So this is where we are at with anti-piracy off the coast of Africa. The UN has given the plea, as has most organizations out there, that we need to do something about the rampant piracy going on in the Gulf of Aden. But where it all goes is up in the air. We need action, and not just talk, if the issue of piracy is to be dealt with properly. This latest resolution is nice, but if none of the nations out there are willing to contribute to this effort with naval support or they do not have the resources, then I really don’t see how the job could be done. Unless….. we actually re-visit the idea of private naval companies and using contract security companies to protect these ships.
I disagree with those that say a private force could not properly protect these ships. My best analogy for this is convoy security in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. If set up correctly with Rules for the Use of Force, and with good UN oversight, then security contractors could do an excellent job. But yet again, that would take the UN to re-evaluate it’s view on this type of activity.
Another idea is to have private naval companies provide the boats and crews, and have either US Navy or Marine troops man the guns. If the US Navy or whatever navy does not have the vessels in their system to perform these tasks, I am sure if they were to contract this out, they would get some providers. And the concept below, with putting a tank on top of one of these vessels looks funny, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
But back to the legalities– if the UN will only allow a Nation’s military to perform these activities, then maybe this military/private military combination is a possible solution? In Iraq, you would see US military escorting civilian driven trucks hauling food and water and fuel all the time–let’s just switch this over to water convoy operations. And the targeting system on an Abrams tank would be very impressive on the high seas and could be used to effectively shut down these guys.
I also think it would be smart to have a three pronged security set up for these types of escorts. You would need an air component, like a helicopter (that could land on an escort ship) or a seaplane, so they could spot any potential threats. UAV’s might be a good tool for this as well, and could be launched from the main client ship or escort ship. Even a UAV with a directional speaker system could be useful, so you could warn pirates to stay away or they will be fired upon.
The second component would be a counter assault ship. Something fast and maneuverable that can get between the client ship and the threat and run circles around slower pirate vessels.
The third component would be the actual escort ship or force that is posted on the client ship. An escort ship would be nice, with a landing pad for a helicopter and crew quarters for security and crew. To have a few guys on the client ship and having an escort ship would probably be the best combination. I guess if you wanted to minimize cost, you could just make the client ship the ‘headquarters’ and post your security there.
Finally, like with convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should also be looking at trying to get the shipping industry to coordinate so that large flotillas of ships could be put together and be protected by a robust security force. Part of the problem out there is that you have all of these ships floating around on their own, and they are all just too spread out to protect with the current naval forces. But getting these companies to do that would be like trying to herd cats.
There are lots of ideas out there to get this done, and pretty soon necessity might force the hand of these companies and the UN to actually endorse and use private naval forces. And the mountain of legalities of using private naval forces will have to be worked out soon, or yet again, the world will stand by(just like we stood by during the Rwanda Genocides) while small bands of pirates completely terrorize the shipping industry. And what will really force the issue is if people start dying of starvation in places like Somalia, because aid ships are either attacked or ransacked by these ‘mufsid’ and are unable to deliver that life saving aid. –Head Jundi
A cheap way to fight pirates. Take a Marine Corps 70 ton Abrams tank or a Bradley fighting vehicle. Put it on a 25 knot aluminum crew boat (shown is the M/V Miss Danielle) which has a deck cargo capacity of 200 tons. Go fight pirates. No charge to the Navy/Marine Corps for the concept.
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A statement from Vice Admiral Gortney,
“The Coalition does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region. The shipping companies must take measures to defend their vessels and their crews.”
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UN calls for action to fight pirates off Somalia
By EDITH M. LEDERER
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday calling on all countries with a stake in maritime safety off Somalia to send naval ships and military aircraft to confront growing piracy there.
The measure urging stepped up international action also called for ships and planes to use “the necessary means” to stop piracy. It was adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which means its provisions can be enforced militarily.
The French-drafted resolution said the surge in piracy and armed robbery off Somalia’s coast poses a serious threat “to the prompt, safe and effective delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia,” where as many as 3.5 million people will reportedly be dependent on food aid by year’s end.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Wednesday that nearly 90 percent of the food delivered to the country arrives by sea on World Food Program ships.
“Navy vessels from the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Canada have been escorting our ships safely into the ports. Canada’s tour of duty ends on October 23. As yet, no nation has volunteered to take Canada’s place,” he said. “Without escorts, those ships will not arrive. Without that aid, more people will die.”
The resolution notes “that increasingly violent acts of piracy are carried out with heavier weaponry, in a larger area off the coast of Somalia.”
Somali pirates are holding a Ukrainian cargo ship loaded with tanks and heavy weapons hijacked late last month. They initially demanded a $20 million ransom, but reports Tuesday said the demand had dropped to $8 million. A half-dozen U.S. Navy warships have surrounded the MV Faina.
