In a surprise move, Turkey has aggressively taken the lead in what seemed a stalemate over Syria. While Bashir Al-Assad has announced his country is at war, his observation might be more accurate than he is comfortable with. Following Syria’s encore performance of shooting at Turkish F-4’s, Ankara has decided to remind the world that the “sick man of Europe” has been in the gym for a long LONG time.
With unconfirmed reports of Turkish units moving to the Syrian border, Turkey is poised to take the lead on a NATO mission no one has wanted to touch. Turkey taking the reins shows optimism for future potential on NATO’s heart monitor. NATO is not merely a support structure for US operations abroad, but as indicated by Turkey’s actions, an institution by which any member state can take the lead on security issues no matter how feckless the majority.
Turkey has been sitting on the periphery for a long time. The nation many dismissed as a NATO ornament and an EU impossibility has proven itself an economic powerhouse, a political leader, and now a military spearhead. “Everybody should know that Turkey’s wrath is just as strong and devastating as its friendship is valuable,” said President Erdogan. With the speed and rigor of the Turkish response both politically and militarily, perhaps the long-ago sick man of Europe will become its backbone.
In my last post I criticized those who overemphasize the size of a fleet as a measure of its operational effectiveness, using the historical example of the Royal Navy’s fleet modernization efforts prior to the First World War. I did not offer any alternate criteria by which to judge what an optimally sized U.S. Navy would look like. With discussions of what insights turn-of-the-century theorists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett would have on modern maritime strategy so popular right now, however, I thought there might be value to apply their models of sea power to evaluate the composition of today’s U.S. Navy.
Critics of what they perceive as a too-small fleet claim that quantity is important because “presence” is necessary for command of the sea. On its face this is logical, as without enough combat power at the right spot and right time, victory is impossible. Having more ships makes it theoretically possible to concentrate a larger force at the decisive point, as well as providing more resources in more places to deter against the enemy, wherever they may be. The only restriction in a navy’s ability to provide presence is the amount of resources that a state has at its disposal.
Mahan was opposed to any notion of presence itself providing any particular utility, expressing a preference for offensive fleet action, even when that end was accomplished by a fleet inferior in total size to that of its foes. His optimal navy was “equal in number and superior in efficiency” to its enemies at the decisive point within “a limited field of action,” not necessarily everywhere. It protected national interests “by offensive action against the fleet, in which it sees their real enemy and its own principal objective.” Mahan would have not approved of an emphasis on presence as an objective, for his description of the undesirable alternative to his above strategy was one which requires the “superior numbers” needed to provide “superiority everywhere to the force of the enemy actually opposed, as the latter may be unexpectedly reinforced.” Trying to outnumber the enemy everywhere at sea is an impossible end state in any situation in which a pair of opponents have remotely comparable resources upon which to draw.
Corbett’s view of sea power is more compatible with the notion that presence is important. Corbett felt that what he called “Command of the Sea” was “normally in dispute” and that the most common state in maritime conflict was that of “an uncommanded sea.” In that context, presence in terms of more ships means that a navy can employ its forces in more places, with command thus achieved. It would be easier to achieve this state of command through presence in asymmetrical situations in which the smaller force is overmatched both in terms of quantity and quality.
War at sea often revolves around two factors: the ability to locate the enemy, and the ability to employ decisive force against the enemy first. Until navies began to use aircraft in the early twentieth century, the only way to locate an enemy fleet was to actually see it from onboard ship (or ashore). Until the introduction of wireless communications, the ability to pass any intelligence thus derived was also restricted to line-of-sight or the speed of a ship. Mahan noted the difficulty to locate and track a fleet when he said that they “move through a desert over which waters flit, but where they do not remain.”
