Too often these days in the national security realm, we find ourselves over-analyzing problems consequently resulting in decision paralysis or unworkable, overly complex courses of action. Some problems truly are multifaceted and complex, such as the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This complexity is evidenced by a stew of insurgents, transnational terrorists, conflicting strategic interests, malign interlopers, and nuclear weapons stored amid violent Islamic extremists. It is little wonder that progress has been agonizingly slow in the wars in Southwest Asia.
But other problems are quite straightforward. Piracy is one of these problems, consisting primarily of desperate ex-fishermen with nothing to lose and everything to gain, who are led and financed by criminal thugs eager to blow their next insurance-funded ransom payment on prostitutes, khat, and luxury real estate in Kenya. Yes, Somalia's problems overall are quite complex. But they do not need to be solved in order to eradicate piracy, or at least to tamp it down to a manageable problem restricted to local waters.
Instead of rapidly implemented, simple solutions we've muddled through growing Somali piracy with unwieldy C2 architectures, extended discussion and planning, but very little decisive action. Sometimes the simplest, most elegant solution - such as when someone shoots at you, shoot them back - is also the most effective. Embarked armed security teams, which most segments of the shipping industry and flag states have begrudgingly embraced, have been 100% effective to date in stopping ship hijackings off Somalia. Even against swarm attacks, well trained, armed guards have the upper hand against pirates with small arms in open skiffs. To defeat such defenses would require a step up in equipment and tactics which probably exceed even the most competent pirates. Unlike purely defensive measures including razor wire, fire hoses, and citadels, armed response changes the risk/reward equation of the pirates. The success of simple solutions with embarked security and increased propensity to use lethal (not legal) action against pirates by CMF navies is evident in 2011's piracy statistics. “Where a year ago the Somali pirates were seeing a 55 percent success rate, in the first several months of 2011 they have seen only a 17 percent success rate…”
Yet these proactive measures are not enough. Needless to say, as long as pirate facilitation and logistical networks ashore operate with impunity, the incentive to push additional young men with weapons out to sea in search of more prey will remain. Several ways to defeat these networks are available: unilateral US or allied lethal action, international policing similar to the current AMISOM mission, or discrete deployments of allied special forces ashore in Puntland to link up with anti-piracy clan elements. Executing any of these options requires leadership on the part of the United States or one of her capable allies.
Piracy should be ended sooner, rather than later. Eventually, simple problems grow to become more complex and harder to defeat. For example, pirates and al Shabaab might see additional reasons to cooperate, such as in the recent kidnappings of European vacationers from resorts in Kenya into al Shabaab-held territory. Similarly, kidnap for ransom was a frequent crime in post-invasion Iraq and grew out of control when al Qaeda in Iraq began buying prisoners (primarily non-Iraqis) from the criminal kidnappers to raise funds for their terrorist activities and for exploitation in violent jihadi execution propaganda videos. That is, until the kidnapping networks began to be targeted with direct action by coalition forces. Moreover, the dozens of naval vessels currently tied up in countering sea criminals in the Indian Ocean can be put to much better use in the same region.
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.
Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts
Sunday, October 2, 2024
Tuesday, September 27, 2024
On US Strikes in Somalia
I thought this was interesting...
Certainly a different view of the military operations inside Somalia than what we see from domestic sources or western news.
Edited: Video starts on every page load, so I removed it and added a link with a quote of the section that caught my attention.
The United States conducted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes, otherwise known as drones or commonly known as Predators, in Somalia during Sept. 24 and this is the second weekend in a row that U.S. forces have carried out drone strikes in southern Somalia. What are being targeted are likely the training camps of the transnationalist jihadist faction of al Shabaab, and these training camps are found in the environs of Kismayo, that southern city in Somalia. And found in these training camps are leaders of this faction of al Shabaab, led by a couple of people, one Godane Abu Zubayr and another individual known commonly as al-Afghani.
What is also interesting to note is that there are not strikes going on against other factions of the Somali jihadist network, such as those led by Mukhtar Robow in the Bay and Bakool regions of Somalia or the other known group called Hizbul Islam, led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys in the greater Mogadishu area. These two factions are not being targeted. So clearly there are efforts to neutralize the most threatening terrorist elements of al Shabaab, but on the other hand to more reach out to or accommodate nationalist factions.
Certainly a different view of the military operations inside Somalia than what we see from domestic sources or western news.
Edited: Video starts on every page load, so I removed it and added a link with a quote of the section that caught my attention.
Thursday, September 22, 2024
Fall 2011 Piracy Season Arrives Off Somalia
As monsoon season abates off eastern Somalia, are new tactics emerging in fall pirate campaign? This NATO press release (PDF) crossed the wires yesterday.Earlier today, NATO’s counter piracy flag ship, Italian Ship (ITS) Andrea Doria, rescued the crew of M/V Pacific Express, 180 nautical miles off the coast of Kenya. M/V Pacific Express had reported being under pirate attack on September 20, 2011.The IMB report at this link suggests a slightly different story, that the pirates set fire to the ship when they became frustrated by not being able to get into the citadel. This Maritime Executive report on the incident is based on the IMB report.
ITS Andrea Doria responded to the distress call and closed in on M/V Pacific Express during the night of September 20. After evaluating the situation, the NATO warship assessed that pirates were no longer on board. As heavy smoke was coming out of the M/V, ITS Andrea Doria decided to send a boarding team to evacuate the crew and rescued all 26 crewmembers (25 Filipinos and 1 Ukrainian) who had locked themselves inside the safety zone of the merchant ship. According to the crew, the fire was the result of the pirates’ attempts to force them out of their confinement. They also reported hearing gun shots and possibly a RPG being fired during their time in the safety zone. They suffered no injuries and are now being transferred to Mombasa.
ITS Andrea Doria has been engaged in Operation "Ocean Shield" to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia under the command of Rear Admiral Gualtiero Mattesi since June 14, 2011.
This is a troubling development and it is important to watch for a pattern. We have seen the pirates off Somalia adapt tactically very well in the past to countermeasures put into place by both the coalition naval forces and the industry. Is setting a ship on fire an emerging tactical response by pirates to a crew seeking shelter in a citadel? Hopefully this is an isolated incident, because a pattern where pirates set fire to ships that cannot be captured would represent a significant escalation and potentially significantly change the perception of piracy by several governments.
Finally, it is important to note the SW monsoon is abating, and the fall pirate season off the east coast of Somalia has arrived. Here are the three incidents off eastern Somalia reported by IMB in the last 72 hours as the monsoon abates:
22.09.2011: 0850 UTC: POSN : 12:16.1S - 043:19.5E: Around 20nm south of Grande Comore, Comoros Island. (Off Somalia) A bulk carrier underway noticed two blue coloured skiffs at a distance of one nm. Master raised alarm, and alerted the armed security team. the skiffs approached at a speed of 20 knots. The persons in the skiff were observed to have RPGs. As the skiffs closed to 300 meters and saw the armed team they slowed down and circled the vessel for a few minutes and then moved away. No shots were fired.It's going to be a busy fall.
21.09.2011: 0643 UTC: Posn: 12:46.6S - 046:18.5E: Around 60nm east of Mayotte Island, Madagascar (Off Somalia) A container ship underway noticed two skifss with three to four persons in each at a distance of 1.5nm. The skiffs increased speed to 18 knots and approached and chased the vessel from different sides. The vessel made evasive manoeuvres, increased speed and enforced anti piracy measures. The skiffs aborted the attempet after chasing the vessels for 25 minutes.
20.09.2011: 0734 UTC : 04:47S - 044: 35E: Around 300nm east of Mombasa, Keny (Off Somalia). While underway, pirates in two skiffs armed with guns and RPG chased a general cargo ship with intend to hijack her. Ship took avoiding action however the pirates managed to board the vessel. All crew retreated into the citadel and requested for assistance. Prior to leaving the ship the pirates set fire to the vessel. A coalition warship arrived at location and rescued the crew.
Tuesday, September 6, 2024
Another TFG Transition
After several years and numerous predictions foretelling the organization's imminent collapse, Somalia's TFG is slowly, but surely taking on the trappings of a real government. Here, the Somalia Report reports that the TFG is now less than a year from holding new elections and putting more permanent governance structures in place. More interesting from a naval perspective is the Benchmark for maritime security, which includes the establishment of a Somali Maritime Police Force and Coast Guard, anti-piracy legislation, establishment of EEZs, and maritime security cooperation with Puntland and Somaliland. Now, if only they could get over that little matter of Al Shabaab's control of most of Southern Somalia's ports.
Somalia's problems are broad and deep, but getting a handle on maritime security will go a long way in mitigating some of the worst of them, including al Shabaab (which will also enable famine relief), and of course, piracy.
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.
Somalia's problems are broad and deep, but getting a handle on maritime security will go a long way in mitigating some of the worst of them, including al Shabaab (which will also enable famine relief), and of course, piracy.
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.
Thursday, August 11, 2024
Pirates vs. Congress: How Pirates Are a Better Bargain
I was sent a copy of remarks made by Stephen M. Carmel, Senior Vice President of Maersk Line, Limited given August 3rd, 2011 at the Commander Second Fleet Intelligence Symposium. After reading these remarks, I emailed Steve and publish them here with his permission.
These are his personal views and not those of Maersk Line Limited, nor those of the very diverse shipping industry. The title was provided by me. Enjoy.
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Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to share my perspectives on piracy with you today. First let me say right out of the gate I am no fan of pirates. Do not like them at all in fact, contrary to what many may perceive from my remarks on the topic. Pirates do impose a cost on our business that we would rather not bear if possible so it is something I worry about. But, while worrying about pirates I also worry about the effect of MARPOL Annex VI and the cost of complying with increasingly harsh emissions control requirements, something that will cost our industry roughly $6 Billion a year to comply with now and that figure will go up as tighter standards kick in in the 2014 time frame. I worry about the requirement to cold iron in LA, something that is very expensive and disruptive. And since while common for Navy ships to go on shore power, commercial ships never do it and are not fitted with a system to do so, a modification is required that will cost the equivalent of one ransom for each ship it is done on.
I worry about things like a proposal fronted by the World Bank, UNEP and others for a $50/ton carbon tax on ships bunkers, which will cost our industry about $17.1 Billion dollars per year. I worry about invasive species related ballast water mandates which will cost our industry approximately $15 Billion a year and I worry even more about California not going along with federal ballast water control mandates and instead implementing their own program at even greater cost to us. So tree huggers and environmentalists are costing us a heck of a lot more than pirates ever will, but interestingly I don’t see anyone agitating for the Navy to get underway to get the quasi-failed state of California under control. But if any of you are up for the mission I’d like to see it.
I worry about the cost of fuel where each dollar increase in bunkers costs our industry well over $300 million a year and over the last 2 years the cost of fuel has gone up about $120 / ton meaning something on the order of a $36 Billion per year increase in fuel costs for the industry. I worry about Ad Valorum tax - a protectionist tax designed to benefit US shipyards we must pay on repairs on our ships done outside the US. My company alone paid over $10 Million in Ad Valorum tax last year - so US shipyards are doing way more damage to us than pirates are. I’d ask for the Navy’s help on getting US yards under control but based on what I read about the Navy’s adventures in shipbuilding, you’re having a tough time with them too. Maybe we would jointly be better off partnering on a strategy to deal with that threat instead of pirates since it is worse for both of us.
I worry about bad policy such as the requirement for 100% scanning of containers imposed by congress in the “Implementing the requirements of the 9/11 commission Act”, a requirement which the European Commission estimates will cost the global economy 150 billion Euros or about 215 billion dollars per year were it to be implemented by all our trading partners. With that single act congress potentially does 20 times more damage to the global economy than pirates do by even the most ridiculous estimates of the cost of piracy, and in the process actually degrades maritime security rather than improves it.
I worry about the politically motivated “war on ear marks” which has brought dredging in this country to a near halt, meaning that ships loaded with our agricultural exports leaving the Mississippi are light loading by upwards of 2 feet, many ports on the East Coast will be unable to accept the larger ships an expanded Panama Canal could bring this way, and upwards of half the ports in the Great Lakes will soon close due to lack of adequate water depth, something that will not be good for industrial activity in the heartland, exports, and by extension our business. All this not to mention the $3.1 Trillion dollars the American Society of Civil Engineers now says it will cost to repair our country’s crumbling infrastructure upon which our business, and yours by the way, depends. And that number does not allow for expansion of infrastructure to accommodate economic growth, a critical issue for us in the shipping business, that number is only to repair and upgrade what we have now. The actual investment needed for accommodate growth over the next 30 years is more like $6.6 Trillion. Next to $6.6 Trillion needed to recover from shortsighted politicians pirates barely register as an irritant.