The resolution only applies off Somalia, whose 1,880-mile coastline is the longest in Africa. Most pirate attacks occur in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, to the north of Somalia. But attacks are increasing in the Indian Ocean off eastern Somalia.
A Security Council resolution adopted in June authorized countries, for a period of six months, to enter Somalia’s territorial waters with advance notice and use “all necessary means” to stop acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea.
The new draft resolution has no time limit.
Somalia, a nation of about 8 million people, has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned on each other.
Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaida have been battling the shaky transitional government and its Ethiopian allies since their combined forces pushed the Islamists from the capital in December 2006.
Ban told reporters “the international community is now very seriously looking at how to help their (Somalia’s) security concerns through deployment of (an) international stabilization force.”
“I’m in the process of identifying potential troop contributing countries who can provide troops and funds or resources and other tools,” he said.
Story Here
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8 Oct 2008
Fighting Gulf of Aden piracy
As piracy rises off the Somali coast, new security initiatives are launched in tandem with calls from senior western naval personnel for the commercial sector to consider private solutions, Patrick Cullen writes for ISN Security Watch.
By Patrick Cullen for ISN Security Watch
The dramatic continuing standoff between US naval warships and Somali pirates demanding a US$20 million ransom for a hijacked Ukrainian ship loaded with Russian tanks has again focused the world’s media attention on piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
Attacks in Somali waters have more than doubled since last year, and the severity of the crisis has refocused government attention on finding solutions to the problem. To date, these solutions have included the unilateral deployment of French, Russian and Malaysian naval vessels to the Gulf of Aden to deal with direct threats to their citizens and commercial fleets. Yet a number of other interesting anti-piracy security developments have also been tabled.
First, two new multinational naval efforts to provide anti-piracy patrols have been established along the East-West corridor of the Gulf of Aden.
Second, and more provocatively, an economic and diplomatic window seems to have been opened for private security firms offering anti-piracy services off the horn of Africa.
Whereas the economic window has been created by sky-rocketing insurance rates for vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden, an apparent diplomatic window has been facilitated by recent pronouncements on private security from senior western naval personnel dealing with anti-piracy operations in the Gulf.
Allied maritime security and “escorts”
Recently, there have been two separate multinational naval initiatives set up to protect commercial shipping transiting the gulf. On the one hand, a “maritime security patrol area” has been set up to provide a shipping lane patrolled by a coalition of allied naval vessels as well as aircraft from Combined Task Force 150.
On the other hand, earlier this week, the European Union’s Brussels-based anti-piracy “cell” announced that two French naval vessels had been deployed to the Gulf of Aden to offer escort services to commercial shipping.
By publicly posting their positions and departure times, these French corvettes are offering the security of their proximity to any vessels that are willing or able to sail at this timetable. Moreover, this east-west (and back again) escort service is simply the vanguard of a larger 10-country EU naval force expected to be deployed to the Gulf of Aden by the end of the year.
The creation of the maritime security patrol area and the EU escort service are clearly positive developments and have been welcomed by the international shipping community. However, some analysts have been skeptical of the ability of these public efforts to effectively provide security in the Gulf of Aden to commercial shipping in its entirety.
Without a more aggressive set of rules of engagement to deal with the pirate mother ships used in this recent spate of highjackings, fears remain that pirates will have plenty of opportunities to attack unprotected ships.
Worryingly, this concern seems to be backed up by reports that ships – including a Hong Kong-registered tanker – have recently been hijacked while transiting within the maritime security patrol area.
As one maritime security analyst told ISN Security Watch: “Coalition forces have had these pirate mother ships in their sights and have simply chased the small pirate speedboats away from their target vessels. This will never solve the problem, and in the meantime the West will continue to play by Marques of Queensberry rules and accomplish nothing.”
Calls for private security
Naval rules of engagement aside, the limitations of the multinational naval coalition’s ability to provide security for the sheer numbers of an estimated 20,000 commercial ships transiting the Gulf of Aden has been acknowledged publicly.
Just over two weeks ago US Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, the Combined Maritime Forces Commander stated that “the coalition does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region.”
While this admission was not surprising in itself, his proposed solution for dealing with the threat of piracy has been. Noting that public security efforts cannot guarantee safety in the region, he told media sources that “the shipping companies must take measures to defend their vessels and their crews,” and went on to urge commercial shipping firms to employ security teams to deal with the threat of piracy.
British Commodore Keith Winstanley, deputy commander of the Combined Maritime Forces in the region, later publicly underscored these remarks, stating that these security measures “would include shippers considering hiring private armed security escorts.”