By having more ships (assuming they effectively employed them), a navy would theoretically have a better chance to locate the enemy on favorable terms. Nelson could sail across the Atlantic (and back again) and around the Mediterranean without finding the French fleet because his “sensors” were limited to the visual range of his fleet. The conflict between the German and British navies during the First World War was largely one in which the two fleets were unable to achieve their tactical objectives because they could not find each other (at least under tactically favorable circumstances). In a more modern example, the American victory at Midway was made possible by SIGINT. Because the US Navy knew that the Japanese intended to attack Midway, its fleet was placed in a position where they were more likely to find the Japanese first (even then however, each fleet was limited in their ability to locate the enemy to the range of their aircraft).
The debate over presence revolves around strategy and objectives, and whether the size and composition of a fleet matches up with those objectives. If the U.S. maritime objective is the ability to operate at sea in any contested theater, then having a sensor-enabled battle force in which surveillance assets make decisive action possible before the enemy can act is more important than surface presence in terms of many ships. Conversely, if the most important objective is to provide maritime security against illicit actors such as pirates or drug smugglers, then presence is more important. As the linked post above from Galrahn notes, a UAV can enable kinetic offensive operations from another platform located far away, but it cannot board a suspect vessel and detain the crew.
The debate between the advocates of presence and a high-end battle force is actually one over the relative importance of the Maritime Security and Sea Control missions, and the resources devoted to each at the expense of the other. Unfortunately, without a crystal ball, there is not a straightforward answer as to which is the more necessary one for the US Navy to conduct.
Lieutenant Commander Mark Munson is a Naval Intelligence Officer and currently serves on the OPNAV staff. He has previously served at Naval Special Warfare Group FOUR, the Office of Naval Intelligence and onboard USS ESSEX (LHD 2). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official viewpoints or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
In the last week, during a visit to the People’s Republic of China, Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng En Hen has reaffirmed bilateral military ties between the two countries with his Chinese counterpart, Liang Guanglie. Since the Agreement on Defence Exchanges and Security Cooperation was signed in 2008, there have been regular exchanges between the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) and the People’s Liberation Army, port calls, joint courses, seminars, and a counter-terrorism exercise. But China is not the only suitor trying to woo the Lion City-state. Earlier this month, Mr Ng also met with US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, with the two agreeing that America could deploy up to four Littoral Combat Ships out of Singapore on a rotational basis, with the first due to arrive in the second quarter of next year. In addition, its Changi naval base was designed from the outset to accommodate ships up to the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, way beyond the country’s own capabilities. With China becoming increasingly assertive towards its neighbours in the first island chain it see as its sphere of influence, followed by America’s pivot towards Asia in support of its regional allies and the advent of Air-Sea Battle to meet the Chinese threat, Singapore may be forced to choose between its two military partners.
Singapore’s Formidable-class stealth frigates – but which side could they end up on?
Though Singapore’s military relationship with the US stretches back further, the country has always had an ethnocentric strategic outlook. At the time of its secession from the Federation of Malaysia on 9 August 1965, Singapore only possessed around 1,000 armed servicemen. This and the republic’s small population of approximately four million, prompted Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to introduce national service from 14 March 1967. Another major factor behind this was that the majority of those personnel, particularly senior officers, we’re Malay and Indian. With Singapore having a Chinese majority population, and with Malaysia seen as the country’s main threat at the time, Malays were excluded from the draft for its first ten years as Chinese filled out the armed forces’ ranks and were swiftly promoted. Even when Malays were included after 1977, they were assigned to the police and civil defence, not combat roles. The Second Minister for Defence, Lee Hsien Loong, stated in 1987 that “If there is a conflict, if the SAF is called to defend the homeland, we do not want to put any of our soldiers in a difficult position where his emotions for the nation may be in conflict with his religion”. Singapore’s political leaders did not trust Malays to fight against their kith and kin. Should hostilities erupt between the United States and China, can Singapore’s Chinese-dominated armed forces be expected to do the same, and does America need to think more carefully about how far it enters into the Lion’s den?
Dr Daniel Owen Spence is Lecturer in Imperial and International History at Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom, and publishes on nineteenth and twentieth century maritime history.
This is the first guest post from our new affiliate, the Atlantic Council of Canada. This post originally ran on the Atlantic Council of Canada website on 06 Mar 12.
