Bobs Agree We Should Put Blue Helmets on Merchant Ships
Robert Wright, a hippie globalist one-worlder like me, and Bob Kagan, a neocon warmonger, both agree on an idea for dealing with the pirates problem—put a couple of armed United Nations peacekeepers on merchant ships going through the region. The idea here is that arming merchant ships would solve the problem, but that you can’t arm merchant ships because countries don’t let armed ships dock at their ports. Putting the guns in the hands of the UN solves the problem:
I have my doubts about this. My impression is that the biggest problem with arming merchant ships is that ship owners actually don’t want to see firefights happening in the vicinity of their cargo. If you think about the idea of holding a ship for ransom, the premise is that the amount of money being asked for is less than the value of the cargo.
Given that reality, if you own a cargo ship and some guys in a small craft amble up next to you with a shoulder-launched rocket what you really want is for your crew to surrender. If your crew starts shooting, then they’re putting your ship at risk of getting blown up by a rocket. It’s true that over time, a sufficient number of bloody exchanges would serve as a deterrent to piracy both because pirates would get killed and also because pirate counterattacks that end up sinking ships don’t get any ransom. But on an individual level, it still makes more sense to surrender than to fight so it’s not clear that anyone would want blue helmets on their ship.
A different idea would be to go “Anbar Awakening” on the whole situation. Suppose there were a group of armed Somali possessing maritime skills and a spirit of derring-do. The international community could find leaders of these Somalis and provide funds to assist them in their brave effort to battle the pirates who’ve been plaguing their community. It’s true that to some this would look like paying protection money to extortionists. But if you call the protection money “aid” and call the pirates you’re paying off “former pirates” and call the process by which the pirates you’re paying try to kill their rivals “anti-piracy operations” then I think it looks perfectly legitimate to recruit some former pirates to conduct anti-piracy operations that are financed by international aid.
This is a less morally tidy approach, but it’d almost certainly be cheaper. You could call ‘em the Somalia Coast Guard, reach an agreement with them about fishing rights and so forth, and they’d be national heroes.
43 Responses to “Bobs Agree We Should Put Blue Helmets on Merchant Ships”
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April 17th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
The “Somali Coast Guard” can protect the vastness of the open oceans, whereas the world’s navies cannot?
April 17th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
The Somalia Coast Guard!
Who cares about euphemisms? Euphemisms and acronyms make world go round. The SCC! It sounds like a powerful college football conference. Not to be trifled with, the bad ole SCC!
April 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
But if you call the protection money “aid”
Most will still call it tribute.
reach an agreement with them about fishing rights
There is an already an agreement about fishing rights – only somalis are allowed to fish in their EEZ. These guys cannot protect their coast from illcit fisherman. Not with a height of eye that gives a distance to horizon on 3 nm. Not when covering 200 x 900 = 180,000 square miles of ocean.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
“A different idea would be to go “Anbar Awakening” on the whole situation.” — Ah yes! The Salvador Option works so well, why not try it in the High Seas! Stick to economic issues, MY . . . . .
April 17th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Paying ransoms is NEVER a good idea. It rewards bad behavior. In the case of an individual ship owner one can understand the desire to save the ship and cargo (and perhaps, even the crew, if the owner is actually a human being with a conscience.)
This is an international problem (high seas, and all that) so it is a collective problem, like stateless terrorism.
A couple of blue hermets on each ship is not the solution, however. This is more like unrestricted submarine warfare or kidnapping of travelers. For unrestricted sub warfare, convoys and effective countermeasures (destroyers with depth charges) was shown to work. For kipnapping of terrorists, the answer is less clear, but fearsome counterattacks (like the Egyptian tourist slaughter response) are effective.
The key is to prevent small craft from getting anywhere close to cargo/passenger vessels. Radar on ship, radar on planes/drones, sonobuoys listening for engines, and fast response counterattacks before the pirates do their deed is needed. This means aircraft, not destroyers and frigates. Death must come quick from the sky virtually unannounced and with deadly effectiveness. If it is to be a UN effort, fine, but using existing technology interlocked like the US does with guided missile cruisers.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
If armed UN ‘peacekeepers’ were unable to prevent thugs armed with machetes and clubs from slaughtering thousands in Rwanda and the Congo, what makes you think they would be effective against Somalis strapped with RPGs and AK-47s?
April 17th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
The Somalia Coast Guard! Who cares about euphemisms? Euphemisms and acronyms make world go round. The SCC!
Confidential to max424: The word “Guard,” if I am not mistaken, begins with the letter “G.”
April 17th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we fund some right-leaning groups inside Somalia to “clean up” the situation there on land before the pirates even reach the sea? We could even start a school to teach them how to do it, say, the “School of the Africas” or something.
