War Is Boring

I wrote this piece for the now-defunct Homeland Defense Journal. It was never published.

by DAVID AXE

Two decades of war and famine in Somalia have turned the country into what Toronto Sun correspondent Eric Margolis described as a “Mad-Max barter town,” a reference to the 1979 Mel Gibson post-apocalyptic action movie. Pirates, Margolis wrote, “are just about the only people in strife-ravaged Somalia these days who have a regular job.”

In 2008, these pirates attacked more than 100 large vessels on the Indian Ocean, and seized around 40, striking as far as 500 miles from their land bases. With captured ships ransoming for a million dollars or more apiece, last year Somali pirates raked in some $30 million, according to the U.N. This had the effect of driving up shipping insurance and, by extension, consumer prices — and precipitating a global military response. Today more than 20 warships from 14 nations patrol 2.5 million square miles of pirate-infested ocean, hoping to deter further attacks.

Quietly and mostly behind the scenes, U.S. Coast Guardsmen are working at critical junctures across this “global war on piracy.” They join Navy small-boat teams, pictured, boarding and searching suspected pirate ships; oversee the evidentiary procedures when the Navy arrests pirate suspects; help forge the international legal understandings enabling the detention, prosecution and imprisonment of pirates; and lead efforts to study evolving pirate tactics and advise mariners on methods for preventing hijackings.

In an age of irregular threats rooted in the world’s “ungoverned spaces,” the Coast Guard, with its unique skill-set, is a “secret weapon” that’s only growing in importance. As a bonus, the rescue service’s operations aimed at suppressing piracy, have a significant bearing on its domestic security activities.

Crime and Punishment
Due to the distances and weather conditions involved, military forces are logistically best suited to Indian-Ocean counter-piracy operations. But the officers commanding the various naval forces patrolling the region say that there’s no solely military solution to the piracy problem. “Piracy cannot be eradicated fully using naval units,” said Greek Commodore Antonis Papaioannou, who in December led the European Union’s first pirate-fighting flotilla. “To solve it, you’ve got to fix it in Somalia,” seconded Rear Admiral James McKnight, commander of an American-led counter-piracy force.

So deep is Somalia’s dysfunction, however, that a lasting solution on land is a remote prospect. According to the State Department, none of the clan, religious or governmental “entities” in Somalia “have the capacity cooperatively or alone to fully address the piracy threat.” For now, the world can only attempt to deter and prosecute piracy at sea, while awaiting a long-term solution on land.

Fighting piracy is “a law-enforcement mission,” according to McKnight. Ideally, pirates would be prosecuted and tried by the law-enforcement and judiciary apparatuses of their home country, in order to minimize logistical and legal complications. But in the absence of functional Somali institutions, the international community must cobble together ad-hoc systems comprising the military, police, courts and prisons of many different countries. It’s a delicate infrastructure.

Enter the U.S. Coast Guard. “As both a military service and a service with broad law-enforcement authority, the Coast Guard is uniquely capable of bridging defense and law-enforcement functions,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral William Baumgartner told Congress in February.

Late last year, with so many warships converging on Somali waters, potentially hundreds of pirate suspects would wind up in military detention. But for many months, no one knew what to do after detaining such suspects. Somali courts were out of the question, of course, and no other country had signaled any interest in putting Somali pirates on trial. The Danish navy famously illustrated this impasse when it turned captured pirates loose on the nearest Somali beach without so much as a slap on the hand. “Somali pirates to date have suffered few consequences, even when they were apprehended,” Baumgartner said.

To prevent the Danes’ “capture-and-release” method from become the rule, in late 2008 several government separately began negotiations with Kenya to adapt that country’s legal system to the needs of the piracy war. In December, the U.K. signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Nairobi allowing the Royal Navy to render captured pirate suspects to a Kenyan federal court in the port city of Mombasa. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, was preparing a similar memorandum that McKnight called “pretty significant.” That deal was finalized in January.

Washington’s agreement with Kenya falls under the umbrella of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, a world forum for resolving maritime conflict. The Coast Guard provides Washington’s representatives to the IMO. Precedent for the agreement was established in 1988, with the signing of the international Suppression of Unlawful Acts convention, directs signatories to accommodate the prosecution of high-seas criminal suspects of any nationality. “The Coast Guard was instrumental in building broad support for using the existing SUA convention to combat Somali-based piracy,” Baumgartner said.

According to Baumgartner, the Coast Guard also led the U.S. delegation to a recent conference in Djibouti aimed at encouraging African countries to better fight pirates. In short, the Coast Guard has been arguably the most important U.S. agency for building the complex international legal framework for prosecuting Somali piracy.

That’s no small accomplishment, in light of the piracy war’s legal and complexity, which Coast Guard Captain Charles Michel, the service’s chief for international law, described as “daunting.” “You may actually have, for example, Coast Guard and Navy personnel involved with Somali pirates who may have attacked a Panamanian vessel with a Filipino crew being tried in a Kenyan court. You can imagine, from a lawyer’s standpoint, the number of challenges you’ve actually got to [overcome] to put those things together.”

“All I will tell you is, we are in the best shape we’ve ever been for Horn-of-Africa pirates with the establishment of an MoU with one of the regional partners,” Michel continued. “That will allow us to bring those pirates ashore and, if the evidence can be tied up correctly, prosecute it in a Kenyan court.”

That’s a big if. For collecting evidence at sea is no easy task.