I worry a heck allot more about bad policy than I do bad guys, bad policy being easier to inflict and harder, and expensive, to recover from once it happens. And speaking of bad policy specifically as relates to pirates, there can be no better example than the Executive order which most believe heads us down the slope towards making ransoms illegal, which in my view is breathtaking in its shortsightedness. That would remove the only tool that is available to us that has proven effective at resolving a piracy incident. Making ransoms illegal is unenforceable, will increase the violence against the crew, will criminalize the victims, and will do nothing to deter pirates. Hostages are a commodity to pirates and they will always find a buyer. The care and feeding of hostages is an expensive investment on the part of pirates, an investment they have every expectation of receiving a return on. In the event we make ransoms illegal they will not stop being pirates, they will adapt their business model and find new buyers, maybe not at the same level of compensation, but it will beat starving on the street in Mogadishu, their other alternative under our current policy. Depending on the nationality of the crew perhaps selling them to an ideologically motivated group who would have no intention of ever seeing them go home might turn a few bucks, or maybe selling them into the very active slavery market. That would also of course mean that only those hostages useful for those purposes would be worth the investment of keeping alive. In short, the EO is a fine example of breaking a model without thinking through how the pirates will adapt and what we’d do about that, a topic I’ll return to again in a minute.
So, there are lots of things I worry about and lots of things that impose costs on our business that I’d rather not have to deal with; piracy is one, but not the only one and certainly not the worst. On any one of them if we can get someone to provide some relief, that’s great, including piracy. But piracy is not some existential threat to this country, or the maritime industry. That has, and is, my central massage when thinking about piracy. We must keep it in perspective. Piracy today is not remotely as bad as it was during the days of the Barbary Pirates to which it is usually and foolishly compared. Piracy then represented a true threat to the security of a young US. Today piracy has zero direct effect on our economy and I have yet to hear anyone articulate anything approaching a valid national interest that justifies the costs, and risks to US lives, of that mission beyond that it is the traditional role of the US to ensure stability in the global regime from which the US benefits in an overall way. In fact piracy has had no real impact on international trade.
Traffic through the Suez Canal is near record levels according to data from the Suez Canal Authority, global supply chains through that region remain intact and we are not diverting around Africa to avoid pirates, although when bunkers are cheap enough we’ll do it to avoid Suez Canal Tolls, since below about $300/Ton going around Africa is actually cheaper and now that we’re all slow steaming time is less of an issue. Charging around at 24 knots on our big containerships is largely a thing of the past, and sadly so are $300/ton bunkers.
It is interesting to note that the US government, in the form of the Maritime Administration is itself a source of incorrect information regarding the diversion bit, which is important as virtually every “cost of piracy” calculation relies heavily on some assumed diversion inefficiency to have any level of a “wow factor” attached to it. I can tell you that Maersk, the largest container company in the world, does not divert around Africa and I don’t know of any major carrier that does. Anyway - the Maritime Administration has on their web site a cost of piracy point paper which is again reliant on diversion for its major impact. They reference the cost of diverting a 300k ton tanker as one example, but the only problem there is of course a 300k ton tanker can’t get thru the Suez so would always go around the cape anyway so the real cost of diversion is zero, and we’ll come back to tankers in a minute. They also talk about the cost of diverting containerships. When pressed for data on how many containerships are actually making such a diversion they are silent - don’t even answer me. So, take that sort or argument with a bulker load of salt and even the US government itself contributes to the voluminous amount of misleading to patently false information floating around about that.
Unfortunately for us freight rates on the Asia / Europe trade route - the only international route directly impacted by piracy, are not where we’d like them to be due to over capacity and weakening demand, so it is nonsense so say consumers are paying increased costs due to piracy. Shipping companies, in the face of weak fundamentals search for any mechanism to extract an extra nickel out of customers, including things like bunker adjustment factors and now piracy surcharges - which thanks to frothy news headlines shippers “understand”, but in the end it is the total cost of shipping a box that counts and that is not going up.
And in fact is down considerably from the peak in 2006 just before the financial collapse. More to the point, the routine peak-season surcharge that would normally be applied to that route this time of year has been delayed several times because peak season volumes are not materializing - an indicator of a bad Christmas retail season in the US and consequently very bad news for the US economy. So, from a system perspective, piracy is not an issue. That is an important point - we need to view the effects of piracy from a system level, but the highly emotional nature, the human drama associated with a specific piracy incident leads the general public to view it from a specific individual occurrence perspective and generalize that, rather than from a true system level perspective, a giant mismatch in perspective and effect. Piracy is a cost of business just like many other costs of business and business can manage it, just as they do the others. Piracy is a little different though because unlike emissions targets or bunker prices, piracy gets the general public excited, provides politicians a risk free platform for pontificating, all of which provides some of our industry an opportunity to burden shift rather than take responsible measures to protect their ships.
I assume everyone here knows the basic statistics - piracy is a very rare event considering the volume of traffic that moves through the area. The probability of any specific ship being attacked is remote, and for the types of ships that actually move the majority of international trade even more so, approaching zero. Attack success rates have fallen into the 14% range. But we’ll not belabor the obvious at this point and instead dwell a little on the issues that hide behind the numbers - the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
From the US perspective it is difficult to see how piracy affects our economy or international trade in any significant way. Trade between Asia and the US all goes via the Pacific. In fact the US Maritime Administration says that 80% of traffic through the Gulf of Aden represents trade bound for, or coming from, Europe. By comparison, only roughly 5% of US containerized trade as measured by volume flows through that region (much less when measured by value), with India being the largest component of that. That trade moves on large, fast containerships, a type of ship that is rarely even attacked and has never been hijacked. Of the oil moving out of the Persian Gulf that everyone rings their hands about, the overwhelming majority of it that moves through pirate waters is bound for Europe, and in fact virtually no oil bound for the US out of the Persian Gulf moves via the Suez Canal. Only about 14% of US crude imports come from the Persian Gulf region according to the US Energy Information Agency. That oil moves around the Cape because that is commercially the best way to do it and has been for a very long time - oil coming to the US generally moves in ships too large to get through the Suez.
It is a curious fact that people connect 2 points on a map and assume that just because a particular route is shorter that it is cheaper. That is simply not the case in international shipping where economies of scale represent a major, if not biggest, cost consideration. The fact is that loading 2 or 3 million barrels on a VLCC or ULCC and taking it around Africa to the US is a cheaper way to move oil to the US than loading 1 million bbls or less on a tanker that can fit through the Suez Canal even though the Suez is shorter. This by the way, is one of many mistakes people make when thinking about shipping through the Arctic, where shorter is neither faster nor cheaper and the Northwest Passage will never be viable as a large scale transit route, but that’s a different soapbox.
Back to oil from the Persian Gulf - how much does piracy add to the cost of a gallon of gas in the US? Is the US consumer actually affected? - a relevant question if this is all about protecting the US economy. First off - forget all those ridiculous news items about the cost of insurance - marine insurance is very complex and does not lend itself to one sentence summaries, they will almost certainly be misleading. The most expensive type insurance related to piracy is K and R, which no one forces anyone to buy.
Insurance for us is like insurance for you - the cost is driven by what you are insuring, the risks you are ensuring against, and the portion of that risk you are willing to bear yourself. Some insurance we are required by law to have - liability insurance for oil pollution for example, just as you are required to have liability insurance for your car. But for most insurance it’s up to the consumer what he wants to buy hence what he has to pay. Absolute certainty is expensive and if that’s what you’re after it will cost you. One way to look at it is like when you rent a car the rental agency offers you the opportunity to buy insurance from them at an astronomical rate. Most don’t need it because credit cards or personal auto insurance policies provide that coverage. But if you decide to take it anyway because you want to be absolutely certain you will never pay a nickel if something goes wrong, you really don’t have any right to complain about the cost of insurance when renting a car. I would also note that insurance companies site piracy policies as one reason profits are way up this past year. The way insurance companies make money writing policies is to collect premiums on policies they don’t pay claims on, which should tell you something about the actual risk.
Rather than pay for very expensive insurance it would probably be better to do something that ensures your ship does not get hijacked to begin with. That something would be armed security, which is so far at least, 100 percent effective. From personal experience hiring highly trained (in fact all ex- US SOF folks) as security on our ships I can back of the envelope it for you. It is two weeks from Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia to Capetown, which would be the section of the trip you would need security on. A team sufficient to protect the ship costs about $5000 per day all inclusive, for a total of $70,000. On a 2 Million BBL VLCC that means security to get it to the US costs about 3.5 cents per bbl. While it varies a little by grade of crude, a rule of thumb is that each BBL of crude will produce about 20 gallons of gas. That means piracy adds a little less than 2 tenths of a cent to the cost of a gallon of gas, or a nickel or so to a 25 gallon fill up. This as opposed to the approximately 43 cents per gallon or $10.75 in taxes you pay on a 25 gallon fill up. Once again that Pirates vs. Congress damage comparison sneaks in there and pirates seem the better bargain. If anyone is up for the mission of protecting us from Congress there’s another one I’d like to see. In short - the average US consumer, and tax payer, is not at all impacted by piracy.
There is no doubt that armed security is an effective way to prevent any specific ship from being pirated - this does not deal with the problem with piracy however - just shifts it to those who are least willing to look after themselves, ironically also the ones most likely to whine for government solutions.
But there are a few things to remember when discussing the arming of ships that are worth mentioning. At my company we are very worried about liability, so only employ people we know can keep their heads under pressure, and are not prone to shooting people who should not be shot (an actually hitting the people that should be). So they are all former SEALS. We also limit the types of weapons they can have on board. The result is we, a responsible operator, have the best trained, but very expensive, operators in the world with a limited, but effective amount of weaponry the operators themselves chose. But that’s our choice, there is no international standard on the training or vetting of shooters, or even any requirement they are different than the normal crew. Nor is there any international standard on what types of weapons are considered appropriate. Nor, by the way, is there a US flag state standard for either shooters beyond having a TWIC card, something every AB has, nor limits on weapons and actually no useful guidance on training. That is all up to us.
If there is nothing for US flag, you can imagine what exists for your average flag of convenience. In fairness both the US Coast Guard for US flag, and IMO for the international community do have general, and voluntary guidelines. Neither is specific, binding, or useful in any way. It is a curious fact that virtually everything else we do has some rule or regulation that governs it, an inspection protocol to insure compliance, and a certificate we have to post to demonstrate to the world that we do what we’re supposed to do. We lose an inch of draft to all the certificates we carry around for everything except the use of deadly force, which is apparently so trivial that it can be left up to individual businesses to do as they wish, or do nothing at all and just whine for more Navy protection.
Remember too that the push, hence permission, to arm applies to everyone, not just US or trusted partner country ships, and once armed they are armed everywhere they go, not just the Horn of Africa. Absent any regulatory limits, they are pretty much free to arm however they see fit and give those guns to whoever they want. So from a port security perspective and as we push other countries to accept armed US flag ships into their ports, what happens when a Maltese registered ship with an international crew from unsavory places, armed to the teeth with heavier weaponry than MLL allows- but armed IAW their flag state approved ISPS required security plan piracy annex - what happens when that ship shows up in Norfolk and sails past the Navy base with the world watching from a reciprocity perspective.
And we do worry a great deal about disruptions to our ships in foreign ports as a result of being armed, again remembering once armed, they are armed everywhere they go. There is no internationally accepted process for the entry and clearance of armed merchant ships, instead we are at the mercy of arms import and export laws everywhere we go. We have no doubt that we are violating arms trafficking laws fairly consistently since such laws are convoluted, differ by country, and were certainly not written with armed merchant ships in mind. In fairness to the rest of the world, so far we have only had problems in one port, where our weapons were confiscated but the ship not held up, that port being Charleston. Ironically that happened on the very same day a very senior official at the state department gave a speech stating that arming merchant ships was the only way to deal with piracy off Somalia.
Lastly I would note there is no internationally agree framework for dealing with liability issues, where if we shoot a pirate off a US flag ship there is nothing to prevent that aggrieved pirate from suing us in a Pakistani court and having our ship arrested next time it shows up in Karachi. Unlike you folks, our ships do not enjoy sovereign immunity and port state authorities are free to board, search, and arrest our ships and crew at their discretion and/or whim. There has been some legislation passed in the US providing such liability protection, which of course is very helpful for piracy off the coast of New Jersey, but does nothing to help us where it actually matters. At this point the single most helpful thing regarding piracy (aside of course from solving Somalia) the worlds governments can do would be to push through IMO a rule set that standardizes training and certification of shooters, a standard weapon set, and international protocols for entry and clearance of armed merchant ships in ports and a standard framework for liability cover. That to me would be a heck of a lot more useful than banal calls for the worlds Navy’s to do more.
That leads to the cost of piracy. There are lots of very big numbers circulating about the cost of piracy, and they do not come with any sort of breakdown or analysis, and are generally produced by entities with a particular point of view they are trying to support, and most are very difficult to believe. For example, One Earth Foundation published a wildly quoted report a couple months ago that calculated the cost of piracy as being between 7 and 10 billion, but the largest component of that cost was the supposed cost of routing around Africa of ships that otherwise would have gone through the Suez, where the authors arbitrarily assume 10% of traffic is rerouting. In other words their single largest component of cost is a total plug unsupported by anything other than the conclusion they had predetermined to reach. There is no basis for that assumption, and it fly’s in the face of the Suez canal authority showing record levels of traffic, but it was just accepted as reasonable by an uncritical public.