Now, certainly, some organizations might simply have two branches: the pirate fighting branch, and the branch that uses their new weaponry and tactics to engage in piracy, but that’s an implementation detail that the geniouses at CAP can easily figure out.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I believe that paying pirates to police pirates was a popular trick during the days of “Spanish Main” piracy. I don’t think it ever worked. Traditionally, the paid-off pirate, usually a governor, protected his own pirates who robbed with impunity while collecting from the government for keeping down the other pirates.
But all I know is what I’ve seen in the movies…
April 17th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
There is an already an agreement about fishing rights – only somalis are allowed to fish in their EEZ. These guys cannot protect their coast from illcit fisherman. Not with a height of eye that gives a distance to horizon on 3 nm. Not when covering 200 x 900 = 180,000 square miles of ocean.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Given the other options for employment in Somalia, piracy, like drugs in Colombia, is simply too lucrative to be stamped out with brute force alone. Until someone comes up with a viable solution to the political/economic wasteland that is Somalia, the pirates will not only continue to operate, but they will adapt to any countermeasures the international community tries to take. With no industry and no investment, what else are these people supposed to do?
April 17th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
With no industry and no investment, what else are these people supposed to do?
Join the Somali Coast Guard, of course!
April 17th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
There is an already an agreement about fishing rights – only somalis are allowed to fish in their EEZ. These guys cannot protect their coast from illcit fisherman. Not with a height of eye that gives a distance to horizon on 3 nm. Not when covering 200 x 900 = 180,000 square miles of ocean.
Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean trawlers are huge, powerful, and often carry guns.
So some shitty little speed boat is not going to be able to tangle with the best that the shipyards in Yokohama or Busan or Kaohsiung can put out.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Isn’t this idea an awful lot like what we tried with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s? Stuff like this has a habit of coming back to bite us later on, I think.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
@7: Holy crap! What a f~ck up I am. The SCG. That ruins everything. It sound like an acronym for an insolvent bank. Wow. My bad.
Unless we can call it the Somalia Coast Card, forget it.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
This illogical argument against arming boats is the exact same as many illogical arguments against gun ownership.
It is all very simple game theory. Both parties are worse off getting into a fire fight. The pirates are best off if they can steal and avoid a fire fight. If the shipowners commit to a fire fight in advance (by arming their boats) then the pirates would be better off avoiding the boats.
The only way this doesn’t work is if the pirates can somehow commit to robbing boats continuously and regardless of whether it makes them worse off. Any suggestions on how this would work out?
Anyways it is very much like the idea of mutually assured destruction.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Umm….Matt Y really needs to stick to topics he knows something about. Paying tribute to pirates is not a good thing. Bribing other pirates to lay off gets you the Barbary Pirate scenario where the bribe only gets significantly larger over time. Eventually, some form of legitimate authority needs to be able to establish a supremacy of force over this area. Until someone comes up with a good way to accomplish this, we will have to continue treading water with alternate solutions.
Pirates with AK-47’s and RPG will not sink a 50,000 ton ship. They can cause damage, start small fires, kill crew members, etc but they aren’t sinking any ships, so please stop making absolutely no since. Yes, arming the ships will initially involve escalation, but eventually, the pirates will find something else to do than fruitlessly risking there lives not capturing ships for ransom. Currently, the cost/benefit analysis for piracy is out of whack and needs to be returned to a more sustainable equilibrium.
Sometimes, Matt makes really stupid arguments while verbalizing his mental processes in these blogs. I bet he got his lunch money taken all the time. Thats unnecessarily mean but you can’t make statements like this, “But on an individual level, it still makes more sense to surrender than to fight so it’s not clear that anyone would want blue helmets on their ship.”
April 17th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
What gets me about this post is MattY’s daily beast article said that the only viable but acknowleged option is to go after the pirates at sea.
Per that article, the only ‘perfect’ solution would be a full sprectrum engagment with the nation. But such an engagment is as likely (more likely) to be bungled.
And the worst thing would be some half-a**ed response to the issue.
All of which I agree with. So why is this post advocating a half-a**ed solution? Maybe I’m missing the Swiftian subtext.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
BTW, spell check is my friend.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
‘but acknowleged imperfect option”
April 17th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The maximum range of a RPG is 1000 yards — it self-detonates at that distance.
Snipers have killed human beings at over 2500 yards with
50 caliber rifles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMillan_Tac-50
A Somali speedboat is much bigger — and won’t float too well with holes in it the size of a thumb.
Yes, I know boats rock but a merchant ship is pretty stable in any sea that a Somali speedboat is going to venture out on.
