Against All Flags

Questions and answers about pirates and Somalia

Jesse Walker | April 17, 2009

Looks like we're good at shooting pirates. Why not send in the Navy and root out the rest?

America's SEALs did an extraordinary job of rescuing Richard Phillips, the captain captured by pirates off the shores of Somalia, but there's a big difference between saving a hostage and putting a dent in hostage-taking. The Somali coastline is approximately 2,000 miles long, and the pirates there strike quickly in small boats. They pay close attention to naval activity and adjust their activities accordingly. The U.S. and its allies simply don't have the resources to cover all that water all the time.

There are more-modest suggestions floating around for international patrols, in which the region's coast guards pool their resources and the western powers merely offer technical expertise and the like. That's a more plausible approach in terms of the costs involved, but it will fall far short of "rooting out the rest."

But you don't have to patrol everywhere to be effective. Just raise the risks of doing business and the problem will decrease to manageable levels.

There's some truth to that. But in that case, the most important thing is to make it costlier to attack a ship in the first place, whether or not the navy is nearby. A decentralized threat demands a decentralized defense.

Do you mean arming the boats themselves?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are risks to arming crews, just as there are risks to leaving crews unarmed. For each particular ship, the owners—and their insurers—are better able to assess those relative hazards than any pundit bloviating from afar. Some companies might prefer to give weapons to their employees; some might prefer to hire private security; some might prefer training their crews in vigilance and nonlethal defense. And given that training people to use weapons—or hiring people who are already trained—is expensive, some might prefer just to buy insurance. (Note, though, that insurance rates in the Gulf of Aden have risen sharply, by some reports more than tenfold, since the recent wave of ship seizures began. As the piracy problem increases, the market responds.)

In addition to all that, though, there are legal barriers to carrying arms onboard, and these may have distorted the ship owners' calculations. In the wake of the recent attacks, there's been some chatter about negotiating a new international agreement to ease or eliminate those restrictions. That's an excellent idea that would at least give the shippers more options.

Self-defense won't solve the problem entirely, though. The piracy problem off Somalia is driven not just by opportunity at sea but also by circumstances onshore.

So you want to attack the pirates' bases on the mainland?

No no no no no. The idea that we could sweep in, destroy the pirates' infrastructure, and consider the problem solved vastly overestimates both the extent and the importance of any particular organization's infrastructure. Let me say it again: The Somali coastline is 2,000 miles long. Pirates have shifted their bases of operation before—since 2007, for example, most of their activity has moved from the waters near Mogadishu towards the breakway statelet of Puntland. They could easily pull up stakes again. And if you do eliminate one group of criminals, you still haven't eliminated or even, in the long run, reduced the crime. Think of the drug war: The authorities are sometimes able to break up particular gangs or cartels, but the profit motive that drives people into the drug business is still there, so other gangs and cartels take their place. At best, you'll be playing a game of whack-a-mole. At worst, you'll also be whacking a lot of civilians in the process.

Somali piracy is a nuisance, but it isn't a national security issue. Some hawks have tried to link the pirates to jihadist terrorism, but their arguments haven't held up: As Commander John Patch, a former director of the National Maritime Intelligence Watch at the Office of Naval Intelligence, pointed out in the December 2008 issue of Proceedings, a journal published by the U.S. Naval Institute, there isn't any credible evidence of such an alliance. He adds that "there is no great risk of terrorists posing as pirates or adopting their methods either to seize a ship for hostages or to use the vessel itself as a weapon by igniting volatile cargo. To be sure, maritime terrorism is clearly a proven method of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but piracy cannot be plausibly conflated with it."

Pirate activity might not be a threat to national security, but it's still costly.

Absolutely. But you have to keep your perspective. The cost of the fight would be far greater than the cost imposed by piracy itself.

So if you don't send the Marines, what do you send? Aid? Nation-building advisors?