The numbers that seem to be most frequently cited are a cost of piracy in the 6 to 8 billion range. While I personally take the number with a large grain of salt, we’ll assume it’s true for this discussion. First to keep it in perspective, the international shipping industry earned $380 billion in 2009 carrying $10.5 trillion dollars worth of international trade - 1 trillion of it going through the GOA region. So the cost of piracy number looks a little less large when placed in proper context. If it really did cost $8 billion to secure the smooth flow of $1 trillion worth of trade personally I’d say we’re getting a good deal. Also remember the other costs of business governments inflict on us I mentioned at the opening and the cost of piracy looks outright inconsequential.
But then if we look a little deeper a curious item to note is that the cost of piracy is 6 to 8 billion, but in 2009 the total ransom payments were $74 million according to the US GAO. Using the low end of the cost of piracy then pirates themselves only made 1.2% of the money earned in the pirate industry and of course less than that at the high end of the piracy cost estimate. If piracy started because Somali’s thought they were getting cheated by international fishing fleets they must really be pissed at how much they are losing out in the piracy business. By the way, while $74 million might sound like allot of cash in a country like Somalia - again you need to place it in context of the very large and surprisingly active informal and largely cash based economy that exists in Somalia. In contrast to the $74 million in ransoms you have $1.6 Billion that enters Somalia every year through remittances and the Somali Khat industry which an article just published in the Somaliland times estimates at $180 million per year are examples. I don’t see an outcry to get hawala’s in Minneapolis under control though.
So, if piracy is costing that much money but pirates themselves are only earning 1% of it, allot of money must be going other places besides pirates. Piracy is indeed a big business these days, and as the numbers suggest, pirates themselves are a very small part of it. The piracy conference for profit circuit alone is a big money generator and if pirates knew how much money people were making talking about them they’d quit being pirates and go on the speaking circuit. There is no shortage of people lining up to sell us the latest in anti-pirate gizmo’s ranging from goo guns to exploding fouling nets to even jars of killer bees (no kidding, that was a real sales pitch). The number of people who earn a good living off exploiting a fear of pirates is very large and all to be unemployed if piracy ever gets solved, meaning there is a vast army of people in whose economic benefit it is to make everyone think piracy is bad and getting worse.
What we end up with is a Horn of Africa piracy industry that is not insignificant, but in the context of the other economic activity in the actual region, not out of proportion huge, but appears to be much more significant as a business elsewhere in the world with the overwhelming amount of money made by people other than actual Somali pirates.
I often hear in rebuttal to my arguments that piracy has been getting more violent and that the old model of piracy for ransom no longer holds. That is probably partially true. When all this first started piracy was a relatively clean business with a well defined model operating under a clear rule set that, while we might not have liked it, we all, pirates and shipping people, understood it. In exchange for there being no violence on our side pirates themselves minimized violence to the crew. It was pure business, no one got hurt, industry paid a ransom and we got the crew and ship back, end of story.
In the world of insurance by the way, when probability is low and outcomes when an event happens are predictable, the risk is quantifiable, easily priced, and not exorbitant to insure. From the very start in response to criticism of that model from government folks I have often warned that Somali’s are adaptive, tough, and not easily deterred. If you are going to destroy a model that, while distasteful, keeps things at a tolerable level and keeps people from getting hurt, you should have something to replace it with. If not you will give the pirates free range to devise what the next model will be on their own. They will not simply stop being pirates because it gets a little sporting for them and whatever model they come up we will like much less than the one we had. But that is exactly what happened, the old model was blown up with no thought into what goes next, and everyone seemed surprised that things evolved they way they did.
But from my perspective this is the expected result in reaction to things the international community did to begin with. It is indicative of the sort of knee jerk policy development regarding piracy here, from an insurance perspective, while probability remains low, the predictability of outcome in the event of an occurrence is much less, meaning a risk that is harder to quantify hence more expensive to insure, and we did that to ourselves. Doing nothing until the international community was ready to take on Somalia as an issue rather than poke around aimlessly at the symptom would have been better, as what existed before was better than what we ended up with. In the end, without an overarching strategy to deal with Somalia, and piracy as one component of that overarching strategy, dealing with piracy alone is difficult to justify given limited and shrinking resources, at best likely to be ineffective and could potentially make things worse.
So, with that I’ll wrap up. Piracy is a pain, but a manageable one that must be kept in context. Nothing I have said should be taken to mean I do not understand the very real suffering of the crews actually hijacked. But my perspective is one of the system as a whole, and international response needs to be oriented around ensuring the stability of the system. I would also add that nothing I have said should be taken as not being truly appreciative of the work the Navy does for us and the international shipping community around the world. I personally have a close and active connection to many Navy missions, and my company collaborates frequently with the Navy on many things of mutual interest. I am simply expressing a realist view that we make a lot of demands on your time and resources. Time and resources that are shrinking and given the budget environment we are in, that situation is not likely to get better any time soon. It is therefore incumbent on us to make sure our demands represent the absolute best use of your limited resources from a system level, overall good perspective, not from the parochial, industry specific “what makes us the most money” perspective that some in our industry take.
I would certainly like to see piracy gone, but the only way that’s going to happen is if Somalia itself is tackled as an issue for the international community. Until then the largest impacts are on the East Coast of Africa region and the land locked countries that depend on East Africa ports such as Mombasa. Clearly all Africans have a stake in dealing with Somalia and I’d certainly like to see them do more there, but an interesting and yet to be fully fleshed out impact of the fall of Quadafi is that he provided a very large if not dominate amount of funding for the African Union, the group with troops on the ground in Somalia now. The AU was already suffering from a funding crisis before the Libyan uprising so it remains to be seen how well, if at all, the AU will be able to continue to operate, which of course impacts Somalia and piracy. It is an interesting connection that the uprising in Libya could actually make piracy worse. The other potential impact is on Asia / Europe trade, although there is no data to support the claim that that trade has actually been adversely impacted in any way. There is no direct US national interest that I have ever heard articulated. Unless and until Somalia the issue is coherently dealt with, the best things the international community can do are first avoid doing things that make it worse, and second, provide the legal and regulatory framework necessary for responsible ship operators to protect themselves.
Thank you.
These are his personal views and not those of Maersk Line Limited, nor those of the very diverse shipping industry. The title was provided by me. Enjoy.
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Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to share my perspectives on piracy with you today. First let me say right out of the gate I am no fan of pirates. Do not like them at all in fact, contrary to what many may perceive from my remarks on the topic. Pirates do impose a cost on our business that we would rather not bear if possible so it is something I worry about. But, while worrying about pirates I also worry about the effect of MARPOL Annex VI and the cost of complying with increasingly harsh emissions control requirements, something that will cost our industry roughly $6 Billion a year to comply with now and that figure will go up as tighter standards kick in in the 2014 time frame. I worry about the requirement to cold iron in LA, something that is very expensive and disruptive. And since while common for Navy ships to go on shore power, commercial ships never do it and are not fitted with a system to do so, a modification is required that will cost the equivalent of one ransom for each ship it is done on.
I worry about things like a proposal fronted by the World Bank, UNEP and others for a $50/ton carbon tax on ships bunkers, which will cost our industry about $17.1 Billion dollars per year. I worry about invasive species related ballast water mandates which will cost our industry approximately $15 Billion a year and I worry even more about California not going along with federal ballast water control mandates and instead implementing their own program at even greater cost to us. So tree huggers and environmentalists are costing us a heck of a lot more than pirates ever will, but interestingly I don’t see anyone agitating for the Navy to get underway to get the quasi-failed state of California under control. But if any of you are up for the mission I’d like to see it.
I worry about the cost of fuel where each dollar increase in bunkers costs our industry well over $300 million a year and over the last 2 years the cost of fuel has gone up about $120 / ton meaning something on the order of a $36 Billion per year increase in fuel costs for the industry. I worry about Ad Valorum tax - a protectionist tax designed to benefit US shipyards we must pay on repairs on our ships done outside the US. My company alone paid over $10 Million in Ad Valorum tax last year - so US shipyards are doing way more damage to us than pirates are. I’d ask for the Navy’s help on getting US yards under control but based on what I read about the Navy’s adventures in shipbuilding, you’re having a tough time with them too. Maybe we would jointly be better off partnering on a strategy to deal with that threat instead of pirates since it is worse for both of us.
I worry about bad policy such as the requirement for 100% scanning of containers imposed by congress in the “Implementing the requirements of the 9/11 commission Act”, a requirement which the European Commission estimates will cost the global economy 150 billion Euros or about 215 billion dollars per year were it to be implemented by all our trading partners. With that single act congress potentially does 20 times more damage to the global economy than pirates do by even the most ridiculous estimates of the cost of piracy, and in the process actually degrades maritime security rather than improves it.
I worry about the politically motivated “war on ear marks” which has brought dredging in this country to a near halt, meaning that ships loaded with our agricultural exports leaving the Mississippi are light loading by upwards of 2 feet, many ports on the East Coast will be unable to accept the larger ships an expanded Panama Canal could bring this way, and upwards of half the ports in the Great Lakes will soon close due to lack of adequate water depth, something that will not be good for industrial activity in the heartland, exports, and by extension our business. All this not to mention the $3.1 Trillion dollars the American Society of Civil Engineers now says it will cost to repair our country’s crumbling infrastructure upon which our business, and yours by the way, depends. And that number does not allow for expansion of infrastructure to accommodate economic growth, a critical issue for us in the shipping business, that number is only to repair and upgrade what we have now. The actual investment needed for accommodate growth over the next 30 years is more like $6.6 Trillion. Next to $6.6 Trillion needed to recover from shortsighted politicians pirates barely register as an irritant.
I worry a heck allot more about bad policy than I do bad guys, bad policy being easier to inflict and harder, and expensive, to recover from once it happens. And speaking of bad policy specifically as relates to pirates, there can be no better example than the Executive order which most believe heads us down the slope towards making ransoms illegal, which in my view is breathtaking in its shortsightedness. That would remove the only tool that is available to us that has proven effective at resolving a piracy incident. Making ransoms illegal is unenforceable, will increase the violence against the crew, will criminalize the victims, and will do nothing to deter pirates. Hostages are a commodity to pirates and they will always find a buyer. The care and feeding of hostages is an expensive investment on the part of pirates, an investment they have every expectation of receiving a return on. In the event we make ransoms illegal they will not stop being pirates, they will adapt their business model and find new buyers, maybe not at the same level of compensation, but it will beat starving on the street in Mogadishu, their other alternative under our current policy. Depending on the nationality of the crew perhaps selling them to an ideologically motivated group who would have no intention of ever seeing them go home might turn a few bucks, or maybe selling them into the very active slavery market. That would also of course mean that only those hostages useful for those purposes would be worth the investment of keeping alive. In short, the EO is a fine example of breaking a model without thinking through how the pirates will adapt and what we’d do about that, a topic I’ll return to again in a minute.
So, there are lots of things I worry about and lots of things that impose costs on our business that I’d rather not have to deal with; piracy is one, but not the only one and certainly not the worst. On any one of them if we can get someone to provide some relief, that’s great, including piracy. But piracy is not some existential threat to this country, or the maritime industry. That has, and is, my central massage when thinking about piracy. We must keep it in perspective. Piracy today is not remotely as bad as it was during the days of the Barbary Pirates to which it is usually and foolishly compared. Piracy then represented a true threat to the security of a young US. Today piracy has zero direct effect on our economy and I have yet to hear anyone articulate anything approaching a valid national interest that justifies the costs, and risks to US lives, of that mission beyond that it is the traditional role of the US to ensure stability in the global regime from which the US benefits in an overall way. In fact piracy has had no real impact on international trade.
Traffic through the Suez Canal is near record levels according to data from the Suez Canal Authority, global supply chains through that region remain intact and we are not diverting around Africa to avoid pirates, although when bunkers are cheap enough we’ll do it to avoid Suez Canal Tolls, since below about $300/Ton going around Africa is actually cheaper and now that we’re all slow steaming time is less of an issue. Charging around at 24 knots on our big containerships is largely a thing of the past, and sadly so are $300/ton bunkers.
It is interesting to note that the US government, in the form of the Maritime Administration is itself a source of incorrect information regarding the diversion bit, which is important as virtually every “cost of piracy” calculation relies heavily on some assumed diversion inefficiency to have any level of a “wow factor” attached to it. I can tell you that Maersk, the largest container company in the world, does not divert around Africa and I don’t know of any major carrier that does. Anyway - the Maritime Administration has on their web site a cost of piracy point paper which is again reliant on diversion for its major impact. They reference the cost of diverting a 300k ton tanker as one example, but the only problem there is of course a 300k ton tanker can’t get thru the Suez so would always go around the cape anyway so the real cost of diversion is zero, and we’ll come back to tankers in a minute. They also talk about the cost of diverting containerships. When pressed for data on how many containerships are actually making such a diversion they are silent - don’t even answer me. So, take that sort or argument with a bulker load of salt and even the US government itself contributes to the voluminous amount of misleading to patently false information floating around about that.