The cost of the rifles as insurance is nothing.
As I have noted here several times, foreign nations have no problems even with private sailboats docking with rifles. You simply declare them and the Customs officer either places a seal on the locked container where you store them or he takes them to store them on land until you leave. A merchant ship should have not problem at all.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I really can’t believe this is such a big problem as it’s being made out to be.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I kind of want to kill SOMEONE indiscriminately. Being all sensibly liberal about foreign policy gets intellectually exhausting sometimes.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Matthew’s blinders is the usual liberal refusal to acknowledge that individuals have a right to self-defense. And that they will do a better job at less cost than the police.
How many terrorists have hijacked an American airliner since we made the straight forward decision to allow the captains to carry firearms?
What really infuriates the common citizen is that liberals are irresponsible dumbfuck social engineers who take NO Responsibility for addressing the problem but threaten the fully malign abuse of the law against those who do.
Last time I checked, there ain’t no police on the high seas. The merchants can carry arms — and if they sink 20 or so Somali speedboats only the sharks will know. And they ain’t talking.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we fund some right-leaning groups inside Somalia to “clean up” the situation there on land before the pirates even reach the sea? We could even start a school to teach them how to do it, say, the “School of the Africas” or something.
Now, certainly, some organizations might simply have two branches: the pirate fighting branch, and the branch that uses their new weaponry and tactics to engage in piracy, but that’s an implementation detail that the geniouses at CAP can easily figure out.
I have an even better idea. Why don’t we hire American right wingers to go and fight the pirates. Can you imagine a strike force composed of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage and maybe to get some men into the group, Ann Coulter?
April 17th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Okay, I give, I figured I would come up with a supremely dumb and funny post.
But Don Williams beat me to the punch. Hilarious and idiotic in ways that I can’t even touch.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
There is a certain sort businessman who lets mobsters, petty thugs and pirates tax them and destroy their margins. But I reject the premise that every businessman is like that.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I can only assume max424 is a Roman time traveler from sometime in the Middle Republic or earlier.
The simple fact is that shipping companies don’t want to engage in self-defense, for many reasons that have already been rehearsed.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
The maximum range of a RPG is 1000 yards — it self-detonates at that distance.
Fortunately, MMORPGs have effectively infinite range and can be deployed over the Internet. Which is to say, if we get all the Somalis addicted to World of Warcraft they won’t have time for piracy. I say we give it a try.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Why is it that the warmonger Kagan types are fat and podgy?
Too much time in ther armchairs?
April 17th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Re: I can only assume max424 is a Roman time traveler from sometime in the Middle Republic or earlier.
Or a south Indian- if i recall correctly the Tamil language spells ‘k’, ‘g’, ‘kh’ and ‘gh’ sounds all the same, and oftentimes does not distinguish between them in foreign words very well. (Like my real name, even though I’m Tamil).
April 17th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I don’t think that the Roberts are right about the problem with arming merchant ships. However, I don’t think Matt Yglesias is right either. Modern cargo ships are huge. RPGs are small. I don’t think the pirates shown in the photograph could sink a cargo ship. Unless the cargo is explosive, I don’t think one can do a ransom’s worth of damage with a few RPGs.
Now as to the Somali coast guard. The UN’s been there and done that. During the unisom I operation during the famine (just before restore hope and unisom II and blackhawk down and all that) aid workers hired body guards partly for protection and partly as a protection racket.
Thus a civil war between competing teams of body guards (OK there was already a civil war but the protection racket didn’t help it).
It would be easy to make a Somali coast guard out of Somali pirates. So easy that you could make two three dozens of Somali coast guards. Have a Somali naval civil war even.
I think the difference is that the US army was in Anbar holding off the insurgents (at great cost) and could keep track of the Son’s of Iraq. Without setting up in Somalia, one can’t enlist (that is list) the Son’s of Somalia and there would be all to many volunteers (until the money runs out).
I mean it might be better than doing nothing, better than blue helmets and better than arming the worlds merchant marine, but I don’t think it will work smoothly.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
@31: I was both, Hector. I often refer to myself as a Roman South Indian from the early Middle Republic (an RSIMR.) That is why I enthusiastically mix up my acronyms, my heritage.
@25: “and maybe to get some men into the group, Ann Coulter?”
Ann could pick off a squirrel from 2,000 yards in a bobbing sea with a BB gun. Blindfolded.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:00 am
In the short-term, we have to either arm these ships somehow, unless we want to hand these vandals any more victories, or just avoid a growing area of pirate reach, which would be expensive, cowardly and probably unwise with the absence of any clear long-term solution, so this plan is probably better than most.
