More Guns, Less Bread and Butter
Eager as I am to slash the defense budget and reduce America’s global footprint, I always figured it made sense for America, a maritime commercial republic, to have its navy undertake wide-ranging freedom-of-the-seas duty. Apparently, with all the other things the military is trying to do at once, we now suck at it, though. Mr. Yglesias probably also suspects that the Bush Administration’s reckless and callous encouragement of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia a couple of years ago helped keep the pirate dens of the coast ungovernable.
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Comment by Thoreau —
September 24, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
I don’t oppose some wide-ranging patrols to deal with pirates, but I’m not terribly enthusiastic about it either. To do it you need bases, and relationships with governments, and then you decide that it makes sense to help arm the navies that you’re cooperating with. And once you’ve got those bases and those relationships with all sorts of militaries around the world, well, it never stops with just busting pirates.
Comment by Curmudgeon —
September 24, 2008 @ 11:04 pm
The Gulf of Aden is a complete disaster because nobody wants to take the pirate problem seriously enough. Instead of playing catch and release (literally) with pirates, what’s necessary are mandatory convoys for non-local shipping and a sink-on-sight order for any speedboats found more than 40nm offshore.
Piracy survives because its profitable. Convoys would reduce profits to nearly zero while a sink on sight policy would increase costs. After a while, most of these people would be forced to find some other line of work.
Comment by Happy Jack —
September 25, 2008 @ 12:19 am
we now suck at it
Gortney also suggested they consider hiring security teams for ships.
As luck would have it, the CEO of an American security company is a former Navy SEAL.
Bug. Feature.
Comment by Kolohe —
September 25, 2008 @ 3:21 am
“we suck at it”
Here’s the other thing.
Back in the day (like master and commander days), there was allied nation shipping (which you protected), neutral nation shipping (which you still stopped and boarded to make sure they were on the up and up), and hostile nation shipping (which you seized and took for yourself – along with occasionally impressment of the crew, or at least, treating them like POW’s.). Who was who was constantly changing. But, if you broke the rules, you were a pirate. (and the rules were enforced not only by the admiralty, but also by the fact that no prize agent would touch you if you broke the code)
Right around the steam/sail transition, the British (and American, and French) had largely done away with piracy (esp in the ‘civilized’ world), treaties had done away with privateers, and the steam technology made piracy more impracticable with the asymmetric resources required to maintain a steam power ship, much less build one to pilage another one.
Then, fast forward to the end of WW2. The American Navy (and the British) had basically swept the seas clean. But just thereafter, they created some regs which made it much more economically practical to flag your ship out of Panama, Liberia, etc. For the shipping company there was no downside.
But then, less than a generation later, but after everyone had switched flags, the last quarter of the 20th century saw diesel and gas marine engines become cheap and commonplace. Suddenly fast ships become more available and can be kept up by technically adept but otherwise resource poor folks. Hence piracy becomes profitable again.
So, all these flag of convenience ships are now getting hit. Well, TAANSTAAFL, as they say. Maybe they should ask the Panamanian or the Liberian Navy to help them out?
postscript: would love to see the Jones Act repealed
postscript 2: The US Navy will of course continue to battle piracy as much as it can. The business of America is
businessmaritime commerce. Don’t be surprised however, if there’s a tendency to protect oil tankers preferentially over a dhow carrying hot pants.postscript 3 to some of the specifics of the post. There’s been a failed state and piracy off of Somalia for two decades. (off course piracy has been there for centuries). The area around the straits of Malacca also has a pretty considerable piracy problem, because of the target rich environment, and the someone tenuous control that the government in Jakarta (and to a lesser extent Kuala Lumpor) has over its remote areas. (PI also has similar issues, but a lot less traffic) Also note that in the article he said we don’t have the resources to devote to it, not that we’re not good at it. In fact, since there’s been either an Iraq embargo or similar sea lane management by us for seventeen years now, there is a generation of sailors and officers that have become quite adept at MIO (military interdiction ops – the ’small ball’ that we had gotten out of the habit of since the end of the master and commander days.) You never hear about it because we are rather good and discrete about it. Compared to say, the British, and their Iran fiasco a few months ago. (not to slog on the british, in many ways their navy is better than ours because they can’t just throw resources at a problem – but that was not their finest hour, and those sailors were set up for failure by their lack of training and experience)
Comment by Gary Farber —
September 25, 2008 @ 10:21 am
“Apparently, with all the other things the military is trying to do at once, we now suck at it, though.”
We’ve never come close to eliminating piracy, and modern, post-WWII navies are worse than earlier ones. Modern navies concentrate firepower in a small number of powerful ships, rather than a large number of less powerful ships. As a result, they can’t take on, say, 16 different sets of pirates in a neighborhood at once, which is what would be more or less required. The U.S. Navy simply isn’t structurally suited to fighting, let alone eliminating, piracy; it’s too small and too concentrated. What you want is more of a huge Coast Guard, with hundreds and hundreds of cutters.
It’s really not related to the War On Adjectives.
Comment by Eric Martin —
September 25, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
Mr. Yglesias probably also suspects that the Bush Administration’s reckless and callous encouragement of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia a couple of years ago helped keep the pirate dens of the coast ungovernable.
Mr. Martin as well.
Comment by Idi Amin's Last Meal —
September 26, 2008 @ 6:53 pm
Piracy in the Straits of Malacca. Near Indonesia. Who else is Indonesian? Barry Hussein Osama!
Vote McCain-Palin to keep peg-legs & rum out of the WHITE House.