Unfortunately for us freight rates on the Asia / Europe trade route - the only international route directly impacted by piracy, are not where we’d like them to be due to over capacity and weakening demand, so it is nonsense so say consumers are paying increased costs due to piracy. Shipping companies, in the face of weak fundamentals search for any mechanism to extract an extra nickel out of customers, including things like bunker adjustment factors and now piracy surcharges - which thanks to frothy news headlines shippers “understand”, but in the end it is the total cost of shipping a box that counts and that is not going up.
And in fact is down considerably from the peak in 2006 just before the financial collapse. More to the point, the routine peak-season surcharge that would normally be applied to that route this time of year has been delayed several times because peak season volumes are not materializing - an indicator of a bad Christmas retail season in the US and consequently very bad news for the US economy. So, from a system perspective, piracy is not an issue. That is an important point - we need to view the effects of piracy from a system level, but the highly emotional nature, the human drama associated with a specific piracy incident leads the general public to view it from a specific individual occurrence perspective and generalize that, rather than from a true system level perspective, a giant mismatch in perspective and effect. Piracy is a cost of business just like many other costs of business and business can manage it, just as they do the others. Piracy is a little different though because unlike emissions targets or bunker prices, piracy gets the general public excited, provides politicians a risk free platform for pontificating, all of which provides some of our industry an opportunity to burden shift rather than take responsible measures to protect their ships.
I assume everyone here knows the basic statistics - piracy is a very rare event considering the volume of traffic that moves through the area. The probability of any specific ship being attacked is remote, and for the types of ships that actually move the majority of international trade even more so, approaching zero. Attack success rates have fallen into the 14% range. But we’ll not belabor the obvious at this point and instead dwell a little on the issues that hide behind the numbers - the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
From the US perspective it is difficult to see how piracy affects our economy or international trade in any significant way. Trade between Asia and the US all goes via the Pacific. In fact the US Maritime Administration says that 80% of traffic through the Gulf of Aden represents trade bound for, or coming from, Europe. By comparison, only roughly 5% of US containerized trade as measured by volume flows through that region (much less when measured by value), with India being the largest component of that. That trade moves on large, fast containerships, a type of ship that is rarely even attacked and has never been hijacked. Of the oil moving out of the Persian Gulf that everyone rings their hands about, the overwhelming majority of it that moves through pirate waters is bound for Europe, and in fact virtually no oil bound for the US out of the Persian Gulf moves via the Suez Canal. Only about 14% of US crude imports come from the Persian Gulf region according to the US Energy Information Agency. That oil moves around the Cape because that is commercially the best way to do it and has been for a very long time - oil coming to the US generally moves in ships too large to get through the Suez.
It is a curious fact that people connect 2 points on a map and assume that just because a particular route is shorter that it is cheaper. That is simply not the case in international shipping where economies of scale represent a major, if not biggest, cost consideration. The fact is that loading 2 or 3 million barrels on a VLCC or ULCC and taking it around Africa to the US is a cheaper way to move oil to the US than loading 1 million bbls or less on a tanker that can fit through the Suez Canal even though the Suez is shorter. This by the way, is one of many mistakes people make when thinking about shipping through the Arctic, where shorter is neither faster nor cheaper and the Northwest Passage will never be viable as a large scale transit route, but that’s a different soapbox.
Back to oil from the Persian Gulf - how much does piracy add to the cost of a gallon of gas in the US? Is the US consumer actually affected? - a relevant question if this is all about protecting the US economy. First off - forget all those ridiculous news items about the cost of insurance - marine insurance is very complex and does not lend itself to one sentence summaries, they will almost certainly be misleading. The most expensive type insurance related to piracy is K and R, which no one forces anyone to buy.
Insurance for us is like insurance for you - the cost is driven by what you are insuring, the risks you are ensuring against, and the portion of that risk you are willing to bear yourself. Some insurance we are required by law to have - liability insurance for oil pollution for example, just as you are required to have liability insurance for your car. But for most insurance it’s up to the consumer what he wants to buy hence what he has to pay. Absolute certainty is expensive and if that’s what you’re after it will cost you. One way to look at it is like when you rent a car the rental agency offers you the opportunity to buy insurance from them at an astronomical rate. Most don’t need it because credit cards or personal auto insurance policies provide that coverage. But if you decide to take it anyway because you want to be absolutely certain you will never pay a nickel if something goes wrong, you really don’t have any right to complain about the cost of insurance when renting a car. I would also note that insurance companies site piracy policies as one reason profits are way up this past year. The way insurance companies make money writing policies is to collect premiums on policies they don’t pay claims on, which should tell you something about the actual risk.
Rather than pay for very expensive insurance it would probably be better to do something that ensures your ship does not get hijacked to begin with. That something would be armed security, which is so far at least, 100 percent effective. From personal experience hiring highly trained (in fact all ex- US SOF folks) as security on our ships I can back of the envelope it for you. It is two weeks from Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia to Capetown, which would be the section of the trip you would need security on. A team sufficient to protect the ship costs about $5000 per day all inclusive, for a total of $70,000. On a 2 Million BBL VLCC that means security to get it to the US costs about 3.5 cents per bbl. While it varies a little by grade of crude, a rule of thumb is that each BBL of crude will produce about 20 gallons of gas. That means piracy adds a little less than 2 tenths of a cent to the cost of a gallon of gas, or a nickel or so to a 25 gallon fill up. This as opposed to the approximately 43 cents per gallon or $10.75 in taxes you pay on a 25 gallon fill up. Once again that Pirates vs. Congress damage comparison sneaks in there and pirates seem the better bargain. If anyone is up for the mission of protecting us from Congress there’s another one I’d like to see. In short - the average US consumer, and tax payer, is not at all impacted by piracy.
There is no doubt that armed security is an effective way to prevent any specific ship from being pirated - this does not deal with the problem with piracy however - just shifts it to those who are least willing to look after themselves, ironically also the ones most likely to whine for government solutions.
But there are a few things to remember when discussing the arming of ships that are worth mentioning. At my company we are very worried about liability, so only employ people we know can keep their heads under pressure, and are not prone to shooting people who should not be shot (an actually hitting the people that should be). So they are all former SEALS. We also limit the types of weapons they can have on board. The result is we, a responsible operator, have the best trained, but very expensive, operators in the world with a limited, but effective amount of weaponry the operators themselves chose. But that’s our choice, there is no international standard on the training or vetting of shooters, or even any requirement they are different than the normal crew. Nor is there any international standard on what types of weapons are considered appropriate. Nor, by the way, is there a US flag state standard for either shooters beyond having a TWIC card, something every AB has, nor limits on weapons and actually no useful guidance on training. That is all up to us.
If there is nothing for US flag, you can imagine what exists for your average flag of convenience. In fairness both the US Coast Guard for US flag, and IMO for the international community do have general, and voluntary guidelines. Neither is specific, binding, or useful in any way. It is a curious fact that virtually everything else we do has some rule or regulation that governs it, an inspection protocol to insure compliance, and a certificate we have to post to demonstrate to the world that we do what we’re supposed to do. We lose an inch of draft to all the certificates we carry around for everything except the use of deadly force, which is apparently so trivial that it can be left up to individual businesses to do as they wish, or do nothing at all and just whine for more Navy protection.
Remember too that the push, hence permission, to arm applies to everyone, not just US or trusted partner country ships, and once armed they are armed everywhere they go, not just the Horn of Africa. Absent any regulatory limits, they are pretty much free to arm however they see fit and give those guns to whoever they want. So from a port security perspective and as we push other countries to accept armed US flag ships into their ports, what happens when a Maltese registered ship with an international crew from unsavory places, armed to the teeth with heavier weaponry than MLL allows- but armed IAW their flag state approved ISPS required security plan piracy annex - what happens when that ship shows up in Norfolk and sails past the Navy base with the world watching from a reciprocity perspective.
And we do worry a great deal about disruptions to our ships in foreign ports as a result of being armed, again remembering once armed, they are armed everywhere they go. There is no internationally accepted process for the entry and clearance of armed merchant ships, instead we are at the mercy of arms import and export laws everywhere we go. We have no doubt that we are violating arms trafficking laws fairly consistently since such laws are convoluted, differ by country, and were certainly not written with armed merchant ships in mind. In fairness to the rest of the world, so far we have only had problems in one port, where our weapons were confiscated but the ship not held up, that port being Charleston. Ironically that happened on the very same day a very senior official at the state department gave a speech stating that arming merchant ships was the only way to deal with piracy off Somalia.
Lastly I would note there is no internationally agree framework for dealing with liability issues, where if we shoot a pirate off a US flag ship there is nothing to prevent that aggrieved pirate from suing us in a Pakistani court and having our ship arrested next time it shows up in Karachi. Unlike you folks, our ships do not enjoy sovereign immunity and port state authorities are free to board, search, and arrest our ships and crew at their discretion and/or whim. There has been some legislation passed in the US providing such liability protection, which of course is very helpful for piracy off the coast of New Jersey, but does nothing to help us where it actually matters. At this point the single most helpful thing regarding piracy (aside of course from solving Somalia) the worlds governments can do would be to push through IMO a rule set that standardizes training and certification of shooters, a standard weapon set, and international protocols for entry and clearance of armed merchant ships in ports and a standard framework for liability cover. That to me would be a heck of a lot more useful than banal calls for the worlds Navy’s to do more.
That leads to the cost of piracy. There are lots of very big numbers circulating about the cost of piracy, and they do not come with any sort of breakdown or analysis, and are generally produced by entities with a particular point of view they are trying to support, and most are very difficult to believe. For example, One Earth Foundation published a wildly quoted report a couple months ago that calculated the cost of piracy as being between 7 and 10 billion, but the largest component of that cost was the supposed cost of routing around Africa of ships that otherwise would have gone through the Suez, where the authors arbitrarily assume 10% of traffic is rerouting. In other words their single largest component of cost is a total plug unsupported by anything other than the conclusion they had predetermined to reach. There is no basis for that assumption, and it fly’s in the face of the Suez canal authority showing record levels of traffic, but it was just accepted as reasonable by an uncritical public.
The numbers that seem to be most frequently cited are a cost of piracy in the 6 to 8 billion range. While I personally take the number with a large grain of salt, we’ll assume it’s true for this discussion. First to keep it in perspective, the international shipping industry earned $380 billion in 2009 carrying $10.5 trillion dollars worth of international trade - 1 trillion of it going through the GOA region. So the cost of piracy number looks a little less large when placed in proper context. If it really did cost $8 billion to secure the smooth flow of $1 trillion worth of trade personally I’d say we’re getting a good deal. Also remember the other costs of business governments inflict on us I mentioned at the opening and the cost of piracy looks outright inconsequential.
But then if we look a little deeper a curious item to note is that the cost of piracy is 6 to 8 billion, but in 2009 the total ransom payments were $74 million according to the US GAO. Using the low end of the cost of piracy then pirates themselves only made 1.2% of the money earned in the pirate industry and of course less than that at the high end of the piracy cost estimate. If piracy started because Somali’s thought they were getting cheated by international fishing fleets they must really be pissed at how much they are losing out in the piracy business. By the way, while $74 million might sound like allot of cash in a country like Somalia - again you need to place it in context of the very large and surprisingly active informal and largely cash based economy that exists in Somalia. In contrast to the $74 million in ransoms you have $1.6 Billion that enters Somalia every year through remittances and the Somali Khat industry which an article just published in the Somaliland times estimates at $180 million per year are examples. I don’t see an outcry to get hawala’s in Minneapolis under control though.
So, if piracy is costing that much money but pirates themselves are only earning 1% of it, allot of money must be going other places besides pirates. Piracy is indeed a big business these days, and as the numbers suggest, pirates themselves are a very small part of it. The piracy conference for profit circuit alone is a big money generator and if pirates knew how much money people were making talking about them they’d quit being pirates and go on the speaking circuit. There is no shortage of people lining up to sell us the latest in anti-pirate gizmo’s ranging from goo guns to exploding fouling nets to even jars of killer bees (no kidding, that was a real sales pitch). The number of people who earn a good living off exploiting a fear of pirates is very large and all to be unemployed if piracy ever gets solved, meaning there is a vast army of people in whose economic benefit it is to make everyone think piracy is bad and getting worse.
What we end up with is a Horn of Africa piracy industry that is not insignificant, but in the context of the other economic activity in the actual region, not out of proportion huge, but appears to be much more significant as a business elsewhere in the world with the overwhelming amount of money made by people other than actual Somali pirates.
I often hear in rebuttal to my arguments that piracy has been getting more violent and that the old model of piracy for ransom no longer holds. That is probably partially true. When all this first started piracy was a relatively clean business with a well defined model operating under a clear rule set that, while we might not have liked it, we all, pirates and shipping people, understood it. In exchange for there being no violence on our side pirates themselves minimized violence to the crew. It was pure business, no one got hurt, industry paid a ransom and we got the crew and ship back, end of story.
