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Global Analysis

Maritime Piracy – A Global Issue

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First Prize Winner, 2015 CIMSEC High School Essay Contest

The nations of Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore all share a unique strength. Despite being third world countries and overall economically weak, they have strength in their geographic position; each are located on crucial waterways. These waterways consist of some of the most heavily traveled commercial shipping routes in the world. In terms of crude oil alone, the strait of  Malacca in Southeast Asia has an estimated 15 million barrels a day, while the strait of Hormuz that links the Arabian Gulf to the Indian Ocean has an even larger amount of oil cargo, estimated at 17 million barrels per day.

These numbers are increasing exponentially every year as the global economy grows and becomes even more interconnected. Yet, despite their critical importance, these sea lanes are among the greatest hotspots for modern­day piracy; a “movement” that costs the commercial shipping industry more than 16 billion dollars each year.

Maritime piracy is a global issue, and in these two regions, there is a trio of factors which have catalyzed the problem; weak economic opportunities for the local populations, a lack of security/enforcement by officials, and the geographic locations all provide ample opportunity for piracy. All of these factors are pretty apparent, and if you eliminate any of these three, you will see piracy decrease tremendously; the result is improved safety, perception, and ultimately, the profitability of the shipping industry.

The solution for the first decade of the 21st century has been to increase security. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have joined together to eliminate piracy in Southeast Asia and create safer shipping lanes. In the Red Sea, along the coast of Africa, and off the Arabian peninsula, western countries have taken

the initiative in eliminating piracy through the creation of the combined Maritime Forces; a collaboration of 26 countries and three task forces; CTF­150 with Maritime Security & Counter­terrorism, CTF­151 with Counter-piracy, and CTF-152 with Persian Gulf Security Cooperation. Due to these efforts, attacks from piracy are at a record low and the seas are safer.

Piracy is a cyclical event that features both periods of outbreaks and minimal incidents. Currently, maritime piracy is under control, however it’s only a matter of time until the next wave of attacks. Following uneventful years, governments and shipping companies will become complacent due to this lack of incidents; they will assess the security threat and adjust their budgets. As companies and governments downsize their security investments, they allow the reinstatement of the one factor that they had eliminated; lack of law enforcement. As a result, pirate attacks will once again revamp.

Heading home after another long day at work.In order to prevent another wave of attacks, a solution must be selected from a multitude of options. The first such solution would be the proven and traditional method of continued security forces/measures in high-risk locations. However, aside from being expensive, it is not permanent and places the burden of responsibility on Western governments. A spinoff of this idea, and an emerging method, is to place this burden on the shipping companies themselves and have them invest in their own security measures. This capitalistic approach expands the market for private security firms. However, in pursuit of profits, shipping companies might try to cut corners. This would allow for increased attacks, which almost always escalate into hostage situations that have to be dealt with through military intervention.

Taking a more permanent approach to fixing the problem is to address a different factor: poor economic conditions. This could be done through direct investment into a region’s economic development or into developing local security forces. To take the direct investment approach would be a long-term approach that would benefit the country overall. Developing local security forces, for example matching dollar for dollar, would be an intermediate solution that would both create economic opportunity while placing the burden of security on local governments. This second approach would be arguably the best in countries such as Indonesia and Singapore because they are already investing in securing their waterways. However, neither of these approaches are applicable in countries with corrupt or unstable governments, particularly Somalia where there’s no central government and various Warlords are in control.

The most unique approach to piracy would be unmanned or drone ships. As the name implies, they would operate similar to U.S. military drones where a controller sits in a building thousands of miles away, while a satellite link provides the controller with the ability to control the craft while receiving input from visual and other sensors. This is a newly emerging concept; in February of 2014, Rolls Royce announced they are developing drone cargo ships, and in November of 2014, Space X unveiled a drone barge for their reusable rocket program. In terms of freighting, the benefits range from better energy efficiency to lower cost due to the lack of a crew.

Drone ships are not pirate proof; they could still be hypothetically hijacked depending on the design of the ships. An example would be that if the engine systems were not secured/contained enough, the vessels propulsion could be halted. The reason drone ships would be so effective against piracy is they eliminate the worst situation for security forces to combat; hostage situations.

The creation of drone ships are host to numerous other difficulties; as with any form of creative destruction that causes structural unemployment, the idea will be, and already is opposed by many who make their livelihood aboard ships. Additionally, unmanned ships are currently illegal under international conventions that set minimum crew requirements. Even if that hurdle was to be overcome, then regulations would still have to be created for the new ships.

