Building a Pirate-Fighting Navy
The annals of defense contracting are full of horrendous mismanagement and cost overruns. They’re also full of hulking, pointless systems that have little to do with the military’s modern-day missions. When critics are lucky, these two issues go hand-in-hand, as with the F-22. But sometimes they come apart. The Littoral Combat Ship, for example, has been a disaster as a program in terms of screw-ups and cost-overruns. But the basic idea of a small, fast, modular ship that can operate in very shallow waters does seem genuinely useful.
When Noah Schachtman asked Gates about the LCS the other day, Gates basically just said the capabilities are really useful. I pressed him on what, exactly, was so appealing about it and he specifically cited pirate-fighting, telling me “You don’t need a $5 billion ship to go after pirates” and, indeed, the high cost of a ship might dissuade you from risking it against a relatively trivial enemy.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that at the end of the day. But as Schachtman point out, it certainly is true that the Navy we have is not well-suited to the doctrine we’ve adopted in terms of anti-piracy missions, while the shift to the LCS would leave us with forces that were better-suited to that policy. My view is that ultimately if you want to tackle the pirates issue, you need to do it on land. Which, in practice, means we probably don’t want to tackle the pirates issue and shouldn’t let this specifically concern play too large a role in our thinking. But LCS has other kinds of appeal as well and on the whole I’m equivocal about it.
38 Responses to “Building a Pirate-Fighting Navy”
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April 10th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
ARRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!
April 10th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
But LCS has other kinds of appeal as well and on the whole I’m equivocal about it.
I seem to recall a Stratfor report from about a decade ago explaining how important a green water navy is for scenarios involving India and China, owing to the geography of the region.
Is that it?
April 10th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Re “My view is that ultimately if you want to tackle the pirates issue, you need to do it on land.”
———–
That right.
Wait until they’re celebrating back in home port
–gloating over their ill-gotten gains — and then napalm their drunken asses.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
or the navy could just look into buying some of the ships that the coast guard use – light, fast, and well suited to chasing down pirates.
If they’re good enough for trying to track down and intercept drug-runners, then pirate ships shouldn’t be too hard and probably easier (I’m guessing that many gulf based drug runners are better equipped for speed and manueverability than poor Somali fishermen turned pirates).
Here’s the Coast Guard’s fleet – these ships have a bonus of being already available and probably being a lot cheaper than the LCS.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
oops! forgot the linky:
http://www.uscg.mil/datasheet/
April 10th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Vosper-Thorneycroft was building small modular frigates 30 years ago with enhanced automation to reduce crew size and increase range that would be perfect for anti-piracy. This really is NOT rocket science and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, to use just two cliches that come immediately to mind.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
My view is that ultimately if you want to tackle the pirates issue, you need to do it on land. Which, in practice, means we probably don’t want to tackle the pirates issue and shouldn’t let this specifically concern play too large a role in our thinking.
Let me see if I understand your thinking:
1. We can deal with pirates on land or at sea.
2. Fighting pirates on land is more effective than fighting pirates at sea.
3. We don’t want to fight pirates on land.
4. Therefore, we shouldn’t fight them at sea.
Am I missing something?
April 10th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Well, to fight the pirates you have to find them. Squeaky Rat on the earlier pirate thread suggested we use our spy satellites to ..er..spy on them.
Unfortunately, our government gave $10 Billion to Boeing back in 2000-2005 to build the next spy satellite constellation (launch: 2005) and got ..er..nothing.
To understand how this piggy in the poke happened, it might be worth noting that the Boeing program was in Jane Harman’s district and Jane Harman was ranking Democrat on the House Intel Committee. (Jane Harman –where have I heard that name before?)
At any rate, Admiral Blair , new Director of National Intelligence, announced a plan the other day to hand a big shitpot of money to Lockheed to take up the slack. It just so happens that the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (DOD office that builds/operates spy sats) during the FIA trainwreck era was Pete Teets, a former Chief Operating Officer of Lockheed until he resigned after Lockheed lost the FIA contract in 1999. No snickers , please.
I myself always wondered how Pete Teets became Director of the NRO in early 2001 (appointed by George Bush) since he signed a $3 Million dollar – 3 year consulting contract with Lockheed in 2000.
By the strangest coincidence, Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynn Cheney, was on Lockheed’s Board of Directors from 1994 until the 2001 inaugural. No snickers, please.
Oh — and the latest Director of the NRO –Scott Large — resigned yesterday after Admiral Blair Great Leap Forward had been announced. See
http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/04/08/spy-satellite-agency-head-resigns/
April 10th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
That’s a bad ass-looking ship.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
The F-22, aka “The Pirate Hunter.”