In the world of insurance by the way, when probability is low and outcomes when an event happens are predictable, the risk is quantifiable, easily priced, and not exorbitant to insure. From the very start in response to criticism of that model from government folks I have often warned that Somali’s are adaptive, tough, and not easily deterred. If you are going to destroy a model that, while distasteful, keeps things at a tolerable level and keeps people from getting hurt, you should have something to replace it with. If not you will give the pirates free range to devise what the next model will be on their own. They will not simply stop being pirates because it gets a little sporting for them and whatever model they come up we will like much less than the one we had. But that is exactly what happened, the old model was blown up with no thought into what goes next, and everyone seemed surprised that things evolved they way they did.
But from my perspective this is the expected result in reaction to things the international community did to begin with. It is indicative of the sort of knee jerk policy development regarding piracy here, from an insurance perspective, while probability remains low, the predictability of outcome in the event of an occurrence is much less, meaning a risk that is harder to quantify hence more expensive to insure, and we did that to ourselves. Doing nothing until the international community was ready to take on Somalia as an issue rather than poke around aimlessly at the symptom would have been better, as what existed before was better than what we ended up with. In the end, without an overarching strategy to deal with Somalia, and piracy as one component of that overarching strategy, dealing with piracy alone is difficult to justify given limited and shrinking resources, at best likely to be ineffective and could potentially make things worse.
So, with that I’ll wrap up. Piracy is a pain, but a manageable one that must be kept in context. Nothing I have said should be taken to mean I do not understand the very real suffering of the crews actually hijacked. But my perspective is one of the system as a whole, and international response needs to be oriented around ensuring the stability of the system. I would also add that nothing I have said should be taken as not being truly appreciative of the work the Navy does for us and the international shipping community around the world. I personally have a close and active connection to many Navy missions, and my company collaborates frequently with the Navy on many things of mutual interest. I am simply expressing a realist view that we make a lot of demands on your time and resources. Time and resources that are shrinking and given the budget environment we are in, that situation is not likely to get better any time soon. It is therefore incumbent on us to make sure our demands represent the absolute best use of your limited resources from a system level, overall good perspective, not from the parochial, industry specific “what makes us the most money” perspective that some in our industry take.
I would certainly like to see piracy gone, but the only way that’s going to happen is if Somalia itself is tackled as an issue for the international community. Until then the largest impacts are on the East Coast of Africa region and the land locked countries that depend on East Africa ports such as Mombasa. Clearly all Africans have a stake in dealing with Somalia and I’d certainly like to see them do more there, but an interesting and yet to be fully fleshed out impact of the fall of Quadafi is that he provided a very large if not dominate amount of funding for the African Union, the group with troops on the ground in Somalia now. The AU was already suffering from a funding crisis before the Libyan uprising so it remains to be seen how well, if at all, the AU will be able to continue to operate, which of course impacts Somalia and piracy. It is an interesting connection that the uprising in Libya could actually make piracy worse. The other potential impact is on Asia / Europe trade, although there is no data to support the claim that that trade has actually been adversely impacted in any way. There is no direct US national interest that I have ever heard articulated. Unless and until Somalia the issue is coherently dealt with, the best things the international community can do are first avoid doing things that make it worse, and second, provide the legal and regulatory framework necessary for responsible ship operators to protect themselves.
Thank you.
Wednesday, July 6, 2024
The United Nations Just Told Reuters What?
Richard Lough of Reuters has just opened the ugly can of worms no one in the maritime shipping industry ever wanted to see opened. Make no mistake, the Obama administration didn't want to see this report either.Ransoms paid to Somali pirates to free merchant vessels are ending up in the hands of Islamist militants, laying shipping groups open to accusations of breaching international sanctions, U.N. officials told Reuters.Remember, this is the United Nations, which is not so small a thing.
John Steed, the principal military adviser to the U.N. special envoy to Somalia and head of the envoy's counter-piracy unit, said links between armed pirate gangs and Somalia's al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were gradually firming.
"The payment of ransoms just like any other funding activity, illegal or otherwise, is technically in breach of the Somalia sanctions regime if it makes the security situation in Somalia worse," said Steed.
"Especially if it is ending up in the hands of terrorists or militia leaders -- and we believe it is, some directly, some more indirectly," said Steed, a retired military officer.
The U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says pirates are increasingly launching their cross-ocean raids from the al Shabaab-controlled southern coastal city of Kismayu. Recruitment for pirates from the region was also on the rise, it said.How about some excellent investigative reporting.
"Detained pirates tell us that some level of cooperation with al Shabaab is necessary to run a criminal enterprise," said Alan Cole, piracy programme coordinator at UNODC.
Al Shabaab sources agree.
"If there was no relationship between us, there is no way the pirates would be able to operate, or carry their weapons within zones we control," said an al Shabaab militant based in the pirate haven of Haradhere, north of Mogadishu.
A Reuters investigation found the following payments had been made to al Shabaab's "marine office":There is more - read the entire article.
On Feb. 25: $200,000 from the release of the Japanese-owned MV Izumi after pirates received a $4.5 million ransom.
On March 8: $80,000 from the $2 million release of the St Vincent & Grenadines-flagged MV Rak Africana.
On March 9: $100,000 after the Singapore-flagged MV York was freed for $4.5 million.
On April 13: $600,000 from the release of the German ship Beluga Nomination after a $5.5 million ransom was paid.
On April 15: A $66,000 share of the $3.6 million ransom handed over for the Panama-flagged MV Asphalt Venture.
On May 14: $100,000 from the release of two Spanish crew of the Spanish-owned FV VEGA 5.
The amounts were corroborated by pirates, al Shabaab militants and residents of Haradhere.
Piracy just took a strange turn, and it would be nice to hear from someone whose title begins with "Admiral" or whose name is Ray Mabus.
Do people realize that it is a big damn deal that the United Nations would casually discuss the connections between Somali pirates and Al Shabaab? No government has ever officially claimed such a link exists. This would mean piracy is a direct funding mechanism for Al Qaeda, and every ransom payment is illegal.
We appear to now be at a point in time with piracy where if a company tries to free captured mariners with ransom money, the company would be subject to prosecution for illegally financially supporting global terrorism. That's a pretty big deal, and really bad news if you are a hostage.
The STRATCOM Opportunity of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame
No matter where I go or who I talk to in the US Navy, the one thing folks give me a hard time about is that it is suggested I often spend too much time focusing on piracy in Somalia and not enough time discussing Al Shabaab. That is fair, I guess, although I was the guy who suggested we buy the services of pirates to fight Al Shabaab, after all at least we know the motivation of pirates is money...
But on a more serious note, US officials have been talking up the threat posed by Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula over the last few months. It turns out, they had a very credible intelligence source of information regarding the threat of those two organizations. A few details from Luis Martinez of ABC News.
First, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame was captured at sea on April 19, 2024 and taken to USS Boxer (LHD 4) where he was interrogated and held before being transferred to New York. To capture the man while at sea obviously suggests an impressive intelligence operation took place behind the scenes, and while it shouldn't need to be said - the reason the US did capture him on what was almost certainly a short notice window to respond to intelligence is because the US Navy is globally deployed and always present. It is probably a bit of luck that some pirate event didn't have our ships out of position to respond to this intelligence, a detail that needs to be stated because it is important to note piracy is a distraction for maritime forces, not a maritime mission the US Navy is currently, actively dealing with directly.
Second, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame was captured at sea. The sea is playing an important but rarely discussed role in Al-Qaeda's lines of communications. Around The Horn of Africa there is a lot of attention given to piracy as the major problem at sea, but piracy is a symptom of the bigger regional lack-of stability problem and by no definition is piracy a threat to the national interests of the United States. Task Force 151, the international task force against piracy, is symbolic of US military activities lately - it is a halfhearted military solution that can never solve the political problem that sources the piracy in the first place. I do not know why it is the policy of the United States to sail the fleet in circles off the Horn of Africa pretending to protect commerce from piracy threats, but at some point effective and efficient use of the fleet needs to focus on forwarding legitimate security solutions. In this instance, that claim can be made.
Third, I intend to leave the legalities of taking Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame to civilian court to the experts, and highly recommend the good folks at the Lawfare Blog. They have made available a copy of the full indictment of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame at this link (PDF), and have already gone into the coverage of this very important development. Does it matter? Yes, how we deal with terrorists is a legal issue that rises to the level of a Presidential election issue. Will this trial get as much coverage as Casey Anthony? It would be a tragedy regarding the judgment and quality of American journalism that balances ratings in favor of national importance if it didn't, which also means it probably won't get anywhere near as much attention as Casey Anthony on the US cable news networks.
Fourth, the politics of this are also very important. George Bush left office with no way to deal with detained terrorists except to release them to the custody of other nations. Some people say the Guantanamo Bay solution works just fine, but it really doesn't. The bottom line on the Guantanamo Bay solution is that it has always been a temporary solution with no replacement, and both the Executive and Congress has been unable to come up with a better replacement for almost a decade now.
But more important than the detainment politics to me is the war narrative politics. For a couple of years now the US Army has cited only "hundreds" or less Al Qaeda operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Al Shabaab alone is well over 5,000, with access to tens of thousands more disenfranchised folks in Somalia alone. No one really knows how big Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is, but best verifiable numbers range over 500, and they have access to many thousands of disenfranchised folks in Yemen. While it is unlikely the Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame case will bring it up, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is on the rise and becoming the next big problem with thousands in their ranks.
The point is, Afghanistan gets all the attention but that isn't where Al Qaeda is. I've put together a little map to put my thoughts in context, and included a few pointers to where one might notice a few dumpster fires.
One Hot Mess
There are more Al Qaeda at the end of those arrows on this map than all other places not shown on this map combined, and you do not see major parts of Pakistan or Afghanistan on that map. The Obama administration knows this, hell everyone knows this, but the question is what is anyone going to do about it and what should the United States be doing about it?
The Obama administration is going to send Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame to civilian court, which means evidence will be presented publicly and a narrative will emerge from that evidence.
We are about to find out if the United States has any STRATCOM at all in the State Department, because this court case is without question the single most important STRATCOM moment of the next decade in the fight against terrorism - not just on the prosecution legal side but also on the operational side.
So lets all generically think about what is happening here. News reports are claiming Somalia is not only a failed state, but Somalia is a dead state with as many as 54,000 people fleeing the war stricken drought zone in June alone. Pirates are now organized enough to use the Yemen controlled island of Socotra as a fuel depot. News headlines tomorrow will discuss a pirate hijacking inside the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, about 30 miles from Aden if my sources are correct. But none of this news items about Somalia actually matters, because none of these developments represent a threat to the national interest of the United States.
Those are other peoples problems and should be left for other people to deal with. It might be hard to swallow, but when one starts counting problems in Somalia, piracy looks more and more like the least of the problems folks are facing, at least it is unless piracy is part of the income model for Al Shabaab. No government has officially made that claim yet though.
The threat comes from Al Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) - all of whom are capable and have desires to strike at US interests both globally and domestically. Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame represents the link between Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which makes him potentially the most important Al Qaeda member captured outside Pakistan or Afghanistan since 9/11. If similar links between these organizations and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) exist, we are in serious trouble... and those links probably exist.
Think about the map. Right now Libya is a dumpster fire with no local functioning security system, which means it represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations linked to Al Qaeda to move and operate freely around the current military contest for political control. Libya has all the makings of a prolonged, uncontrolled tribal war similar to Somalia where groups are likely to link up with elements of Al Qaeda like AQAP and AQIM for support towards taking political control once Gaddafi is removed.
Folks also better start paying attention to the news on the western side of Africa, because another front is starting to open up in Africa (see here, here, and here) - and I'm not talking about Independence day in Sudan this Saturday - which is where the UN is focused.
Right now we are fighting wars on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the political objective hopefully to reduce the military presence in both nations over the next few years. Pakistan is going to remain a target in an extended air campaign for years. The only sure thing we know from the announced arrest of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame is that the United States is about to really spin up air operations in Yemen and Somalia over the next days, weeks, and months.
Libya is a strategic catastrophe, or as it is more commonly being called privately - an Obama Boondoggle - and it will surely look like one that even the best political spin doctors can't hide as European nations begin to withdraw from combat operations next month. Libya is also emerging as the new nexus in North Africa for Al Qaeda, and anyone who says otherwise is ignoring how that fight against Al Qaeda is the fight everyone knows is coming after Gaddafi loses power. The easiest prediction one can make right now is that some form of covert US military operations against AQIM and their efforts in Nigeria are coming - sooner rather than later. Finally, the Obama administration has a "no massacre" policy, so if things get heated after South Sudan declares independence, expect US military activity there too.
Since AFRICOM stood up, the focus has been engaging African nations at their request in what is described as a "supportive role" towards security. That must change in the very near future.