So which of the options would be the most effective? A combination of all the different methods would probably be the best solution in both the short and long run. No matter what solution is best, governments and companies need to choose a method and instate it in the coming years to ensure we don’t see another wave of attacks. Growth of the world’s economy depends on the safety of the major waterways, and inaction could cost lives.

Citations

Kermeliotis, Teo. “Somali Pirates Cost Global Economy ‘$18 Billion a Year’.” Piracy on the High Seas. Ed. Debra A. Miller. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2014. At Issue. Rpt. from “Somali Pirates Cost Global Economy ‘$18 Billion a Year.’.” CNN.com. 2013. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Debusmann, Bernd. “Military Action and Foreign Aid Must Be Used to Eliminate Pirate Sanctuaries.” ModernDay Piracy. Ed. Debra A. Miller. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012.

Current Controversies. Rpt. from “Why High Seas Piracy Is Here to Stay.” Reuters 4 Mar.  Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Arnsdorf, By. “RollsRoyce Drone Ships Challenge $375 Billion Industry: Freight.” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 25 Feb. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2015. .

“Combined Maritime Forces.” Combined Maritime Forces. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Smith, Mat. “SpaceX Is Going to Land a Rocket on a ‘spaceport’ Barge.” Engadget. 17 Dec.  Web.13Jan.2015. <http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/17/spacexrocketlandingxwingsupersonicautonomous spaceportdroneship>

“U.S. Energy Information Administration  EIA  Independent Statistics and Analysis.” World  Oil Transit Chokepoints Critical to Global Energy Security. EIA, 1 Dec. 2014. Web. 13 Jan.  2015  <http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=18991>

About the Author

Steel Templin is a senior from South Lake High School in Groveland, Florida. He is active in Key Club, Student Government, and National Honor Society, and holds leadership positions in each. In addition to school clubs, he is a varsity football player and varsity crew member. Steel hopes to attend and row at either the Naval Academy, Cornell, or Georgia Tech and study nuclear or aerospace engineering. Additionally, after college Steel plans to serve in the military or one of our country’s security agencies. 

Global Analysis

Maritime Security Student Writers Week

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By Chris Rawley

One of the goals of CIMSEC is to bring new perspectives into the discussion on maritime security and to break down traditionalcomposition-notebook barriers in the conversation between younger and older voices, military and civilians, and across international partners.  Along these lines, we recently hosted our first annual Maritime Security Scholarship Essay Contest.  We are pleased to announce the three contest winners and publish their essays here this week.  They are:

1st Place, and the winner of a $500 cash scholarship is Steel Templin, from Groveland, Florida.

2nd Place, receiving a $250 scholarship is Griffin Cannon, from South Burlington, Vermont.

Honorable mention goes to Nolan McEleney, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, who will receive $150.

The challenges piracy poses to freedom on the seas is a timeless topic, so it’s no wonder that two of our winning essayists decided to cover this topic.  Perhaps as a sign of trends to come, they both suggest a role for unmanned systems in fighting piracy.  Our honorable mention winner outlines the importance the space domain to maritime security.  Well done to our participants and winners!  We look forward to seeing many more fine essays next year.

Capability Analysis

Deconstructing ‘Survivability’

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In a recent CIMSEC NextWar article, “The LCS Survivability Debate,” Chuck Hill admirably contributes some much-needed nuance to (and sparked a flurry of articles about) the debate surrounding the Littoral Combat Ship. At the center of this conversation is the question of just how we define the survivability of small surface combatants. Under any traditional rubric, such ships would appear to be sitting ducks, without the durability or defensive capabilities of even slightly larger cousins. Yet, as Hill illustrates, this traditional perspective lacks important insight into the more qualitative assessments of resiliency. His piece provides well-argued documentation demonstrating a key factor: that small surface combatants make bad targets. These ships sale under the radar, so to speak. To demonstrate his point, Hill concludes with some anecdotal evidence:

“As part of Operation Overlord, the Normandy Invasion, 60 US Coast Guard 83 foot patrol boats were assigned to rescue those unlucky enough to find themselves in the water or sinking. 30 went to the American beachheads and 30 went to the British and Canadian beachheads. Being wooden hulled and gasoline powered, they certainly would not have been considered ‘survivable.’