April 10th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
That would be using special pirate-seeking napalm that doesn’t harm their wives, kids, neighbors, and hostages?
Because if all we want to do is flatten the Somali coast we could do that – but what makes you think it’s a good solution?
April 10th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
A lot of what our air force / navy is about is providing a deterrent to hostile nations who might want to pick a fight with us, or with our allies. Not fighting a war because the other guy is afraid of you is a good thing.
That said, there is still a lot of useless crap in the defense deptartment budget, and the DOD is still woefully unprepared and unequied for the types of people who we actually have to fight. People who have no home county and thus are not scared of complete obliteration – terrorists, insurgents, pirates, etc. We need an a defense dept that is capable of fighting the modern battles, but is also capable of preventing the traditional wars.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
The way we deal with pirates has nothing to do with the types of ships we have. If this argument had merit, neither the early US, the Brits, or anyone else would have ever sent a frigate or Ship of the Line against a pirate.
The reason we don’t go after pirates is because people like you, Matt are overly concerned with which jurisdiction they should be tried in once we bloodlessly capture them.
You want to get rid of this scourge? Do what the British navy did during the 19th century.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Matt has been saying that the long term solution to the Somali pirate problem is to help Somalis rebuild a “real” government and economy. At the same time, we need to deal with current fact that they have neither.
For a whole variety of reasons, the “Somali problem” isn’t going to be solved any time soon, although I suppose we could start by not doing things that seem to have made the problem worse, like pounding on the Islamic Courts.
Regarding the pirate problems in a number of important shipping lanes, lots of LCS’, such as the Freedom, LCS 1, would be more cost effective than the frigates we’ve got.
Buuuut…. the Air Force is run by people who want to fly F-22s, the Army by people who want to fly Apaches or drive M-1s, and the Navy by people who want to command or launch from carriers. Therefore, most of the fleet is geared towards keeping the CVNs supplied and safe. The LCS doesn’t fit the Navy’s current culture any more than the A-10 does in the Air Force. So, we’re gonna have to force it down their throats, and encourage promotion to Flag officer of the boys and girls that end up commanding them.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Matt can say what he likes about rebuilding Somalia; I’d love to see him, with a straight face, argue in favor of a large US mission to Somalia to do that. After a few car bombs and other assorted attacks, we’ll see whether he’s willing to stick with that plan.
In the meantime, a little disproportionate force would go a long way to making the people who engage in the piracy rethink their plans.
Fixing Somalia? Expensive. Stopping the piracy? Not so much, so long as we are willing to take the 19th century approach. Which worked, I might add.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Channeling my inner wingnut, if we really thought Somali pirates were a problem, we should mine their coast. Or bomb every coastal area where boats are docked. But I think we’ve pissed off enough Muslims already, so we’ll need another strategy.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Here’s the Coast Guard’s fleet – these ships have a bonus of being already available and probably being a lot cheaper than the LCS.
Not nearly enough of them to go around – the entire LA-Long Beach stretch of coast from Ventura County down to Orange County, which is the nation’s second largest population center and single busiest port zone, has, IIRC, three of these boats in service (and who knows how many can be in the water at any given time), they’re breaking down, and the replacements ran so far over budget and were such lemons the program was cancelled.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
the 19th century approach
I hear you. If we get serious about upping the ante, we’d better be ready to stomach the consequences to those freighter crews that still get boarded.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
The reason we don’t go after pirates is because people like you, Matt are overly concerned with which jurisdiction they should be tried in once we bloodlessly capture them.
Evidence, you dishonest right-wing coward?
The reason we don’t go after pirates is because cowardly assholes like you with violent fantasies were cheerleading for the iraq war to give meaning to your pointless life while ignoring actual problems and lashing out in a hateful rage at politicians that were actually concerned about real problems while you supported the stupid politicians who fed into your ignorant lizard-brained pathologies. And now you’re lashing out at one of the only bloggers who’s bothered to comment on the issue consistently for a while to feed your need to spew.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Gunboats! That’s what you fight shore-based pirates with, gunboats. They are dirt cheap and can be built fast. The Royal Navy built 156 in two years in 1855-56, late in the Crimean War, as a (convincing) threat against Russia in the Baltic.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
LCS is desperately needed, which makes the Keystone Kops nature of the program all the more devastating. As opposed to those ridiculous Zumwalts (I mean, even the Navy doesn’t want the damned things any more, and talk about “running up the score”–however will we destroy massed armor formations in the open without the Zumwalt?), LCS speaks to the kinds of naval missions we need to be good at, and lack capacity for at the moment. Somalia is just one example of a place where a fast corvette with two helicopters and a modest shore-assault capability would be really spiffy. I agree with Gates (for what little it’s worth) that LCS is a fundamentally good idea that we need to keep working at.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Tyro,
I wasn’t cheerleading the Iraq war; I merely took a “we broke it, we bought it” approach. As opposed to the “we broke it, them’s the breaks” approach the left favored. We did that in Afghanistan in the late 70’s and early 80s. How did that work out?