Long-term, we have plenty of options, likely none of which involves arming ships, but I wouldn’t bet on any of them at the moment, especially the best one (stabilizing Somalia).
April 18th, 2009 at 7:36 am
As someone mentioned, what makes you think the fellow Somalis are going to be any good at finding and killing their comrades in any way that the current navies in the area aren’t?
As for the solution to simply suppress the problem so that trading can get along, it’s pretty simple. Shoot-on-sight orders for pirate craft caught in action, coupled with following these guys back to the main coastal hideouts and sinking their boats. If the harbor is sheltering them, then ALL the boats in that harbor get sunk. They’ll get the message – the incentives to piracy might still be there, but pirates are fundamentally about getting and enjoying their gains, and the gains are rather dangerous and painful in this case.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Shoot-on-sight orders for pirate craft caught in action, coupled with following these guys back to the main coastal hideouts and sinking their boats. If the harbor is sheltering them, then ALL the boats in that harbor get sunk.
Yes! Because collective punishment has always worked so well in the past, and besides, it’s the American way!
April 18th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Here’s a possible solution I haven’t heard too much: why not get rid of all the damn illegal guns and weapons flooding the Third world?
Nobody remember “Lord of War”? Gun smuggling ties into a lot of the violence across Africa and Asia, which also are the biggest hot spots for violent piracy. Why can’t we go after the guns? Why can’t we get the top 5 members of the UN Security Council to cut back on supplying their proxy nations? Why can’t we go to France, England, Russia, China, and our own US head honchos and tell ‘em “Guys, all these guns are now cutting into your own pockets. You might wanna rethink this whole black market gun trade you all are running.”
April 18th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Re James Gary at 36: “Yes! Because collective punishment has always worked so well in the past, and besides, it’s the American way!”
———–
Er.. the American Indians tell me that the American way is to burn the field crops in fall so that the women and children starve over winter.
Although some Iraqis say this has changed — that the way now is to bomb water purification plants so that the women and children die from dysentery and cholera after having to drink polluted water.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:40 am
As I recall the situation in Anbar, Iraq, the American army and marines were not so much holding things down as getting their asses kicked all over the place. Reports were that the Americans had completely lost control of Anbar.
The Awakening Councils of Anbar can be seen as an internal indigenous development. Essentially, having moved into a position of dominance, the Sunni insurgency began purging itself as the dominant groups fought for power. The Tribal Sheikhs and Baathists combined against the fundamentalists who were largely alien to Iraqi traditions. The United States simply fed money and support, for peace. It amounted to paying tribute for political stability.
The notion of trying this in Somalia is interesting, but the internal political dynamics are quite different. Essentially, the Somali coastal pirates have no internal power struggle to take sides on or try to exploit. The money from piracy is far in excess of useful bribes. There’s not enough motivation.
You certainly couldn’t do it on the cheap – paying some Somali’s crap wages to act as a coast guard. You might succeed by paying all the Somali’s coastal communities a lot of money over a long term.
Right now, it seems cheaper to keep paying ransoms.
As for arming ships crews. The problem is that the Pirates have the initiative and the ships are far more vulnerable. It’s basically no different than a New York mugging. You might have a gun, but the mugger has the drop on you, and the willingness to kill your ass.
Sadly, the gunfag types generally have very little understanding of the way that violence really works.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
We have 11 carrier groups. I know they are incredibly busy, but couldn’t we place one of them directly off the Somalia coast and leave it there?
Could we place 3 carrier groups off the African coast and completely wall off shipping from the rascally pirates?
Where’s Midland?
April 18th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Getting rid of all the illegal weapons in the 3rd World….you might as well try making Somalia into a modern democracy first for the good it will get you. AK-47’s and RPG’s are cheap and easy to make in too many places all over the world. There are also many millions of them already flooding the market, so reducing those numbers would be an extraordinary task in itself. It has nothing to do with the US, as most of the weapons are manufactured in Asia to begin with.
Think about how difficult it was to reduce the effectiveness of Iraqi militants, who made their own home-made bombs capable of taking out tanks. We paid the Sons of Iraq but they had plenty of their own weapons to begin with.
April 18th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I think putting blue helmets on merchant ships would result in the orderly transfer of the crew to the pirates without needless violence.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Can’t do Anbar in Somalia. Somalian pirates aren’t ‘plaguing’ ordinary Somalis. The best available data indicates that most ordinary Somalis support the pirates.
If Gulf of Aden piracy gets to be a big enough problem that it must be stopped, then the choices are between arming cargo ships (blue helmets or otherwise), getting medieval on Somalia’s shipping and coastal towns (sink every Somali vessel large enough to be used for offshore piracy flatten all pirate towns and port facilities) or some combination of both.