“Apparently they were in the thick of it, because they rescued 1438 men from the water and sinking craft. In spite of all the fire from shore, not a single boat was sunk and not a single crewmen was killed. Apparently the German gunners were too busy with the landing craft hitting the beach and the warships that were shelling them. They simply were not a priority target.”

This argument resonated with me. I manage research for the intelligence and security services firm Security Management International (SMI) and a large portion of what we do is target analysis and vulnerability assessments. We employ an approach known as CARVER – criticality, accessibility, recoverability, vulnerability, effect, and recognizability – which blends qualitative and quantitative assessments of risk, much in the same spirit as Hill, and provides an interesting lens through which to deconstruct what we mean by survivability.

Criticality measures a target’s significance as a component of a larger system or network. Accessibility represents a target’s ease of access. Recoverability is the time it would take the system to respond to an incident and restore a component’s utility. Vulnerability is an account of a target’s susceptibility to attack based on adversary capabilities. Effect is the degree of devastation or impact such an attack on a given target would have on the overall system. And recognizability is the likelihood an adversary would recognize a component’s criticality. What do we learn if we apply this technique to the LCS debate?

Traditional arguments critiquing the LCS’ survivability can be seen as highlighting the more quantitative elements of CARVER (accessibility, recoverability, and vulnerability). As a craft designed to operate close to shore, the Littoral Combat Ship certainly fits the bill for accessibility. While a fast ship, the short range between shore-based batteries and the vessel place it at greater risk than ships operating farther out. Hill covers the topic of recoverability, which highlights similar concerns. He relays part of a U.S. Naval Institute piece on the topic (also a commendably nuanced read), noting that “small warships are historically unsurvivable in combat. They have a shorter floodable length, reduced reserve buoyancy and are more likely to be affected by fire and smoke damage than larger combatants.” A direct hit would likely leave an LCS reeling to a more devastating degree than an equivalent hit to a larger combatant. Even non-state asymmetric actors may pose a degree of risk to the craft given its intended area of operation in congested littorals, which pose the threat of terrorist incidents similar to the USS Cole bombing.

Yet, as the CARVER methodology would suggest, there are additional elements to threat and vulnerability assessment. These are the more qualitative components to which Hill’s article seems to allude. They include criticality, effect, and recognizability. Here the LCS performs significantly better. As a small surface combatant, the Littoral Combat Ship can be seen as far less critical than a capital ship. Therefore, the loss of an LCS presents less of an overall effect on the fleet. Neither of these points is meant to trivialize the potential for loss of life. Rather, the psychological component of how an adversary (especially a symmetric adversary) might perceive an LCS suggests it would present itself as less of an attractive target because of its less significant role compared to an aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine. This all comes together in the final point, reconizability. If an adversary fails to recognize the LCS as a high-value target, which its criticality and the effect of its loss would suggest, this should be reflected in the overall assessment of its survivability.

None of this unequivocally resolves the enduring conversation about how and where the LCS should operate, and against what type of adversary. Thus, the debate around its survivability will linger. Yet, as we can see, and as Chuck Hill rightly identifies, there is a greater degree of complexity in what makes something resilient other than the thickness of its armor. If sixty wooden-hulled Coast Guard patrol boats could survive the invasion of Normandy, surely our depiction of the LCS’ durability deserves greater nuance.

About the Author

Since 2011 Joshua has served as the manager for research and analysis at Security Management International (SMI), an intelligence services provider in Washington, DC. Josh has co-authored several articles in the Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International with SMI associates. Since 2013 Joshua has also been a frequent contributor to spaceflightinsider.com, a member of The Spaceflight Group’s community of aerospace news websites. He is a PhD candidate at the University of St. Andrews’ Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, where he researches maritime security. Joshua is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of The George Washington University where he received a BA in Middle East Studies from the Elliott School of International Affairs.

 

Asia-Pacific, Capability Analysis, Global Analysis

Naval Build-Up in the Philippines

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Like many of its regional peers, the Philippines is in the midst of a defense buildup, motivated in no small part by China’s assertive moves in the western Philippine Sea and the resource-rich Spratly islands. 
              
The donation this week of two Balikpapan-class Landing Craft Heavy (LCH) from Australia was the most recent boost to Philippines defense efforts. 
        