At some point it is time to admit that strategically, the US military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to consolidate and contain Al Qaeda to those two states has failed miserably, and the US must adapt. I do not know what that adaptation looks like, but western, northern, and eastern Africa are dumpster fires where Al Qaeda presence is growing - and AFRICOM needs to grow up from its touchy, feely hands off approach and be a real Unified Combatant Command if they are going to productively deal with these emerging problems. The United States is facing Al Qaeda on three sides of a continent we have neglected as policy for decades, and our best friend on the continent - Egypt - is enduring some internal issues that remove the nation as a regional leader we can count on.
Which takes us back to Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame's day in court and the associated STRATCOM. What will the court files reveal about Al Qaeda? What will be the emerging narrative from a terrorist trial in the US at a time where the nation is suffering from war fatigue, and oh by the way, the future is darker than the present. How strong are our alliances and are they sufficient to address emerging challenges?
How can the US and China work together in solving the emerging Al Qaeda problem in Africa? We are engaged with China on this, right? If the answer isn't yes, we have much work to do. How long before Europe bails in dealing with problems on their own southern lawn? How much longer will US war hawks trumpet the cause in Afghanistan with other, much more serious problems emerging in Africa and the Middle East? How long can the US sustain "air campaigns" and claim that activity legitimately forwards a solution, as opposed to doing what air campaigns always do - prolong the problems?
The US Navy is heavily investing in force structure to fight the big war against China in the Pacific while the nation is engaged in 6 campaigns - none currently deployed from the sea - in 6 countries across the Middle East and Africa. The most important nation in Africa besides the United States is China. In other words, the Navy is organizing to fight the one nation that has the most shared interest with us towards an Africa that is connected to the global trade system - something Al Qaeda stands squarely against. Is this approach to national security interests our naval strategy, or our naval strategery?
What does the logistics of distributed regional naval support presence look like when low end counter terrorism problems are to be addressed in the maritime domain by the Littoral Combat Ship?
Tell me what WWIII might look like. Take your hand and rub it on a globe from Nigeria to Pakistan on land, and if we count piracy - go from the Gulf of Guinea up towards the Med, down the Red Sea and all the way over to the west Indian coast topped by the Persian Gulf all the way down to the southeastern coastline of Africa. Is that a sufficient amount of territorial mass to conduct military operations and potentially be big enough to be a world war? By 2012 that is almost certainly going to be the range of land and sea where the US is conducting air strikes and maritime security operations against legitimate Al Qaeda related terrorism threats. This is not a hollow prediction, the US has consistently fought Al Qaeda wherever they go, and right now that enormous swath of territory is the area Al Qaeda is attempting to influence politically. Think about it.
STRATCOM matters in ideological struggles, and right now the expansion of Al Qaeda across Africa represents a weakness in our ideological struggle against the legitimacy of Al Qaeda as a credible alternative to the global trade system. If the global trade system isn't effectively reaching the people of African nations, which in many cases it is not; Al Qaeda represents a legitimate alternative to an offering we can't make to disenfranchised people.
The STRATCOM from the Obama administration offers nothing productive to disenfranchised people in Africa, and unfortunately that is the one lesson everyone stands witness to with the Arab Spring. That also might explain why the Obama administration does not stand up for folks like Mubarak and Gaddafi, hoping the result will offer the US better access to disenfranchised people. Will we have compelling alternatives for the people once dictators are out of power? I don't think anyone really knows, primarily because we are still quite uncertain how it all turns out in Egypt.
Are we fighting the right fights with the right tools? Today the Obama administration claims air campaigns aren't war; they are simply an evolved variation of armed humanitarian intervention. If humanitarian air strikes isn't the STRATCOM for Libya, then what exactly is? What about Somalia? What about Pakistan? Yemen? Sudan? Nigeria? Are we shaping the information environment for political action, or simply shaping the battlefield for the next air campaign?
The United States is a strategic hot mess right now in our fight against Al Qaeda. We are engaged in two land wars and air campaigns in four countries, and we do not have a policy that can be articulated as an acceptable plan for successfully ending any of these military campaigns. Why is defense cuts the most highlighted spending issue by this administration when the Presidents policies continue to call for more and more open ended military activity across Africa and the Middle East? How does any of this end?
Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame is sure to be another political parade of some sort, but is the United States preparing to lead the parade by establishing a narrative that explains the use of global forces or are we simply going to operate as usual pretending 6 different simultaneous military campaigns are no big deal? I believe the event represents a real opportunity for the administration to take control of the counter terrorism narrative to forward a more reasonable realignment of counter terrorism policy.
If the President can't establish a narrative that explains the constantly expanding use of military force globally as his primary political tool in the war against terrorism, then he needs to be replaced for getting the United States involved in (and also failing to lead during) what is by any definition the largest hot battlefield globally the nation has fought on since World War II. It is quite concerning that US political leaders are not being held accountable for that remarkable fact.
But on a more serious note, US officials have been talking up the threat posed by Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula over the last few months. It turns out, they had a very credible intelligence source of information regarding the threat of those two organizations. A few details from Luis Martinez of ABC News.
After secretly holding and interrogating a Somali man captured off the coast of Africa for two months, the United States indicted him, claiming he was a liaison between terrorist groups.Many thoughts, not very well collected, come to mind as I observe this event.
The Somali man, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, believed to be in his mid-20s, is a top leader in the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia who has been acting as a go-between with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the U.S. Justice Department alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
First, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame was captured at sea on April 19, 2024 and taken to USS Boxer (LHD 4) where he was interrogated and held before being transferred to New York. To capture the man while at sea obviously suggests an impressive intelligence operation took place behind the scenes, and while it shouldn't need to be said - the reason the US did capture him on what was almost certainly a short notice window to respond to intelligence is because the US Navy is globally deployed and always present. It is probably a bit of luck that some pirate event didn't have our ships out of position to respond to this intelligence, a detail that needs to be stated because it is important to note piracy is a distraction for maritime forces, not a maritime mission the US Navy is currently, actively dealing with directly.
Second, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame was captured at sea. The sea is playing an important but rarely discussed role in Al-Qaeda's lines of communications. Around The Horn of Africa there is a lot of attention given to piracy as the major problem at sea, but piracy is a symptom of the bigger regional lack-of stability problem and by no definition is piracy a threat to the national interests of the United States. Task Force 151, the international task force against piracy, is symbolic of US military activities lately - it is a halfhearted military solution that can never solve the political problem that sources the piracy in the first place. I do not know why it is the policy of the United States to sail the fleet in circles off the Horn of Africa pretending to protect commerce from piracy threats, but at some point effective and efficient use of the fleet needs to focus on forwarding legitimate security solutions. In this instance, that claim can be made.
Third, I intend to leave the legalities of taking Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame to civilian court to the experts, and highly recommend the good folks at the Lawfare Blog. They have made available a copy of the full indictment of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame at this link (PDF), and have already gone into the coverage of this very important development. Does it matter? Yes, how we deal with terrorists is a legal issue that rises to the level of a Presidential election issue. Will this trial get as much coverage as Casey Anthony? It would be a tragedy regarding the judgment and quality of American journalism that balances ratings in favor of national importance if it didn't, which also means it probably won't get anywhere near as much attention as Casey Anthony on the US cable news networks.
Fourth, the politics of this are also very important. George Bush left office with no way to deal with detained terrorists except to release them to the custody of other nations. Some people say the Guantanamo Bay solution works just fine, but it really doesn't. The bottom line on the Guantanamo Bay solution is that it has always been a temporary solution with no replacement, and both the Executive and Congress has been unable to come up with a better replacement for almost a decade now.
But more important than the detainment politics to me is the war narrative politics. For a couple of years now the US Army has cited only "hundreds" or less Al Qaeda operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Al Shabaab alone is well over 5,000, with access to tens of thousands more disenfranchised folks in Somalia alone. No one really knows how big Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is, but best verifiable numbers range over 500, and they have access to many thousands of disenfranchised folks in Yemen. While it is unlikely the Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame case will bring it up, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is on the rise and becoming the next big problem with thousands in their ranks.
The point is, Afghanistan gets all the attention but that isn't where Al Qaeda is. I've put together a little map to put my thoughts in context, and included a few pointers to where one might notice a few dumpster fires.
One Hot Mess
There are more Al Qaeda at the end of those arrows on this map than all other places not shown on this map combined, and you do not see major parts of Pakistan or Afghanistan on that map. The Obama administration knows this, hell everyone knows this, but the question is what is anyone going to do about it and what should the United States be doing about it?The Obama administration is going to send Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame to civilian court, which means evidence will be presented publicly and a narrative will emerge from that evidence.
We are about to find out if the United States has any STRATCOM at all in the State Department, because this court case is without question the single most important STRATCOM moment of the next decade in the fight against terrorism - not just on the prosecution legal side but also on the operational side.
So lets all generically think about what is happening here. News reports are claiming Somalia is not only a failed state, but Somalia is a dead state with as many as 54,000 people fleeing the war stricken drought zone in June alone. Pirates are now organized enough to use the Yemen controlled island of Socotra as a fuel depot. News headlines tomorrow will discuss a pirate hijacking inside the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, about 30 miles from Aden if my sources are correct. But none of this news items about Somalia actually matters, because none of these developments represent a threat to the national interest of the United States.
Those are other peoples problems and should be left for other people to deal with. It might be hard to swallow, but when one starts counting problems in Somalia, piracy looks more and more like the least of the problems folks are facing, at least it is unless piracy is part of the income model for Al Shabaab. No government has officially made that claim yet though.
The threat comes from Al Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) - all of whom are capable and have desires to strike at US interests both globally and domestically. Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame represents the link between Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which makes him potentially the most important Al Qaeda member captured outside Pakistan or Afghanistan since 9/11. If similar links between these organizations and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) exist, we are in serious trouble... and those links probably exist.
Think about the map. Right now Libya is a dumpster fire with no local functioning security system, which means it represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations linked to Al Qaeda to move and operate freely around the current military contest for political control. Libya has all the makings of a prolonged, uncontrolled tribal war similar to Somalia where groups are likely to link up with elements of Al Qaeda like AQAP and AQIM for support towards taking political control once Gaddafi is removed.
Folks also better start paying attention to the news on the western side of Africa, because another front is starting to open up in Africa (see here, here, and here) - and I'm not talking about Independence day in Sudan this Saturday - which is where the UN is focused.
Right now we are fighting wars on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the political objective hopefully to reduce the military presence in both nations over the next few years. Pakistan is going to remain a target in an extended air campaign for years. The only sure thing we know from the announced arrest of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame is that the United States is about to really spin up air operations in Yemen and Somalia over the next days, weeks, and months.
Libya is a strategic catastrophe, or as it is more commonly being called privately - an Obama Boondoggle - and it will surely look like one that even the best political spin doctors can't hide as European nations begin to withdraw from combat operations next month. Libya is also emerging as the new nexus in North Africa for Al Qaeda, and anyone who says otherwise is ignoring how that fight against Al Qaeda is the fight everyone knows is coming after Gaddafi loses power. The easiest prediction one can make right now is that some form of covert US military operations against AQIM and their efforts in Nigeria are coming - sooner rather than later. Finally, the Obama administration has a "no massacre" policy, so if things get heated after South Sudan declares independence, expect US military activity there too.
Since AFRICOM stood up, the focus has been engaging African nations at their request in what is described as a "supportive role" towards security. That must change in the very near future.
At some point it is time to admit that strategically, the US military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to consolidate and contain Al Qaeda to those two states has failed miserably, and the US must adapt. I do not know what that adaptation looks like, but western, northern, and eastern Africa are dumpster fires where Al Qaeda presence is growing - and AFRICOM needs to grow up from its touchy, feely hands off approach and be a real Unified Combatant Command if they are going to productively deal with these emerging problems. The United States is facing Al Qaeda on three sides of a continent we have neglected as policy for decades, and our best friend on the continent - Egypt - is enduring some internal issues that remove the nation as a regional leader we can count on.
Which takes us back to Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame's day in court and the associated STRATCOM. What will the court files reveal about Al Qaeda? What will be the emerging narrative from a terrorist trial in the US at a time where the nation is suffering from war fatigue, and oh by the way, the future is darker than the present. How strong are our alliances and are they sufficient to address emerging challenges?
How can the US and China work together in solving the emerging Al Qaeda problem in Africa? We are engaged with China on this, right? If the answer isn't yes, we have much work to do. How long before Europe bails in dealing with problems on their own southern lawn? How much longer will US war hawks trumpet the cause in Afghanistan with other, much more serious problems emerging in Africa and the Middle East? How long can the US sustain "air campaigns" and claim that activity legitimately forwards a solution, as opposed to doing what air campaigns always do - prolong the problems?
The US Navy is heavily investing in force structure to fight the big war against China in the Pacific while the nation is engaged in 6 campaigns - none currently deployed from the sea - in 6 countries across the Middle East and Africa. The most important nation in Africa besides the United States is China. In other words, the Navy is organizing to fight the one nation that has the most shared interest with us towards an Africa that is connected to the global trade system - something Al Qaeda stands squarely against. Is this approach to national security interests our naval strategy, or our naval strategery?
