Battling Pirates
Written by Mark Fitzgerald
During the early 18th century, countless ships carrying valuable cargo were hijacked on the high seas of the Caribbean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean. This was a golden time for pirates. Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, became legendary for his exploits and was later romanticized in popular imagination as a seafaring villain who wore a feathered tricorne and lit matches woven into his beard to frighten enemies. “Only the devil and I know the whereabouts of my treasure, and the one of us who lives the longest should take it all,” rumor has it he said once.
Now, three centuries later, piracy continues to be a lucrative, though extremely risky, enterprise. Last year, pirates attacked 217 ships and successfully hijacked 47 of them, collecting more than $60 million in ransom payments, according to the World Peace Foundation. The Gulf of Aden is a key route for commerce between the Mediterranean and Arabian seas in the Indian Ocean, and has been a center for piracy activity for many years. Over 22,000 ships pass through the waterway each year.
“The piracy phenomenon we face today is really nothing new,” said Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, the U.S. Coast Guard’s response policy director. “It existed centuries ago and has come back with a vengeance against much higher value targets. If you have a very large carrier, the value of its cargo can approach $8 billion dollars, and the cost of delaying delivery of that shipment in a just-in-time inventory context can escalate very quickly. So when you look at these two to three million dollar payoffs for some of these high value cargos, it’s just a small fraction of the total money that’s at stake.”
But ransom payoffs tend not to arrive as quickly as crewmembers would like. Twelve of the 47 vessels that were hijacked last year and 263 crewmembers were still being held at the beginning of 2010.
CAPTIVE AND CAPTAIN
On April 8, 2009, the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, which was en route to Mombasa, Kenya, was assaulted about 300 miles off Somalia’s coast. The ship, which had a crew of some 20 U.S. citizens, eluded the pirates for more than three hours, using fire hoses to prevent the pirates from boarding the ship.
Eventually four pirates armed with AK-47 rifles got onboard, but not before the crew managed to disable the ship. The unarmed crew captured one of the pirates, but the other three remaining pirates took Alabama’s captain, Richard Phillips, hostage on a 28-foot lifeboat. Three days later, U.S. Navy snipers fatally shot the pirates and rescued the captain. “They were desperate guys who didn’t care what happened to anyone else,” Phillips recalled.
The U.S. Coast Guard serves as the regulatory arm of the U.S. maritime industry and is a key member of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which aims to advance safe, secure and efficient shipping on clean oceans. On any given day, about a half dozen U.S. flagged vessels traverse through the high risk waters in the Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. A month after the Maersk Alabama incident, the Coast Guard published the maritime security directive, Guidelines for U.S. Vessels Operating in High Risk Waters, which encourages owners and operators of U.S. vessels to increase security capacity in areas where acts of piracy are prevalent.
“This directive provides a compendium of best practices,” explained Zukunft, who oversees the development of strategic doctrine and policy encompassing operational maritime missions in the areas of law enforcement, search and rescue, counterterrorism and defense operations, incident management and preparedness, and contingency exercise programs.
The directive emphasizes that U.S. vessels implement security protocols for acts of terrorism, piracy and armed robbery. “A number of these practices include basic tasks, something as simple as making sure that you withdraw your accommodation ladder,” added Zukunft. “Being ready to conduct speed maneuvers and implementing armed security details are also important.”
COST OF BUSINESS
Of the 70 U.S. vessels that frequently operate in these high risk waters, 34 have armed security details. “The cost of these details runs about $20,000 per day,” estimated Zukunft. “Frequently in our outreach we fend off overtures that this should be a militarized mission, but considering the value of these cargoes, having these details is simply the cost of doing business.”
Having state of the art deterrence, surveillance and detection equipment also helps to protect vessels against attacks. International Maritime Security Network LLC (IMSN) has designed the Triton Shield Anti-Piracy System, a non-lethal device that creates an active deterrent around the perimeter of a ship. The product was developed as a multilayered defense package that incorporates training and education, hard security to enhance the ability to detect, deter and defend against piracy.
“Working with IMSN has provided valuable insight for Horizon Lines and allowed us to take immediate action to enhance our vessel and facility security posture and our ability to mitigate the risk of either a pirate or terrorist attack,” said Mike Bohlman, the director of marine services at Horizon Lines, a U.S. container ship operator that handles cargo bound for Asia.
Other deterrents include fire hoses, nets, slippery foam, electric fencing, highenergy light beams and long range acoustic devices. The Coast Guard has encouraged ship owners and operators to conduct a vulnerability assessment and harden the vessel against intrusion. It also recommends establishing a safety area on board where crewmembers can take refuge during an attack.
“Another part of our regulatory regime for U.S. flagged ships and most of the IMO nations is to stress that vessels carry a ship security alert system,” noted Zukunft. “When a ship comes under attack, a crewmember activates the signal which goes to a satellite and is downlinked to our operations center in Portsmouth, Virginia. This is our first indication that a vessel may be in trouble.”
FAR FROM SHORE
As international naval patrols have become more frequent in the Gulf of Aden, pirates have taken operations far away from shore. Now they are preying on cargo vessels as far from the Somali coast as the Seychelles, about 1,000 miles into the Indian Ocean. Late last year, a Greek freighter was captured 200 nautical miles east of the Seychelles, the farthest any modern day pirate has attacked so far.
“Trying to find these guys is sometimes rather difficult,” pointed out Zukunft. “They’re operating in very low profile vessels, sometimes 1,300 miles offshore. In indigenous environments, it’s often difficult to discern legitimate from illicit activity. On our end, it comes down to better maritime domain awareness. Normally we would dispatch a boarding team, but unlike our drug interdiction operations, we cannot just unilaterally go onboard foreign flagged vessels. We don’t have an international protocol that allows us to enact U.S. law on the high seas.” ♦