By James Marcus Bridger
The newly created Puntland Marine Police Force undergoes training
One would be hard pressed to find an article analyzing Somali piracy—be it journalistic, academic, or militarily focused—that does not make the claim that this maritime problem can only be solved on land. In the four years that the international community has attempted to address this crisis, however, a coherent and coordinated onshore strategy has yet to emerge. The development of indigenous counter-piracy capacity in the affected states of the East African seaboard has, despite rhetoric to the contrary, received scant attention from donor states. Authorities in the epicentres of Somali piracy—the autonomous states of Puntland and Galmudug—have largely been left to fend for themselves. Mistakenly, the international response to Somali piracy remains blinded by a military-centric focus on naval shows of force.
An American think-tank project, The Oceans Beyond Piracy report, calculated the total annual cost of counter-piracy military operations to be $1.27-billion USD. Using the same methodology, the annual operating cost of NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield has been placed at $293-million, while a figure of $450-million has been given for the EU’s Operation Atalanta. While both of these missions have been extended to the end of 2012, it is unlikely they will be able to continue indefinitely in an age of fiscal austerity and military cutbacks. Economic constraints have already forced the number of ships deployed to Operation Atalanta to fall “below the red line” of a six vessel deployment, according to EU Military Committee chairman, Hakan Syren. NATO was similarly forced to divert naval resources away from the Horn of Africa when they were need for operations off the coast of Libya. There is also the danger that naval efforts may fall victim to their own success: a drop in incidences of piracy may cause a scaled down naval presence, but as the pirate structures onshore would remain intact, the gangs would only have to wait for coalition forces to withdraw before returning to sea.
A sustainable solution to the piracy crisis therefore requires a coordinated strategy tailored to address the root causes that allowed the practice to take hold in Somalia’s pirate-prone states and flourish in the wider region. The explosion of piracy first witnessed in 2008 has been attributed to the decline of local institutions in the autonomous state of Puntland, particularly its inability to pay its once-effective police and coastguard forces. As security in Puntland has improved over the last two years, the piracy nexus has shifted south to the weaker sub-state of Galmudug. Offshore, the pirates have been able to expand the scope of their operations from the mouth of the Red Sea to the Mozambique Channel due to the underdeveloped maritime security capacity of regional states. As piracy expert Martin Murphy notes, effective policing at sea requires “boats well equipped with radar, communications, well trained and honest crews … shore based command and control facilities … reliable intelligence about pirate activity [and] air support and surveillance”, all measures which are prohibitively expensive for the developing states in the region to implement.
Part of the mandate of NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield is to “facilitate and support the development of regional states’ capacity to conduct effective counter-piracy operations.” In practice however, capacity building has accounted for only a fraction of Ocean Shield’s budget and has not been conducted through any centralized organ. Two possible channels—the Djibouti Code of Conduct and the UN’s Somali Trust Fund—received only a combined total of $5.95-million in international assistance in 2011, a fraction of the amount spent on military operations.
Towards an enduring counter-piracy partnership
If Somali piracy is to be combated in a sustainable manner, it is imperative that NATO—in conjunction with partner states and organizations—begin shifting resources away from a military-centric counter-piracy strategy and towards a program for regional maritime security capacity building that enables regional authorities to meet the challenges of piracy by themselves in the long-term.
While a number of channels for capacity building have been created, a report by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs recognizes that, “there is no single coherent strategy for building coast guard capacity in the maritime area, and no comprehensive framework for the efforts.” In order to rectify this problem, NATO and the African Union (AU)—working through regional sub-bodies—should establish a new “Maritime Security Dialogue.” When attempting to lay the foundation for a joint capacity building program there are five main areas that need to be considered: regional naval cooperation, equipment and vessel procurement, training, intelligence coordination, and engagement with Somalia’s autonomous units.