What does the logistics of distributed regional naval support presence look like when low end counter terrorism problems are to be addressed in the maritime domain by the Littoral Combat Ship?
Tell me what WWIII might look like. Take your hand and rub it on a globe from Nigeria to Pakistan on land, and if we count piracy - go from the Gulf of Guinea up towards the Med, down the Red Sea and all the way over to the west Indian coast topped by the Persian Gulf all the way down to the southeastern coastline of Africa. Is that a sufficient amount of territorial mass to conduct military operations and potentially be big enough to be a world war? By 2012 that is almost certainly going to be the range of land and sea where the US is conducting air strikes and maritime security operations against legitimate Al Qaeda related terrorism threats. This is not a hollow prediction, the US has consistently fought Al Qaeda wherever they go, and right now that enormous swath of territory is the area Al Qaeda is attempting to influence politically. Think about it.
STRATCOM matters in ideological struggles, and right now the expansion of Al Qaeda across Africa represents a weakness in our ideological struggle against the legitimacy of Al Qaeda as a credible alternative to the global trade system. If the global trade system isn't effectively reaching the people of African nations, which in many cases it is not; Al Qaeda represents a legitimate alternative to an offering we can't make to disenfranchised people.
The STRATCOM from the Obama administration offers nothing productive to disenfranchised people in Africa, and unfortunately that is the one lesson everyone stands witness to with the Arab Spring. That also might explain why the Obama administration does not stand up for folks like Mubarak and Gaddafi, hoping the result will offer the US better access to disenfranchised people. Will we have compelling alternatives for the people once dictators are out of power? I don't think anyone really knows, primarily because we are still quite uncertain how it all turns out in Egypt.
Are we fighting the right fights with the right tools? Today the Obama administration claims air campaigns aren't war; they are simply an evolved variation of armed humanitarian intervention. If humanitarian air strikes isn't the STRATCOM for Libya, then what exactly is? What about Somalia? What about Pakistan? Yemen? Sudan? Nigeria? Are we shaping the information environment for political action, or simply shaping the battlefield for the next air campaign?
The United States is a strategic hot mess right now in our fight against Al Qaeda. We are engaged in two land wars and air campaigns in four countries, and we do not have a policy that can be articulated as an acceptable plan for successfully ending any of these military campaigns. Why is defense cuts the most highlighted spending issue by this administration when the Presidents policies continue to call for more and more open ended military activity across Africa and the Middle East? How does any of this end?
Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame is sure to be another political parade of some sort, but is the United States preparing to lead the parade by establishing a narrative that explains the use of global forces or are we simply going to operate as usual pretending 6 different simultaneous military campaigns are no big deal? I believe the event represents a real opportunity for the administration to take control of the counter terrorism narrative to forward a more reasonable realignment of counter terrorism policy.
If the President can't establish a narrative that explains the constantly expanding use of military force globally as his primary political tool in the war against terrorism, then he needs to be replaced for getting the United States involved in (and also failing to lead during) what is by any definition the largest hot battlefield globally the nation has fought on since World War II. It is quite concerning that US political leaders are not being held accountable for that remarkable fact.
Tuesday, July 5, 2024
Denying the Sea to al Qaeda
By now, those who follow the world of counter-terrorism closely have learned that the FBI has unsealed an indictment against Ahmed Warsame, who according to various news reports, was captured and has been held at sea on a naval vessel for the past couple months. It is no secret or suprise that the sea plays an important role in al Shabaab's continued sustenance. Although certainly it is possible to receive munitions and other logistical support via air or land routes, given that al Shabaab controls hundreds of miles of Somali coastline, the sea is a logical component of their supply chain.
The revelation that al Qaeda is moving key personnel (along with arms and money) at sea is an even better reason for us to ramp up countering maritime facilitation supporting al Shabaab and AQAP. Unfortunately, most of the naval assets that would be required to execute this sort of comprehensive maritime campaign are tied up in attempting to counter Somalia's other seaborne scourge, piracy. Using a phased approach, once piracy is defeated (and this can and should happen sooner, rather than later), coalition naval forces in the Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin should turn their attention towards enforcing UNSCR 733 and 751. European countries that aren't hip on countering terrorism should certainly be game to supporting long un-enforced UN sanctions, right?
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.
The revelation that al Qaeda is moving key personnel (along with arms and money) at sea is an even better reason for us to ramp up countering maritime facilitation supporting al Shabaab and AQAP. Unfortunately, most of the naval assets that would be required to execute this sort of comprehensive maritime campaign are tied up in attempting to counter Somalia's other seaborne scourge, piracy. Using a phased approach, once piracy is defeated (and this can and should happen sooner, rather than later), coalition naval forces in the Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin should turn their attention towards enforcing UNSCR 733 and 751. European countries that aren't hip on countering terrorism should certainly be game to supporting long un-enforced UN sanctions, right?
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.
Friday, July 1, 2024
Special Forces Retrieve "Dead and Wounded" in Somalia
I've discussed this issue twice, here and here, and now more details are being released which suggests I may have been pretty close both times.U.S. military forces landed in Somalia to retrieve the bodies of dead or wounded militants after a U.S. drone strike targeted a group of insurgents, Somalia's defense minister told The Associated Press on Friday.It's not over according to reports on the ground.
The operation is at least the second time U.S. troops have landed in Somalia after a targeted strike, though no forces have been stationed there since shortly after the "Black Hawk Down" battle that left 18 Americans dead.
Defense Minister Abdulhakim Mohamoud Haji Faqi called on the U.S. to carry out more airstrikes against the al-Qaida-linked militants.
Somali officials apparently were not informed about the June 23 operation near the southern coastal town of Kismayo beforehand.
Low flying jets were seen over the insurgent strongholds of Merka in Lower Juba and Kismayo in Lower Shabelle during the last 24 hours sparking fears in residents that new airstrikes are imminent.That report is from today, a few hours ago. Somalia has quickly become a hot zone for US military activity, and it has nothing to do with pirates.
The airplanes started flying over Merka on Thursday evening after Makrib Salat (evening prayers), and the insurgents ordered residents to remain in their houses, according to locals who spoke to Somalia Report.
About 7:00 pm, we saw airplanes flying over the town. They did not fire but the residents are feeling terror because they afraid they will be victims if the planes strike al-Shabaab targets, said Ahmadey Maow, a resident in Merka.
One of the al-Shabaab militia in Merka, who spoke to Somalia Report on the condition of anonymity, said that all al-Shabaab officers in Merka fled from the town last night to Shalanbood and Buulo-mareer.
I wonder what we are doing with the "wounded" once they are captured?
Thursday, June 30, 2024
Drones, Not Helicopters Over Somalia
I was wrong and deserve to be criticized for not trusting my instincts, and also for relying on questionably sourced media reports. Helicopters over Somalia? Washington Post says it was drones.The strike last week against senior members of al-Shabab comes amid growing concern within the U.S. government that some leaders of the Islamist group are collaborating more closely with al-Qaeda to strike targets beyond Somalia, the military official said.Nice to see a major newspaper note we are now engaged in combat operations in six countries. The United States is now fighting two wars on the ground, Iraq and Afghanistan, and noteworthy the other four countries the United States is fighting drone wars in (Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia) all have very long coastlines.
The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is reportedly using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. And it comes as the CIA is expected to begin flying armed drones over Yemen in its hunt for al-Qaeda operatives.
It is my hope that when Admiral Greenert becomes CNO, he sets goals that inspire innovation. For example, set goals like launching a Reaper off the future USS America (LHA 6). It isn't hard to predict that airpower alone in the form of drones won't solve serious problems, meaning the serious problems will only fester until some point when a nation hosting CIA drones will kick you off their property.
If the drones fly from the sea, particularly if they fly off platforms where airpower isn't the only option like a LHA/LHD, we don't have to worry about those kind of problems.
Wednesday, June 29, 2024
Footage Of Dutch Freeing Pirated Vessel
On April 2 the Dutch rescued an Iranian vessel from Somali pirates.
The MoD has now released footage of that rescue, during which 2 pirates were killed after they opened fire on the Dutch sailors.
AFRICOM's Air War in Somalia
For the second time in four days, and for the third time since April, the United States has conducted an airstrike in Somalia.The key point here is that all of these attacks are apparently being conducted by helicopter, all of them are being done at night, and all of them appear to be well planned surgical strikes against Al Shabab targets in southern Somalia.
The first attack came on April 6, 2024 near Kismayo where it was reported over 35 members of Al Shabab was killed. The second attack came on June 24, 2024, also near Kismayo, where helicopters reportedly attacked a military convoy clustering at a Al Shabab base. The third attack came last night when three helicopters attacked a training camp in Taabta village in the Afmadow District of Lower Juba. Noteworthy, the news report notes that the locals had been hearing airplanes the last few days, suggesting they were under aerial surveillance.
It has been very difficult to track down confirmation that the 'unidentified' helicopters are that of the United States, but CNN's Barbara Starr broke the story on Tuesday.
CNN has learned that U.S. military aircraft conducted a strike near Kismayo in southern Somalia last week as part of new secret joint Pentagon and CIA war against a terrorist group the U.S. believes is targeting Europe and the United States.The video report found at the link is much more informative, and describes a new JSOC/CIA Somalia operation that is intended to go after high value targets in Al Shabab. Whether or not this is "new" or simply a better funded operation is subject to interpretation, but it does indicate a shift towards more US covert operations in Somalia and it also provides some much needed airpower for AMISOM, even if it isn't in direct support of their operations.
The U.S. hit a stronghold of al Shabaab, a Somali-based al Qaeda affiliate now in the U.S. crosshairs.
U.S. military and CIA personnel have gone to Somalia in recent months, gathering intelligence and meeting key Somali contacts, according to two U.S. officials. The White House believes that al Shabaab and al Qaeda are now hand in glove.
After tonight's attack in Lower Juba, which is the southern most region of Somalia along the Kenyan border, there simply wasn't a way the US would be able to deny responsibility anymore so any revelations by Barbara Starr today are of no consequence. There are only a few outfits in the world that can pull off two precision helicopter attacks conducted in the middle of the night in a failed state over a four day period, and only one nation in the world has both the capability and the political capacity to make those strikes happen.
It will never be confirmed, but US Army 160 SOAR - the same outfit that flew helicopters in the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden, and the same outfit that flew helicopters over Mogadishu of Black Hawk Down fame - is the most likely unit conducting these operations. Apparently they have returned to Somalia to kill Al Shabab big boys, and because they are the very best - it is a good bet that they will find a lot of success and the life expectancy of whoever is unlucky enough to be labeled the "#3 Al Qaeda guy" in Somalia has suddenly become very short. There is no danger in speculating US Army 160 SOAR is involved here, because there just aren't very many units the US has that can do this mission, and that isn't a secret.
And to be blunt, it is the height of parochial thinking within the fighter jock driven naval aviation community that after nearly 10 years after 9/11, the US Navy has still not stood up a naval aviation unit to do missions like the US Army 160 SOAR. Hopefully that will change soon.
Monday, June 27, 2024
What to Watch For This Week
There are six big issues this week I will be watching closely.South Korea will be conducting military exercises all week near the city of Paju near the DMZ. While South Korea conducts exercises along the DMZ all the time, I keep thinking we are going to see another North Korean action in the very near future. The reports of the Army struggling with malnutrition is particularly troubling, and on Tuesday the US women's soccer team is going to kick the snot out of the North Korean women's soccer team at the Women's World Cup in Germany. If you get a chance, look for photo's of the two teams side by side before the game. It is going to look like a competition between the women and the girls, and the North Korean soccer team isn't malnourished like the rest of that nation.
Russia will continue testing the Bulava missile on June 28th. One of the really interesting aspects of this launch is that Russia intends to stream the launch live on the Russian Defense Ministries website. That is either a sign of confidence in the missile program after very difficult development pains or political desperation given how much money has been spent. I am less concerned than apparently most of you regarding the conventional military power of Russia, but I am concerned about Russia's nuclear inventory. Nuclear weapons remain Russia's most influential and most leveraged political weapon.
There is diplomatic movement in the territorial dispute between China and Vietnam. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that there is a resolution, while the New York Times is reporting that both sides have agreed to sit down and discuss the issue. I tend to think the Wall Street Journal mistook the announcement for talks about the issue as an actual resolution to the territorial dispute, and the New York Times reporting is more accurate. Regardless, the possibility the US could get diplomatically involved is one of the factors driving a diplomatic solution from China. I would suggest Hillary Clinton has once again positively influenced the region with her speech last year regarding US policy of South China Sea territorial disputes in ways that most people do not truly appreciate.
It is unclear what will happen with the "peace" flotilla that sailed to run the Gaza blockade. Egypt is playing a positive role, and other nations have also played positive roles in preventing a confrontation. Much of the international will ignore how running a naval blockade is an act of war, but Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is an act of war, which makes whining about rockets into Israel nothing more than a complaint by Israel that the enemy is fighting back. The big difference here is that the war is between Israel and Gaza, not those of the blockade who make themselves enemy combatants in a war zone intentionally. Israel isn't only within their right to stop the flotilla, but also within their legal rights under international law to sink the ships outright. Yeah that would be the height of political stupidity, but Israel will stop the flotilla at any cost.