The LCH donation is particularly timely, as it complements the upcoming pair of Strategic Sealift Vessels (SSV), being built by PT PAL Indonesia. Based on the Indonesian navy’s successful Makassar-class Landing Platform Dock (LPD), the 8,600-ton amphibious lift ships can transit to remote areas and serve as a mobile base for helicopters and smaller landing craft. As evidenced during Typhoon Haiyan, the dearth of such assets hampered the Philippine government’s aid response to the hardest-hit parts of the country. 
          
As gifts stand, the donation of ex-HMAS Tarakan and Brunei is particularly generous – the Royal Australian Navy will hand them over fully refurbished with new safety and navigation components, plus spare parts packages. Manila is considering purchasing the three remaining LCHs as well. 
       
While the media focus of Manila’s defense acquisitions under the Capability Upgrade Program has been centered on big-ticket items to restore basic conventional force capabilities, there have been other, quieter acquisitions that directly support war-fighting and maritime domain awareness (MDA). 
         
Notably, the service signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2014 with the Philippine National Oil Company to transfer three retired 2,500 ton petroleum tank ships. This acquisition would enable fuel replenishment at sea and increase on-station time for high-endurance assets like the patrol frigates Ramon Alcaraz and Gregorio Del Pilar, both formerly U.S. Coast Guard Hamilton-class cutters.  
Another low-profile capability is the National Coast Watch Center program—a surveillance system designed to monitor oceanic traffic in the western Philippine Sea.
              
As expected, details of this national intelligence capability are closely held, but much of it is likely based on the successful implementation of the earlier Coast Watch South program. With heavy U.S. assistance, the Philippines created a network of monitoring stations combining radar, maritime surveillance and radio/data networks that provides a real-time strategic and tactical “picture” of oceanic traffic in the Southern Philippines—the so-called Sulawesi Sea Triangle. That area is a hotbed of illicit trafficking by sea and a favored logistical trail for transnational insurgent forces that prowl the region. When completed in 2015, the west-facing Coast Watch chain will monitor the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), extending 200 nm into the contested Spratly Islands group. In the future, additional monitoring chains will cover the Northern and Eastern facing portions of the country as well. 
           
The most recent, visible and well-publicized modernization program has been the integration of the multipurpose helicopter program with the patrol frigate force. Five Augusta-Westland A109s twin-engine helicopters equipped with forward-looking infrared have been delivered to the fleet to replace long-retired BO-105s. From an operational perspective, the navy has made quick strides to integrating the air asset with ships of the line. The AW109s had a maiden deployment on board Ramon Alcaraz during the Australian multinational military exercise Kakadu 2014, approximately eight months after receiving the first helicopters. 
          
Out of all the projects to restore capabilities, the navy is still awaiting final determination of its premier acquisition – the multi-role frigate. The Philippines wants to buy two units to serve as major and modern combatants of the patrol frigate force. While the negotiations have been stymied by a complex two-phase process, a list of qualified bidders has emerged, including well-known Spanish shipbuilder Navantia and several South Korean firms, among others. A winning bid was to be selected in late 2014, but the acquisition process reportedly has been complicated by efforts to separate the tracks of selecting a ship from the embedded weapon systems. This may have to do with current challenges of the Philippines not being easily cleared for purchases of regional-balance changing weapons, such as a long-range surface-to-surface missile, with which this ship class is normally equipped.  
          
The Armed Forces of the Philippines has benefited under President Benigno Aquino III’s administration. To date, multiple modernization programs have either reached significant acquisition stages or have been completed entirely during his tenure. 
         
However, as the new paint smell wears off for the navy, the historical challenges that have haunted its past acquisitions and programs loom. It is critical that the next presidential administration continue to support the acquisitions, as well as the services, both politically and fiscally. The navy needs to ensure that internal expertise among the ranks to maintain their newly acquired equipment is present and sustainable. Above all, operating effectively and efficiently at sea continues to be the primary objective. The nation’s seafaring history and ties to the maritime culture give impetus to the current goals of ensuring territorial integrity and establishing a credible defense. Given the relatively rapid pace of modernization, the Philippine navy is well on the road to restoring the capabilities necessary to meet those demands. 
                               
Armando J. Heredia is a civilian observer of naval affairs. He is an IT Risk and Information Security practitioner based in New England, with a background in the defense and financial services industries. He is a regular contributor to the Center for International Maritime Security’s NextWar blog.  
                             
This article can be found here in its original form on the USNI website and was republished by permission.