While ships assigned to Operation Ocean Shield have already made a number of port visits to African partner nations, it is advised that NATO deepen this engagement by conducting more joint counter-piracy exercises with regional players, particularly those that fall outside of the current international patrol areas. In order to increase the indigenous capacity of regional states, NATO members should consider donating vessels and equipment that is ready to be decommissioned. Given that the pirate gangs are often better equipped than regional coastguards, it is also advisable that boats and navigation equipment seized from pirates be turned over to regional authorities, rather than destroyed as is commonly the case.
NATO is comprised of the most highly trained and specialized maritime forces in the world and it is imperative that this expertise be offered to the regional states that will become the bulwark against piracy when the international flotilla eventually departs. While individual NATO members have engaged in bilateral training programs, it is in the interest of regional cooperation and interoperability that a common training center be established, perhaps building on existing programs in Djibouti or Nairobi.
In order to tackle piracy and other maritime crimes in a more informed and coordinated manner, East Africa requires a headquarters that functions as an intelligence sharing and reporting center. Given the role that members of the Somali diaspora play in raising capital for pirate ventures, intelligence sharing is particularly pertinent to the tracking and prosecution of pirate financiers.
Expansion of pirate operations between 2005 and 2011
A committed international engagement with Somalia’s autonomous regions—primarily Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug—is the most important aspect of a long-term counter-piracy policy. While it is imperative that NATO and its members do not interfere with the process of political reconciliation currently underway in Somalia, it is crucial that these sub-state units are treated as autonomous actors within the Maritime Security Dialogue, as it is currently not possible to build a national Somali coastguard in the absence of an effective central government.
NATO and other foreign actors have traditionally been reluctant to engage local institutions, as it was feared that they were corrupt and infiltrated by pirates. However, this situation has changed dramatically in recent years, as the government of Puntland has arrested and imprisoned more pirates than any other nation. The newly created (and largely self-financed) Puntland Marine Police Force (PMPF) has recently launched raids against the pirate hubs of Eyl, Garacad, and Bayla. Given that it can take up to seven hours to reach pirate beach camps from the PMPF’s garrisons, Puntland’s counter-piracy efforts would be much more effective if NATO donor nations provided all-terrain vehicles and funded the development of roads, radar stations, and other forms of basic infrastructure. Jay Bahadur, one of the few Western journalists to spend significant time in Puntland, has also recommended that NATO and other foreign partners help fund the PMPF and other local police services. Local intelligence networks could also be improved simply by providing coastal communities with cell phones and establishing an anti-piracy tip line that would provide modest rewards for information about the activities of pirate gangs.
The benefits of a better way forward
In order to bring an end to Somali piracy, NATO and its partners will have to work more closely with the AU and its member states to build up indigenous maritime security capacity both within Somalia’s autonomous states and the wider region. While relations between the AU and NATO have been strained and mutually suspicious at times, counter-piracy capacity building offers a unique opportunity to build a more trusting and cooperative relationship between the two organizations. Aside from mitigating the financial and human costs of piracy, the recommendations outlined above should also serve to increase regional integration, deter and disrupt other types of maritime crime, and bring a plethora of economic benefits to the region.
NATO and its partner organizations have recognized that indigenous maritime security capacity building offers the only sustainable solution to the piracy crisis, but there appears be a lack of institutional will to change course. At present, NATO’s partnership policy does not cover funding or equipment procurement, and this will have to be modified to make capacity building truly successful. Capacity building will require significant initial investments, making it imperative that bilateral donors coordinate their efforts with other members of the Alliance and synergise their efforts with international organizations such as the EU and UN. If the international community is successfully able to change course, NATO, the AU and the wider world will reap the benefits of a more effective counter-piracy policy long after the bandits have been driven from the sea.
James Marcus Bridger serves as a Content Editor and Senior Research Analyst with the Atlantic Council of Canada as part of the Department of National Defence’s Security and Defence Forum Program. He holds a MA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in International Relations. James’ current research focuses on issues of African and maritime security.
Any views or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and the news agencies and do not necessarily represent those of the Atlantic Council of Canada. This article is published for information purposes only.