In a move seemingly timed to take advantage of these recent public pronouncements – as well as the reported tenfold increase in insurance rates for ships transiting the Gulf of Aden – one London based private security company has teamed up with a brokerage firm to offer private security services designed to lower insurance rates in the Gulf.
Mike Maloney, an insurance broker involved in the deal, told ISN Security Watch that their private security partner’s ability to place an armed security team on board a client’s vessel had convinced a number of insurance underwriters to offer preferred rates to ship owners that took advantage of these private security teams.
Other private security companies have also taken renewed interest in the possibilities of using security teams to provide anti-piracy services off of the coast of Somalia.
Tom Ridenour, the director of maritime security services for the private security company Blackwater Worldwide, told ISN Security Watch that while putting a security team on board a client’s vessel may be part of the solution, this technique should also be supplemented with broader defensive security measures.
“Ideally, an on-board security team would also be supplemented with a mobile private security force placed on small and fast interceptor vessels that could impose itself between the client’s ship and the attacking pirates before they could pose a threat to the crew,” he said.
The skeptics
Others, however, remain skeptical of Commodore Winstanley’s call for shipping firms to hire armed private security personnel for their commercial fleets. Cyrus Mody of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) told ISN Security Watch that while they have received requests for advice from shipping companies considering hiring armed private security services, the IMB maintained its policy of not advocating the use of weapons.
“We feel putting weapons on board will only escalate the potential for violence,” Mody said.
He also argued that this would open up an extremely complex legal issue regarding oversight over the use of force at sea.
“Hypothetically, if an armed security team exchanged fire with pirates and someone was killed, who would be held accountable? Would it be the ship master, or ship owner, or the private security team? What jurisdictions would be involved? Would it involve the vessel’s flag state and the law of the nation in whose water the incident took place?”
Dominick Donald of Aegis Defense Services agreed with these concerns, arguing that the multi-jurisdictional legal issues surrounding a potential use of lethal force by a private security team against pirates – even in self-defense – had yet to be clearly hammered out.
“More to the point,” he told ISN Security Watch, “the use of armed private security on board commercial vessels would not stop piracy…it would simply displace it to other unprotected vessels.”
As yet, it is difficult to speculate on the extent to which the higher echelons of the US and UK naval defense establishments have cogently considered a form of public-private cooperation – or responsibility sharing – in protecting the private sector from piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
Moreover, assuming that the costs of these services will mount into the tens of thousands of dollars – the rate for such services in the Malacca Straits three years ago – it is also likely that only a very small percentage of the commercial maritime industry would be willing and able to pay for such private security services.
However, the possibility for a growing role for private maritime security in anti-piracy work should not be discounted.
In a curious parallel, these recent pronouncements from western naval personnel are in some ways reminiscent of the early and ad hoc calls by Coalition forces in Iraq for the private sector to provide their own private security in the face of a growing insurgency and an over-stretched coalition force.
If the public sector’s unwillingness to eliminate this piracy threat is matched by a willingness to advocate giving the private sector the responsibility to provide their own security solutions, we may yet witness the rise of the private naval company.
Patrick Cullen is a political risk consultant and an expert on issues pertaining to the private security industry. He is the author of numerous academic and professional publications on the subject. He is currently finishing his doctorate at the London School of Economics and is based in Manhattan, New York.
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4 Apr 2008
Private security takes to the sea
With violent maritime piracy and the risk of waterborne terrorism on the rise, states and non-state actors turn to private security, Patrick Cullen writes for ISN Security Watch.
By Patrick Cullen in New York
Piracy, once generally perceived to have been eliminated as a security threat, has re-emerged as a significant problem for state and non-state actors alike. Though the number of pirate attacks had waned during the last few years, new International Maritime Bureau statistics have shown that piracy is again on the upswing worldwide. This upsurge in piracy – and the market created for countering this threat – can be conceptualized along three distinct lines.
Mapping the maritime private security market
Within the private sector, shipping, oil and insurance firms have been impacted by a significant and long-term increase in pirate attacks mounted against off-shore oil platforms, tankers and cargo vessels traveling throughout the world’s shipping lanes.
In strategic “choke points” like the Malacca Straits, large, slow-moving container ships and tug-pulled drilling rigs are easily approached and boarded by the much smaller, agile and quicker boats used by today’s pirates.
These attacks, measured in terms of ship and cargo losses as well as increased insurance premiums, have amounted to losses of up to US$16 billion annually.
The second market driver is the inability of weak and failed states to effectively patrol their territorial waters, leading to an increase in piracy as both a crime of opportunity as well as a form of organized crime.
Today, brazen, violent and technologically sophisticated pirate syndicates-for-hire are using areas of non-existent or weak government as bases for their criminal activities. Armed with RPGs and AK-47s and using GPS devices, pirates operating over 100 miles off of the coast of the Horn of Africa are boarding vessels and holding the crews hostage for ransom demands.
