Missing the point?
Robert Kaplan in the NYT says the US needs three navies but only has two:
Piracy has been endemic to the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, and particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as “sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number and audacity as trade increased, so that piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity…
Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the lifeboats…
we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge, with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city, facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy, street-fighting Navy.
In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis reveals, it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for patrolling the major sea lines, thus guarding the global commons. It packs enough precision weaponry on its warships to project power on land against adversaries like North Korea and Iran. But it still does not have enough of a sea-based, counterinsurgency component to deal with adversaries like Somali pirates and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features speedboats loaded with explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s coastline, which could ram ships on suicide missions.)
Do we really need three navies, as Kaplan suggests, with all the expense involved, or something simple like new rules of engagement? AP: “U.S. rules of engagement prevent the Americans using their vastly superior fighting power to engage the pirates if there is any danger to civilians.”
April 13th, 2009 at 9:52 am
It is considered trite to say this in today’s John Boyd-influenced atmosphere, but some additional precision technology might be invaluable for this type of warfare. We’ve got large ships carrying a combination of large, precise weapons (cruise missiles and cannons) and small, imprecise weapons (heavy machine guns and masters-at-arms with sidearms). It seems to me that there is a gap needing to be filled by small, precise weapons.
It should be straightforward to place multiple select-fire (semi- or full-auto) .50 caliber rifles in small remote-controlled, stabilized, armored turrets on warships of any size. With appropriate vision and control systems, such arms could precisely kill targeted individuals, or just destroy the engine on an incoming speedboat with little chance of collateral damage.
Such precision might very well negate much of the downsides of extremely tight rules of engagement. It would certainly be a useful tool for warriors attempting to dominate the psychological battlefield.