Ideally, I’d like to see us pull most (even all) of our overseas bases, return to being a trading republic, and give any pirate/terrorist who attacked us or our assets a very bloody nose in order to discourage such behavior in the future. I want neither the lefty nation building mindset nor the right nation building mindset.
The main difference between left and right in foreign affairs seems to be in which places we’ll intervene and why. I’d prefer “none of the above”.
April 10th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
@ 15 “Encourage promotion to Flag officer”
A Naval force comprised of smaller, lighter, and faster ships would allow the Navy to put far more boats in the water. A force design along these line would not only be more tactically flexible, it would provide far more command positions.
Forcing necessary change on the Military’s Big 4 is brutal. You need a selling point. More available Flag positions at the upper end of the Naval hierarchy would be an excellent place to start the lobbying process.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Evidence, you dishonest right-wing coward?
Piss off, you lying left-wing sack of shit.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
After near 20 some odd years of continuous MIO ops in the gulf, the US Navy is quite proficient at anti-piracy ops compared to say, the cold war. We have a generation of officers and enlisted that have years worth of practical experience
Contrary to Schactman’s story, all destroyers and frigates have small boats and crew served weapons (i.e. 50 cal machine guns) that are in fact effective anti-pirate weapons.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
What’s the 19th century approach? Usually someone provides a link when they mention stuff like that.
‘The’ left wanted that? I imagine you come here often. Do you find a lot of agreement even among the mini ‘The’ left you find here? Saying all of the left wants anything is weak strawman bullshit. Leave that at RedState.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Re Don Williams
Wait until they’re celebrating back in home port
–gloating over their ill-gotten gains — and then napalm their drunken asses.
Napalm nothing, nuke ‘em.
April 10th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
the REAL story behind the pirates!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjreRSFNLTI
April 10th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Jg – The left wanted to pull out of Iraq starting in 2004, and it reached a screaming crescendo of “out now” in 2006/2007. If you don’t recall that, I daresay you weren’t paying attention.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Let’s remember that James Robertson’s Brinks home security system is protecting him from those urban n^Hpirates.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
The way we deal with pirates has nothing to do with the types of ships we have. If this argument had merit, neither the early US, the Brits, or anyone else would have ever sent a frigate or Ship of the Line against a pirate.
Actually, neither the US, the Brits, or anyone else ever sent a ship of the line against a pirate. They very seldom sent frigates after them, either, save for small, older vessels unfit for fleet duty.
They did, of course, send first line ships against identifiable pirate bases where they thought it might do some good.
The day to day work of hunting down pirates went to smaller vessels, sloops, corvettes, and converted merchantmen.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Contrary to Schactman’s story, all destroyers and frigates have small boats and crew served weapons (i.e. 50 cal machine guns) that are in fact effective anti-pirate weapons.
All those small boats do little to expand the effective deterrent power of a destroyer because they have no seakeeping ability out of sight of their base ship.
To deny the ocean to pirates and smugglers, you don’t send one billion dollar ship, you deploy ten ships at a hundred million each.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Let’s recall that I live in a suburb that’s way, way more integrated than most American cities. But hey – keep those assumptions coming
April 10th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
destroyer because they have no seakeeping ability out of sight of their base ship.
tru dat. But you can also expand your LOS through helo’s.
you deploy ten ships at a hundred million each.
Yes, but we (america) seem unable or unwilling anymore to build huge runs of cheap equipement which used to be our stock in trade.
If anything we should restart laying some keels for some more Perry class. They had been 2nd rate players in both the anti air and anti submarine games, but have found a niche in MIO where everything else is unsuited or overkill.
Or like you say corvettes. Or as someone else said above, more cutters.
April 11th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
To combat piracy of the kind practiced from Somalia with sea going ships requires having the merchant vessels traveling in convoys and having ships that are effective at protecting convoys.
So, helicopter carrier destroyers or frigates would make sense. A mothership for small, fast patrol boats would make sense.
An ability to go toe to toe with a well armed coastal defense force in the midst of a sea-borne amphibious assault? Really? That’s the most cost effective ways to protect convoys of merchant vessels?