CSI: Somalia
In January, U.S. Central Command stood up a new naval task force specifically devoted to fighting pirates. The so-called Combined Task Force 151, with McKnight in command, included three American vessels plus a British ship, each vessel acting as a “mother-ship” for small boats that would deploy boarding teams to check out suspected pirates. The Coast Guard sent a eight-man, Miami-based Law-Enforcement Detachment, or LEDET, for training and to accompany CTF-151′s sailors on boarding operations.

Coast Guard Captain Mike Giglio, the service’s law-enforcement chief, described the LEDETs as “specially trained units that are particularly skilled in developing case packages to support prosecution.” The need for a LEDET in CTF-151 became clear when McKnight emphasized what Giglio called “an unblinking focus towards achieving successful prosecution” of pirates. In other words, McKnight didn’t want to take any chances that suspected pirates might slip through any cracks in the makeshift legal arrangements underpinning the piracy war.

The LEDET with the task force can deploy with small-boat teams, and also trains sailors in evidentiary procedures. The detachment is especially valuable in the aftermath of a suspected piracy event, for gathering up the physical evidence, interviewing victims and providing other material support to the prosecution’s case.

“Think about a law-enforcement event,” McKnight said. “I mean, you just don’t go into a bar scene and just start, you know, rounding up the usual suspects and start taking them off to jail. I mean, you just have to make sure we have the right evidence, whether … they’re carrying, you know, guns or RPGs or something like that. So we have to make sure it’s a criminal case. And if we’re going to take them to Kenya, we have to make sure we have the right evidence so that they could be prosecuted.”

Events in February and March underscored the importance of evidence to potential piracy cases. Twice, the Navy had to release pirate suspects on Somali soil, Denmark-style, because there was inadequate physical evidence, by Kenyan standards, to establish their hostile intent. In the February case, rough weather had swamped the pirates’ boat and destroyed any weapons that might have been aboard. In March, the suspects reportedly threw any weapons overboard before they were captured. On the brighter note, over a 24-hour period in February, CTF-151 and its LEDET captured 16 pirate suspects along with sufficient evidence to mount a prosecution.

“The challenges there are not small,” Michel said. “We need to ensure that our evidence-collection procedures are lashed up very tightly with the Kenyan judicial system so that the … evidence packages … are actually going to be admissible in a Kenyan court. Then we’ve got the additional challenge of actually supporting  the trial itself, which may include bringing witnesses from, say, the attacked ship, as well as bringing witnesses from either the Coast Guard LEDET or Navy boarding team who may have been on board that particular vessel.”

Best Practices
The deployed LEDET’s difficult work could be rendered unnecessary by yet another facet of the Coast Guard’s involvement in the piracy war. While Coast Guardsmen deploy abroad to advance the legal and evidentiary aspects of combating piracy, some of their colleagues back in the U.S. are working to educate civilian mariners, in order to “harden” them against pirates’ tactics. In that way, mariners themselves become the first and best line of defense against pirates.

The Coast Guard is “requiring U.S. vessels and encouraging all vessels to address the piracy safety and security threat,” Baumgartner said in his Congressional testimony. He said the rescue service was telling mariners to take precautions including sailing faster, changing course often, erecting barriers to keep pirates from scaling ships’ sides and even using fire hoses to ward off approaching pirate boats.

“These and other relatively low-tech solutions have already proven effective at ‘hardening’ merchant shipping targets,” Baumgartner said. “Even if such tactics cannot entirely prevent pirate attacks, they may prolong the time it takes for pirate groups operating from small craft to gain control of a target vessel long enough for naval or law enforcement response assets in the area to successfully intervene.”

The Coast Guard’s education efforts appear to be helping. Analyst Martin Murphy, from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said mariners are “waking up to the need to take precautions.”

The piracy war is proving educational for the Coast Guard, as well. Pirates represent a form of “small-vessel” threat. Traveling in the same boats that fishermen use, pirates can blend in with legitimate seafarers, making them difficult to spot before they attack. The Coast Guard is worried that terrorists might use similar tactics to infiltrate the United States. These fears intensified in the wake of the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Those assailants reached India on a stolen fishing boat that evaded detection by Indian forces.

The Coast Guard’s April 2008 Small Vessel Security Strategy called for the service to “leverage technology to enhance the ability to detect, infer intent, and when necessary, interdict small vessels.” “We’ll make sure that we acquire aircraft that have the cameras and the [electro-optical/infrared] balls and the maritime search radar and that sort of thing,” said Rear Admiral Gary Blore, the Coast Guard’s top acquisitions officers.

Such systems are already getting a work-out in the piracy fight. U.S. and coalition forces on the Indian Ocean use a wide range of systems for detecting pirates, some even mounted on robotic aircraft.

But piracy is not primarily a technological problem. Deterring pirates means education, careful legal preparation and proper evidentiary procedures — all skills the Coast Guard possesses in greater measure than other military agencies.

“The Coast Guard has a unique role to play,” Baumgartner said, “and remains committed to working with our military, government, and industry partners to bring these criminals to justice and forge long-term solutions for regional maritime safety and security.”

(Photo: Navy)

Related:
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Sam Jackson to Portray Mysterious Kenyan Piracy Expert
Somali Pirates Trained in the Soviet Union? You Betcha
Pirates Have Stingers? Probably Not …
NATO Frigate’s Pirate Catch-and-Release
Video: Navy, Coast Guard Grab Pirates
NATO Back in the Pirate-Fighting Business
Somali Insurgent’s Tips for Fighting Pirates
Coast Guard Issues Counter-Piracy Rules
A Negotiated End to Somali Piracy?

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