The TFG in Somalia is making things harder for everyone on the piracy issue. On May 24 six private security personnel were arrested and $3.6 million intended for paying a pirate ransom was seized by the TFG in the name of anti-piracy efforts. While the six people have been released due to Presidential pardon (read external political pressure), the bottom line is ransom money will now have to be delivered in ways that get around the TFG. This comes as it is reported that London insurance companies now pull in more than $120 million a year from Somali piracy, while the United Nations reports ransoms last year totaled just over $110 million. The areas where piracy insurance is required in the Indian Ocean have expanded, so expect a much higher figure than $120 million for insurance companies this year. Bottom line, governments everywhere are part of the problem because none of them are willing to commit to a real solution, and the shipping industry is caught trying to manage their own interests against an assault of some kind from all sides.
Finally, ex-Varyag goes to sea trials on Friday. No need to discuss this one, I'm pretty sure everyone will be watching and there will be plenty of things said. The aspect of this event I am watching for is what China says about it.
A bonus thought:
People have long asked where Somali pirates are getting all of their good intelligence from. They seem to know where the easy to hit ships will be, by name and all. There is ample evidence that Somali pirates are not working with Iran and they also do not appear to work in coordination with any Al Qaeda affiliated groups. One of the biggest questions that has popped up as a result of several different events over the last several months is how much influence and apparent connectivity ISI Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha has with Somali pirate leaders. My sense is the relationship between Somali pirates and the ISI is the next big pirate story on the verge of busting into the media.
(Picture at the top caught my attention. Some will get it, some won't. Click for more information.)
Saturday, June 11, 2024
A Bad Week for al Qaeda
Several key AQ personalities met their fates last week. Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior operations officer was destroyed in the FATA. One of the best open sources for counter-terrorism information, The Long War Journal, reports Abu Ali al Harithi, a leader in AQ in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in Yemen. And Harun Fazul, who has been on FBI’s most wanted list for his role in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, apparently pissed off the wrong folks at a check point in Mogadishu. Life by the gun, die by the gun.
How or who killed these scumbags doesn’t matter. What is important is that constant pressure is maintained on all aspects of the network following the death of UBL. Keeping their operational planners and talking heads in survival mode is the best way to prevent further major attacks on America and our allies.
Despite these positive developments, al Qaeda maintains safe havens in North and East Africa, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, while pockets of true believers reside untouched in a few other places, and yes, even on US soil. It’s unfortunate that we’ve wasted nearly a decade on a variety of ineffective measures, most of which have done little to weaken al Qaeda. During this time we’ve learned that tap-dancing with corrupt leaders and pumping billions of US taxpayer dollars in foreign aid (much of which makes its way into their offshore bank accounts) while they ignore the very conditions that allow terrorist safe havens to persist in their countries doesn’t work. We now know that our own legal system is mostly too paralyzed by indecision to bring captured terrorists to justice so it’s just easier to kill them on the battlefield, wherever that may be. We understand that there are less costly (in lives, money, and prestige) and better ways to eliminate groups of terrorists than massively expensive wholesale conventional military occupations. Despite numerous efforts, we realize that attempts at public diplomacy, strategic communication, and de-radicalization are futile against an enemy whose core beliefs are not negotiable nor compatible with a free society. And we’ve discovered that inane flying policies and TSA feeling up our children makes for great security theater but only entices the terrorists to become more creative in disrupting our economy and liberty. One hopes that what we have learned is that the best way to defeat al Qaeda and its adherents is to rapidly attrite leadership and key facilitators to the point of collapsing the network to irrelevancy and discouraging those who might want to emulate them. Keep on pressing.
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.
How or who killed these scumbags doesn’t matter. What is important is that constant pressure is maintained on all aspects of the network following the death of UBL. Keeping their operational planners and talking heads in survival mode is the best way to prevent further major attacks on America and our allies.
Despite these positive developments, al Qaeda maintains safe havens in North and East Africa, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, while pockets of true believers reside untouched in a few other places, and yes, even on US soil. It’s unfortunate that we’ve wasted nearly a decade on a variety of ineffective measures, most of which have done little to weaken al Qaeda. During this time we’ve learned that tap-dancing with corrupt leaders and pumping billions of US taxpayer dollars in foreign aid (much of which makes its way into their offshore bank accounts) while they ignore the very conditions that allow terrorist safe havens to persist in their countries doesn’t work. We now know that our own legal system is mostly too paralyzed by indecision to bring captured terrorists to justice so it’s just easier to kill them on the battlefield, wherever that may be. We understand that there are less costly (in lives, money, and prestige) and better ways to eliminate groups of terrorists than massively expensive wholesale conventional military occupations. Despite numerous efforts, we realize that attempts at public diplomacy, strategic communication, and de-radicalization are futile against an enemy whose core beliefs are not negotiable nor compatible with a free society. And we’ve discovered that inane flying policies and TSA feeling up our children makes for great security theater but only entices the terrorists to become more creative in disrupting our economy and liberty. One hopes that what we have learned is that the best way to defeat al Qaeda and its adherents is to rapidly attrite leadership and key facilitators to the point of collapsing the network to irrelevancy and discouraging those who might want to emulate them. Keep on pressing.
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.
Friday, June 3, 2024
Piracy Costs Soon To Increase By Billions
A very interesting article on the financial impacts of piracy on the shipping industry.
The piracy insurance costs for the old zone that impacted the 22,000 ships was around $3.3 billion in earnings for insurance companies. The new zone will add an additional $4.2 billion annually in insurance costs to shippers in the region. The 300% increase in insurance costs due to piracy has to date, hurt the region more than it has hurt the global market. That might change though as the piracy zone continues to expand, and in all cases those costs eventually get passed down to the consumer.
What I find interesting is the insurance costs would soon be around $7.5 billion annually in Somali piracy alone. Following the money from Somali piracy, insurance companies are easily the largest source of costs, and I do wonder how much tax revenue Great Britain is earning from those insurance company earnings.
India has made significant strides in fighting piracy along their west coast over the last 5 months, but they are inaccurately taking credit for the recent decline in piracy near Indian waters. It would be more accurate to highlight that the weather has been the primary factor keeping pirates off the west coast of India the last several weeks, and for the foreseeable future those weather conditions are unlikely to change, meaning piracy is simply moving elsewhere - currently towards the Red Sea, among other places.
India is lobbying Lloyd’s of London to reverse its expansion of the area judged prone to pirate attacks to cover almost all of the nation’s west coast after insurance costs surged as much as 300-fold this year.The article is worth reading, and goes on to note that 52% of all maritime trade to India takes place in western ports that could be impacted by the new zone.
“There is no longer any threat along the Indian coast,” Shipping Secretary K. Mohandas said in a May 23 interview, adding there had been no attacks within 800 kilometers (500 miles) of the coast due to stepped-up naval patrols. The Joint War Committee, which assesses insurance risks, extended the zone in December about 900 miles east as the hijacking range grew.
A reversal by Lloyd’s would reduce insurance costs after some premiums skyrocketed to as much as $150,000 per voyage from $500, the Indian National Shipowners’ Association said, hurting shippers’ earnings. Essar Shipping Ltd. and Varun Shipping Co. are among companies that say the move is eroding margins as they struggle with overcapacity and rising costs.
“Typically ships bought insurance for the three days they were moving through the Gulf of Aden -- now they have to pay for the additional 10 days” through the Indian Ocean, said Sean Woollerson, an insurance broker at London-based Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group Plc (JLT), which specializes in shipping. The larger zone means about 28,000 more journeys a year are liable to higher premiums than the 22,000 made in the old zone, he said.
The piracy insurance costs for the old zone that impacted the 22,000 ships was around $3.3 billion in earnings for insurance companies. The new zone will add an additional $4.2 billion annually in insurance costs to shippers in the region. The 300% increase in insurance costs due to piracy has to date, hurt the region more than it has hurt the global market. That might change though as the piracy zone continues to expand, and in all cases those costs eventually get passed down to the consumer.
What I find interesting is the insurance costs would soon be around $7.5 billion annually in Somali piracy alone. Following the money from Somali piracy, insurance companies are easily the largest source of costs, and I do wonder how much tax revenue Great Britain is earning from those insurance company earnings.
India has made significant strides in fighting piracy along their west coast over the last 5 months, but they are inaccurately taking credit for the recent decline in piracy near Indian waters. It would be more accurate to highlight that the weather has been the primary factor keeping pirates off the west coast of India the last several weeks, and for the foreseeable future those weather conditions are unlikely to change, meaning piracy is simply moving elsewhere - currently towards the Red Sea, among other places.
Friday, May 20, 2024
NATO's Quiet War Off Somalia
Last weekend I noted several strange and inconsistent reports of anti-piracy actions taking place off Somalia. There were numerous reports, some saying it was NATO while others claiming it was the EU, then we got word of others involving an Iranian vessel. This doesn't even count the recent USS Buckeley (DDG 84) helicopter incident where a handful of pirates learned about Davy Jones locker.NATO put out a press release describing some of their activities last weekend (PDF).
This doesn't really explain much of anything, and I believe transparency regarding anti-piracy operations continues to be a major problem the EU, NATO, and the US is ignoring. Lack of transparency gives more credibility to other versions of events.NATO action frees hostages and defeats pirates
London: Recent disruptions of several Pirate Action Groups by NATO forces within the Somali Basin have freed a significant number hostages from captivity and denied the pirates their motherships.
By careful co-ordination of his available forces Commodore Michael Hijmans, NLD (N) NATO’s Commander of its Counter Piracy task force was able to seize the initiative and engage known pirate motherships. NATO was then able to disrupt them by either forcing their surrender or removing their capacity to attack merchant ships by the destruction of their attack skiffs.
In the most recent pirate disruption on 16th May the USS BAINBRIDGE was tasked to investigate a report of a pirate attack by the MSC Ayala. The Ayala was well prepared and had good self protection measures in place to deter the attack and the pirates broke off. The BAINBRIDGE however was by then in the area and quickly located the dhow which had launched the attack and observed ladders being thrown into the sea. The US ship questioned the crew over VHF radio and initially they tried to deceive them by denying that they were pirates but then changed their story and agreed to leave the ship in their attack skiff. Once clear of the dhow it was observed that the skiff was unseaworthy and the pirates were themselves then rescued by the BAINBRIDGE. The dhow, which had been hijacked four days previously, was cleared and then allowed to go about her lawful business on the high seas.
In two other separate incidents last week the American ship USS STEPHEN W GROVES and the Danish ship HDMS ESBERN SNARE and both encountered armed pirate gangs actively hunting for targets of opportunity.
During an engagement between the USS STEPHEN W GROVES and the Taiwanese fishing vessel Jih Chun Tsai 68, a known pirate mothership, shots were exchanged before the pirates surrendered. Subsequently a boarding team from the STEPHEN W GROVES was able to access the fishing vessel where they found 4 dead and 2 injured people. The dead were identified as the master/owner of the fishing vessel and 3 pirates and the injured were 2 of the pirates. The surviving pirates have been returned to Somalia. The event is under review to determine how the fatalities occurred and no additional information is available at this time..
When the HDMS ESBERN SNARE approached a suspicious dhow she was fired upon without warning and returned fire in self defence while manoeuvring to increase the distance between the ships for safety. After the pirates surrendered ESBERN SNARE sent her armed boarding team to the dhow to secure it and assess the situation. The boarding team discovered 4 dead pirates and 10 with injuries of varying degrees of seriousness as well as 14 uninjured pirates, none of the 16 Iranian hostages of the dhow’s crew was hurt. The injured pirates were transferred to the ESBERN SNARE for medical treatment along with the remaining pirates. The freed hostages have been repatriated to Iran.
Speaking today Rear Admiral Hank Ort NLD, Chief Of Staff at MC Northwood said of the task force’s successes “This has been a busy week but through these actions we have clearly demonstrated the resolve of NATO to press home the advantage we have of disciplined crews, excellent support from our maritime patrol aircraft and co-ordination with other international counter piracy forces to suppress piracy. We are sending the message that piracy is a criminal activity that the international community will not tolerate. Of course we are very concerned about the decision by pirates to open fire on our forces and the loss of life is very regrettable which is why we investigate the circumstances on every occasion.”
With more engagements we are finding that a lot more people are getting killed, and not only pirates but civilian mariners are getting killed in the cross fire while the western anti-piracy naval forces aren't mentioning that these actions are even taking place at all until several days later.
There continues to be a lot of evidence that NATO is engaged in a lot fighting and killing at sea off Somalia nobody is really talking about. Does that bother me? You bet it does, because it means NATO is being used as a blanket to conceal US military operations in a quiet war off the East coast of Africa. I'll be honest, I really don't care if we kill pirates engaged in piracy, but we are doing something wrong and sending the wrong message if we have to hide that we are doing it.
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