Sea Shepherds Wrap Another Successful Campaign

Sea Shepherd appears to have executed another successful anti-whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean. "Japan's Fisheries Agency said the fleet was on its way home from the Antarctic 'on schedule', but admitted that at 267 the catch was way down on expectations. Whalers killed 266 minke whales and one fin whale, the agency said, well below the approximately 900 they had been aiming for when they left Japan in December." The Agency official goes on to blame bad weather and "sabotage acts by activists," as the reason for the lower than expected haul.

At USNI's blog, LCDR Claude Berube, a Naval Academy professor and one of the subject matter experts on non-state maritime actors, has posted an interesting interview with former Navy Surface Warfare Officer and Sea Shepherd sailor, Jane Taylor. If you want to understand what motivates these activists to risk their lives for animals, the video is worth a watch.

A few weeks ago, I was privileged to have an opportunity to talk a bit about Sea Shepherds and other maritime IW issues with Claude's Capstone class and brief another group of bright Midshipmen and faculty at the Forum on Emerging and Irregular Warfare Studies. One of the students there asked me something along the lines of how the SSCS could continue to be so operationally incompetent. As we've discussed here before, their tactics are controversial and direct actions like throwing rancid butter might seem largely ineffective when viewed through the lens of Whale Wars. But my response to this Mid was basically to say that it is quite possible to fail at the tactical level while still meeting a campaign's operational or strategic objectives. Sea Shepherds have demonstrated that truism time after time. Of course in warfare, the opposite situation is also possible. In places like Afghanistan, our ground forces often execute brilliantly, but the results don't materialize because of strategic factors that are beyond the control of even the highest level military officers working the problems.

Regardless of what you think of their methods or motivation, SSCS provides the most transparent case study in non-state maritime actors today. As I told Claude's students, it is worthwhile to pursue an understanding of the way these NSMA's operate because many of them -- Al Qaeda, LeT, pirates, and narco-traffickers, to name a few -- have more nefarious motivations than saving the whales and pose direct risks to global security and the maritime economy.

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 U.S. Department of Defense, the US Navy, or any other agency.