At the same time, illegal and sometimes violent fishing operations trawl up and down the unpoliced coastlines of these weak states, occasionally using physical force to intimidate and steal from their competitors.
One retired US Coast Guard officer, who is currently working for a private security firm, told ISN Security Watch that there were an estimated 700-900 “pirate” fishermen operating off of the coast of Somalia alone.
The third market driver for maritime security has been the perception of a terrorist threat.
Since 11 September 2001, this vulnerability of international shipping to piracy has been redefined by the US and other states as a terrorist threat. Fears that al-Qaida or another terrorist organization may sink a large tanker to block a major shipping lane or use a hijacked liquid natural gas container ship to mount a large-scale spectacular terrorist attack against a major port have become a serious concern.
While the state and non-state actors affected by these developments can be distinguished by the different threats they face from piracy and maritime terrorism, today they can also be aggregated by their choice of security solution: both states and the private sector are turning to private security companies (PSCs) to help meet their maritime security needs.
Maritime private security services
Perhaps it is unsurprising considering its reliance on private security in Iraq that the US has taken the lead in the state use of maritime security firms. They have done so in a number of areas.
At the federal level, both the Department of Homeland Security and the US Coast Guard have solicited advice from PSCs on matters of maritime security. For example, after the 9/11 attacks, a number of British firms – including Marine Underwater Security Consultants and Hart Security – were invited to participate in a committee drafting of the US Coast Guard’s ISPS Code submission to the International Maritime Organisation.
After the bombing of the USS Cole, the PSC Blackwater was awarded a contract to train over 50,000 US sailors in the use of small arms to defend their ships from terrorist attacks.
This US public-private interface has not been limited to merely an advisory or training role. At the local government level, the US has launched a number of pilot programs using the firm Seawolf Marine Patrol to provide manned guarding services for a US ports. Overseas, the US navy has relied upon the PSC Glenn Defense Marine Asia to provide security – complete with armed ghurkhas – for its naval vessels while in port.
Though the US is a significant state client of these nautical private security services, it is far from the only one.
Middle Eastern and Asian states have hired PSCs like Britam to provide training for their own maritime security forces to protect state-owned high-risk maritime assets. In the wake of the 2002 assault on the Limburg tanker in Yemeni coastal waters, for example, Hart Security was hired to train the Yemeni Navy in waterborne anti-terrorist tactics.
African states have turned to PSCs in an even more proactive capacity. Both the self-declared State of Puntland and Sierra Leone have hired armed PSCs to police their coastlines.
In some cases, these “private navies” have been used to combat illegal fishing and enforce their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) fishing rights granted under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) regime. In other instances they have been used to deter or eliminate pirate networks that were targeting local coastal trading communities.
The private sector is also a growth market for maritime private security firms.
Traditionally, various members of the maritime industry more broadly have hired PSCs in risk mitigation roles. For example, the marine insurance industry utilizes PSCs in various political risk advisory, due diligence, asset recovery and maritime kidnap and ransom (k&r) services associated with piracy and terrorism.
More provocatively, large shipping and oil companies sensitive to increasingly violent pirate attacks against their oil tankers and drilling rigs have turned to PSCs like Background Asia Risk Solutions to provide armed personnel and armored escort vessels to “ride shotgun” while escorting these expensive assets through some of the world’s most dangerous waterways.
Future prospects for maritime security
This latter development has caused some consternation amongst the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, whose territorial waters overlap with the heavily trafficked Malacca Straits where some of these armed private security escorts have taken place.
Though reports of PSCs conducting armed escort services have died down in the last 18 months, this does not necessarily mean they are not still happening.
Steve Weatherford, the former head of maritime security operations at Glenn Defense Marine Asia, told ISN Security Watch that “there continues to be a demand for security on board vessels, and not just in the Malacca Straits […] but the specific details of these operations are kept low key by the participants.”
The view of a robust future for private security responses to piracy is shared by others in the industry.
Tom Ridenour, the director of maritime operations at Blackwater, is looking to expand overseas into this counter-piracy market, recently purchasing a ship capable of deploying small rigid-inflatable boats, helicopters and a 30-man security team to provide anti-piracy services.
Though this new ship has not yet won any contracts, Ridenour told ISN Security Watch “we’ve applied the Kevin Costner ‘field of dreams’ concept. If you build it, they will come.”
Whether or not this niche market of private maritime security expands along with its land-based counterpart remains to be seen.
Patrick Cullen is a political risk consultant and an expert on issues pertaining to the private security industry. He is the author of numerous academic and professional publications on the subject. He is currently finishing his doctorate at the London School of Economics and is based in Manhattan, New York.