimes Section. In the absence of clearly identified roles and responsibilities, and with competing priorities, officials indicated agencies have not taken initiative to develop joint guidance to ensure these disparate efforts work together efficiently and effectively.-44