C'mon Nords, I'm looking for a big response from you on the action the military took to settle this. Can't believe these SEALS parachuted into the ocean, were retrieved by the Bainbridge and then shot the bad guys simultaneously without injury or death to the captain. Unbelieveable!!
Well, falling out of the sky and linking up with a ship has been SOP for decades. They even used to call it "Rubber Duckie", although that description probably projects the wrong image to the bad guys. They probably boarded the aircraft in Norfolk and stayed airborne all the way to the BAINBRIDGE, refueling several times inflight.
Shooting the bad guys-- that's what they spend all their time (and a tremendous quantity of ammunition) practicing. If there's any question at all, it's why there are only three dead pirates instead of four.
A frightening number of things could have gone wrong with this whole operation. It's nice to see the good guys win one for a change.
I highly recommend two books by Dick Couch, a retired Navy SEAL O-6 with a Vietnam POW rescue to his credit. Dick is still, I believe, the only author permitted to follow SEAL students through BUD/S and supplemental training:
Amazon.com: The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228: Dick Couch: Books
Amazon.com: The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident: Dick Couch: Books
We keep hearing how the area is so large, impossible to patrol, etc. Why is it that this wouldn't work: As soon as a tanker is under attack, or has a clear suspicion of an imminent attack, it calls the Navy and jet fighters or helicopters are dispatched.
Obviously it wouldn't work, or we wouldn't have a pirate problem...
Not sure about the Navy, but in the Air Force, to get planes in quickly requires them to be on runway alert or in the air on round the clock combat air patrol. For each of those on alert used to require 3 on the ground undergoing maintenance, refueling, crew rest, etc. And that's just the planes, you also need comm units, command and control, etc, etc.
Something you would do for short periods in wartime, but not likely for random pirate attacks. The Navy might be better at this with aircraft carriers, but do you really want to tie up a carrier for this mission? It's what Nords said earlier.
Same with the Navy. And if the carrier was doing anything else but steaming in the correct direction, it might take 20-30 minutes to launch the first aircraft. Carriers do flight ops just about every day, but the missions are usually fully booked and diverting for a pirate call means that something else won't get done, they'll need more tankers, they'll need more air-control support, and so on.
The effective (controlling) range of a Navy fighter jet is probably down to 200-300 miles, even with Air Force tankers & battlespace-control aircraft on the scene. The carrier could easily be two or three times that distance away when the 911 call comes in. An amphibious warfare Expeditionary Strike Group is almost all helicopters, V-22 OSPREY, and old-fashioned Harrier jets. Again, not much more than 200 miles and more like 100+ when you're loaded down with ordnance.
A carrier can move at more than 30 knots, but running away from its screening ships might be a bad idea. A realistic speed of approach for the whole group would be more like 25 knots with a lot of underway refueling of the non-nuclear ships. Even if the carrier was doing flight training 50 miles away, it might be 30-60 minutes to whistle up a couple of fighter jets to overfly the merchant ship. Probably not enough response time.
And once all that maritime supremacy is on the scene, what next? It's like having the SWAT team do the hostage negotiations-- it doesn't matter how much firepower is on the scene, the problem is the hostage negotiations.
Taxpayers aren't willing to pay for it. I was commissioned into the 600-ship Navy of 1982 when we were going to have over two dozen aircraft carriers countering the Evil Empire at every domino. Then the Berlin Wall tumbled, DESERT STORM was declared a success, and everyone started clamoring for their share of the "peace dividend". (Never mind Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, ...) Today we have 10 or 11 carriers in commission, depending on whether you declare the new one ready to operate or not. And the carriers are the funding centerpiece, too-- the 600-ship Navy was going to have 125 attack submarines, and current construction projections have today's numbers dipping into the low 50s before they start climbing again. We're actually ripping apart 25-year-old boomers to turn them into multi-mission guided-missile attack submarines because they happen to have enough nuclear fuel to stick around for a few more years.
Actually, maintaining safe open sea lanes is the Navy's number-one mission, is it not ?
Yes, but for whom? Warships and oil tankers-- no problem. Definitely open and perhaps even safe. The current buzzwords are "forward presence" and "power projection".
But maritime security is a bit further down on the priority list. And food relief for starving African nations who aren't helping to control piracy in their local waters? Please contact the State Department to help us sort out our priorities...
Concerning tying up forces and the cost of a presence... I admit I'm speaking from ignorance, but these ships patrol somewhere, and are doing practice operations all the time. Might as well have some doing some practice near Somalia, right?
Putting one carrier battlegroup somewhere (like the Arabian Gulf) actually requires 3-4 battlegroups-- one on station, one in shipyard, one working up for the deployment, and perhaps one somewhere in between. (Carriers can get a lot of work done in a shipyard in six months, but refueling their reactors takes them offline for a minimum of two years.) So... depending on how nasty the individual jobs are, you can have 24/7 presence in three or maybe four places. Anything more will not merit a carrier without canceling another operation. In an emergency you might get an amphibious ship full of pissed-off Marines who've just lost a liberty port.
Personnel operational tempo limitations strive to have sailors around homeport for a year between six-month deployments. Those numbers are inversely correlated to retention & recruiting, too-- make the deployments longer or the homeport times shorter, and people will vote with their feet.