Innovation Blog

 Somali Piracy:  Outsource the Problem to China?

By Shlomo Maital 

US Missile Cruiser

      Somali pirate boat

A major part of world shipping goes through the Gulf of Aden,  and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, only 20 miles wide, between Yemen and Somalia, on its way to and from the Suez Canal.   Somali pirates regularly attack ships, take them hostage and demand ransom.  Some 21,000 ships cross the Gulf annually;  pirate attacks are disruptive and damage world trade. 

Using small motorboats, the pirates throw grappling irons onto ships, board them, and take them to the Somali coast, where they are held (sometimes for weeks or months) until ransom is paid by the shipowners.

       Several countries have sent their navies to the region, including China and the United States.   The US Navy should have solved the problem.  America’s navy has battle tonnage equal to that of the 13 next-largest navies combined.  It has missile cruisers that cost $1 billion each.  Out of America’s annual defense spending of $533.8 b. (2010 budget), some $171 b. goes to the Navy (including Marines).  The US Navy’s mission statement includes protecting “freedom of the seas”.  Yet despite its presence in the Gulf of Aden, piracy continues and thrives.

      Why?

      Speaking on the BBC’s World Service, a Dutch ship captain who recently fended off a pirate attack analyzed the problem.  He noted that China’s Navy is present in the area and is very effective.  Chinese navy ships organize convoys through the Gulf of Eden  that leave at precise regular announced times.   Any ship that joins such a convoy is convoyed safely to its destination.   But finding and joining such a convoy is fairly rare, because only the Chinese organize them.

     Other navies, such as that of the US, do not announce such convoys, for fear that announcing the exact times and places will leave them vulnerable to attack by al-Quaeda suicide boats, like the kind that killed 17 US sailors in Aden, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. 

     If I were the U.S. Commander of Naval Operations, and if I allowed Somali pirates to continue to capture ships,  I would offer my resignation at once, in humiliation.  Why spend billions, if you cannot defeat a handful of Somalis with motorboats and AK-47s? 

       In a Letter to the Editor to the International Herald Tribune, commenting on another US failure (to forestall the nearly-successful attack on the Dec. 25 flight from Amsterdam to Detroit),  Stein  Bastiansen writes:  “The U.S. is a country known for innovation, no-nonsense pragmatism and goal-oriented rationality but it also seems capable of building bureaucracies with choking limitations to creativity, independent problem-solving and critical thinking”.

          Is there no-one in America’s Navy sufficiently embarrassed by the stinging defeat at the hands of illiterate Somalis to find a way to solve the problem?   Of course, the root problem is the poverty-stricken failed state of Somalia.   But sometimes illnesses are treated by attacking the symptoms.  Surely 450,000 American sailors (regular and reserve),  284 ships and 3,700 aircraft can deal with the Somali pirates — or can they?   If they can’t, American taxpayers have the right to demand their money back.