JOHN ROBB

PIRATES

Some thinking on Somali pirates:

• Seal snipers took out three Somali pirates and freed an American hostage held in a lifeboat.  What's interesting to me is the decision making process used to resolve this minor problem.  Here are some of the aspects.  Firstly, there was a timer on the hostage stand-off.  Other pirate groups/ships (an open source insurgency with commercial drivers) were en route to surround the lifeboat or take control of the hostages.  Secondly, this minor decision involved a highly centralized decision making loop that included the President, the Commander of CENTCOM, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the DoJ, and the White House/NSC -- just to pull the trigger on three kidnappers holding a hostage at gunpoint.  Lastly, one of the biggest fears of the US government is that these pirates would be arrested.  Why?  Since Somalia is a mess, they would become wards of the US, likely suffer only minimal jail time, and eventually end up applying for US citizenship.  
• The symbiosis between private insurance and privateering dominates.  If the company that owned the rescued ship wasn't a US defense contractor, its kidnapping insurance company (likely Lloyds) and its designated crisis representatives (likely Control Risks Group) would have negotiated to pay the pirate's fee to get the hostage back -- as are thousands of kidnappings from Mexico to Colombia to Nigeria to the Gulf of Aden are settled every year.  Somali pirates have made tens of millions this way already.  Further, in many parts of the world, kidnappers are almost never caught/killed (<5% in Mexico and the same is likely true for Somalia).  So, given this backdrop, the Navy's rescue effort was just a sideshow and the industry that made it possible will continue to grow rapidly.
• Dead end solutions dominate in great power capitals.  The most commonly suggested solutions, patrols by conventional navies and nation-building, aren't the answer.  Both are expensive and would be futile over the longer term.  The Pyrrhic solution that will eventually be adopted is a combination of A) funded militias (Somali anti-pirates that raid pirate dens) and B) business as usual (private sector management ala the symbiosis detailed above).  Might as well cut to the end game and quite the near term charade (I told this to the House Armed Services committee when I testified in early April).

NOTE:  In the comments on this post, "Moon" came up with a term:  The Somali Coast Guard, which may serve as a moniker for a militia effort.  How much would this cost?  

 

Let's do the numbers.  The short term "solution" that arrested Iraq's descent into state failure was an open source counter-insurgency (aka managed militias) called the Anbar Awakening (not the "surge," which was a costly PR stunt).   That program costs $30 million (plus administration) per month.  1/200 of the cost of maintaining US troops in theater (perversely, the US gov't has offloaded the administration and cost of this program to the Iraqi government, which because it sees the militias as disloyal, isn't paying them anymore -- ultimately, this will lead to a renewed descent into state failure).  A similar program in the Gulf of Aden, using Somali militias, would likely cost $2-3 m a month (guesstimate).  That's a small, small fraction of the cost of patrols by conventional navies and a infinitesimal fraction of what would be a failed nation-building effort in Somalia.  Granted, this is an extremely flawed solution (the militias will end up being lots of trouble), but it is going to be the one eventually adopted.  

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Posted by John Robb on Monday, 13 April 2009 at 08:01 AM | Permalink