I'm seven years out of the loop and I'm not reading the classified message traffic anymore, but here's some things that would concern me if I was ordered to rush [-]Horatio Hornblower[/-] my command to that section of the world and clean it up:
- Big ocean, little ships. These guys are going a couple hundred miles off the coast, and it's just not so easy to tell the bad pirates from the innocent fishermen or itty bitty enterpreneurial merchants. By the time you see someone veer out of line to attack a merchant, it's too late to do more than shoot live ammo in the vicinity of a big civilian vessel.
- Big bad unilateral imperialism. If the U.S. Navy blows away a few pirate ships, it'll instantly wipe out years of African diplomacy-- not just for the Navy but for the Army & Air Force. It'll send the wrong message to the Middle East, too. It's unrealistic to expect the U.S. Navy to impose worldwide Pax Americana, just like it's unrealistic to expect our imperialistic grunts to bring peace out of chaos in a two-front war. Every one of these pirates is just a poor, oppressed, impoverished people trying to make their way in a lawless, unfriendly world that doesn't care about their culture unless it gets in the way of shipping oil to fuel America's gas-guzzling SUVs for Paris Hilton reality shows.
- A little help here? (Corollary to the previous paragraph.) Where are all the other countries that are a few time zones closer to this shipping lane, and what have they been doing to protect merchant shipping? Isn't any other country in Africa or the Middle East capable of imposing some limits on Somalia?
- Your tax dollars at work. Putting all these warships on station (nuclear aircraft carriers & submarines included) costs a horrendous toll of fuel and material wear & tear. Every time a member of the national command authorities asks for a unit to be placed on the scene of a crisis, that's one less unit available for some other crisis scene. It's also (for the Navy) at least two other units that have to deploy earlier, stay later, and delay upkeep/shipyard repairs. It also raises the deployment rate of the crews who have already cost hundreds of thousands to obtain & train, let alone retain.
- Rules of engagement. Ask the Coast Guard how much fun it is to get the drug-runners in the crosshairs and then spend hours on the radio negotiating with LEO to see if they can order the vessel to heave to for boarding, let alone whether weapons are free or not. Sure, the Navy can "blow these guys out of the water" but there will be collateral damage just like the NYT headlines about UAVs killing innocent Afghani & Pakistani civilians. Frankly, it's a lot easier to goad the pirates into shooting back so that the Navy can invoke self-defense criteria. But then American hostages would die, which is also an unacceptable solution.
- Target practice. No easy answers to this one. If the U.S. has the only Navy that's shooting pirates, then U.S. merchants might be a lot more susceptible to terrorist attacks. Instead of boarding ships with their RPGs for the chance of a $1M payoff, the Somalis might just accept a low-risk $10K from their friendly local Al Quaeda affiliate to stand off and shoot every fourth tanker. Rather than risk those exchange ratios it's a lot easier to cough up a million or so to ransom live hostages every few months. And so if you're not going to kill pirates or break things, then why race a Navy ship to the scene?
- Everyone understands how hard it is to fight land-based terrorism. Pirates are a waterborne equivalent.
- Finally, everyone who's done any open-ocean sailing understands this question: When's the last time you saw a merchant ship take "evasive action"?
for the Navy!
