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<\/a><\/p>\nThis is the light side of sailing. Four Americans were killed this week in a part of the world that has become famous for Pirates.<\/p>\n
Even for modern Navy, no easy solution to piracy<\/p>\n
BY JEANETTE STEELE<\/a><\/p>\n WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2011 AT 9:38 P.M.<\/p>\n \/ USS STERETT<\/p>\n The 509-foot Sterett steams off Point Loma during maneuvers in 2010. The destroyer is among the Navy’s newest ships, having been commissioned in 2008.<\/p>\n In the vast waters around the Gulf of Aden<\/a>, roughly 1 million square miles of sea, finding pirates and rescuing their victims is something even today\u2019s sophisticated, nuclear-power Navy can\u2019t always do.<\/p>\n After Tuesday\u2019s killing of four Americans aboard their hijacked yacht off the coast of Oman, Navy officials remained silent about whether the American deaths will prompt a change in tactics. Meanwhile piracy experts say bulking up the U.S. military presence or even attacking pirate dens in Somalia isn\u2019t necessarily the long-term answer. Any solution must change what turns people into high-seas criminals, they said.<\/p>\n Navy ships steaming out San Diego<\/a>, including the Boxer amphibious group on Tuesday, are increasingly listing anti-piracy as one of their top deployment missions. But they are finding themselves operating in a part of the world where the brigands are not ideology-driven terrorists or warriors, but desperate youths being controlled by businessmen hungry for multimillion-dollar ransoms.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody\u2019s going to say now we\u2019ve got to go in there guns blazing,\u201d said retired Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, who commanded the Navy\u2019s anti-piracy task force when it was launched in early 2009.<\/p>\n \u201cBut, first of all, nobody wants to go after the pirates ashore in Somalia. And the other thing is, it\u2019s a criminal event. You have to fall under the guidelines of international justice,\u201d McKnight said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we had a 1,000 ship Navy to go out there, we\u2019d make a major dent in piracy \u2026 but the problem is the area is so vast you can\u2019t be everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year was the worst on record for mayhem on the seas. Pirates captured 1,181 mariners and killed eight, hijacking more than 50 ships, according to the International Chamber of Commerce\u2019s International Maritime Bureau<\/a>.<\/p>\n The situation is most bleak off Somalia, which accounted for 92 percent of all ship seizures in 2010.<\/p>\n International attention, including the Navy\u2019s now 2-year-old Combined Task Force 151<\/a> and two European task forces, has decreased attacks in the Gulf of Aden. Navy officials said there are 34 warships, under 15 different national flags, now patrolling the gulf area.<\/p>\n But the pirates are pushing farther out.<\/p>\n Tuesday\u2019s killings were an example of the new pattern: Somali pirates<\/a> used a \u201cmother ship,\u201d a larger vessel they\u2019d hijacked earlier, as a base to extend their skiff attacks northward into the Arabian Sea.<\/p>\n The 58-foot yacht, carrying a Marina del Rey couple and their two friends, was trailed by four Navy ships, including the San Diego-based destroyer Sterett.<\/p>\n Negotiation with the pirates was attempted but ultimately failed to save the Americans, who were killed by the pirates. A team of Navy SEALs<\/a> raced to cover the 600 yards between the Sterett and the yacht after pirates fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the destroyer.<\/p>\n To Tom Wilkerson, U.S. Naval<\/a> Institute chief executive, that loss of life means current anti-piracy strategy isn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n Differing from McKnight, he is in the camp that says follow the pirates onto land.<\/p>\n \u201cFinding pirates in the act in that area is a dice roll,\u201d said Wilkerson, a retired two-star Marine general.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the U.S. and the international community are serious about reducing the piracy, they need to engage using the UN resolutions to put some kind of force ashore and remove the sanctuary.\u201d<\/p>\n The Sterett is only the most recent in a string of San Diego warships drawn into pirate-fighting.<\/p>\n In September, a platoon of Camp Pendleton-based Marines aboard the Dubuque rescued the crew of the German cargo ship Magellan Star.<\/p>\n In a mission that required a White House green light, 24 force reconnaissance Marines captured 9 Somali pirates and saved the crew that was hiding in a fortified part of the ship.<\/p>\n Capt. Alex Martin, who led that team, said the Somalis almost instantly dropped their earlier bravado when the first Marine appeared over the bow.<\/p>\n “You felt like they were criminals who had been caught. It wasn’t like dealing with elements of al Qaeda in Iraq, where this is what these guys do, they believe in this,” said Martin, 28, a La Jolla High School<\/a> graduate. “These were just criminals. And once they got caught, they were like, ‘Oh, God, what now?'”<\/p>\n The San Diego-based destroyer Howard had its pirate encounter in September 2008, when it rushed across 350 miles of ocean to aide the Faina, a Ukrainian vessel carrying military weapons.<\/p>\n In the end, the ship\u2019s owners declined to risk their cargo in a raid, instead paying the pirates a $3 million ransom six months later.<\/p>\n And, in one of the most high-profile actions of late, Navy SEAL snipers bobbing on the back of a destroyer shot pirates holding the captain of the American cargo ship Maersk Alabama at gunpoint in April, 2009.<\/p>\n It was that incident, and the later 33-year sentence handed to one of the pirates by a New York court, that may have intensified the peril on the seas.<\/p>\n The Associated Press on Wednesday quoted Somali marauders who vowed that they will kill hostages before being captured during military raids and facing trial.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the way this business used to work, piracy experts say.<\/p>\n Somali pirates were known for taking hostages and holding them, alive, for ransoms that have ballooned in recent years. A common demand in 2005 was $150,000 to $200,000. Now the stakes have risen to as high as $9 million per ship, said Martin Murphy, author of the new book \u201cSomalia, the New Barbary? Piracy and Islam in the Horn of Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n If the international community promoted some other way for ordinary people to make money, that pirate bounty might not look so attractive, Murphy said, as much of it flows to the ringleaders, not the people taking the risks.<\/p>\n For cargo shippers, the high-stakes gamble appears to make sense for now, said Peter Chalk, RAND Corp. analyst. Using the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden cuts travel time from the Mediterranean Sea<\/a> to the Indian Ocean by three weeks, saving the shipping industry an estimated $2 billion a year or more.<\/p>\n Efforts to make ransom payments illegal have gone nowhere, Chalk said. If the United States<\/a> wanted to change that, or rewrite current rules of engagement for Navy ships fighting pirates, the task would be difficult because these maritime polices are international in nature, he said.<\/p>\n Pleasure boaters used to be somewhat safe from Somali pirates, as they weren\u2019t seen as rich ransom targets. That may explain why the Marina del Rey couple entered the area off Oman.<\/p>\n \u201cI think here they weren\u2019t expecting trouble because they were so far away from major concentration of attacks,\u201d Chalk said.<\/p>\n As Wilkerson, the retired Marine general, said about U.S. policy toward pirates, that strategy may need to be reworked in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The electronic monitoring of the boats racing in the America’s Cup instead of judges in boats will changes yacht racing again. The America’s Cup seems determined to alter yacht racing as we have known it. Personally I have long wondered when we would have this sort of thing. GPS has become very accurate. Judges and … Continue reading PIRATES AND NEW RULES<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[632],"tags":[525,633],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas-cup-34-2","tag-americas-cup-34","tag-pirates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenlirakis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n