Thread: Best response to Somali piracy?

At any given time, 20+ warships patrol the over two million square miles of ocean off Somalia trying - and largely failing - to protect merchant vessels. These warships often represent the last word in modern naval war fighting technology. The pirates are nothing more than tribesmen equipped with clapped out fishing boats, machetes, RPG's and AK-47s. Yet the admirals tell us they cannot discharge as basic (perhaps THE most basic - and important) a naval function as the protection of trade from these Somali ruffians in that vast ocean. I think the taxpayers of the world have a right to ask what, then, is all taxpayer money spent on navies been spent ON over the last six decades since WWII?

The US Navy for example still has thirteen or so carrier battlegroups, which do little to justify their cost and seem to spend most of their time sailing about waiting for the Imperial Japanese Navy to show up. Using an Arleigh Burke class destroyer to engage four Somali bandits in a dingy is hardly a proportionate or economic response. It seems to me peacetime admirals always succumb to their love of parading their bands on the quarter deck of their vast nuclear powered carriers, or lobbying for ships whose size (The USS Bainbridge for example weighs as much as a WWII cruiser) would make them sitting ducks in WWII let alone in the age of massed supersonic long range robot missiles. Like Jellicoe, they see the size of the ocean and smallness of their ships and like him they shrug there shoulder in a helpless and defeatist way and say they simply cannot guard that much ocean with so few ships.

But think about it. About 20,000 merchant ships a year (50-60 per day) transit the Gulf of Aden. If you were to organise one convoy each way, for example, every three hours (i.e. sixteen convoys a day) of whatever number of merchant ships guarded by one warship then the problem becomes a lot easier. For the Somali pirates the merchant ships would largely vanish from the ocean and second, when they did see a merchant ship the next thing they would see would be an escort bearing down on them - so the pirates would come conveniently to the escorts to be destroyed or otherwise at leisure, rather than having expensive warships running hither and yon searching for the pirate skiffs. And since practically any warship would be 100% lethal to the pirates, you could easily build twenty - or thirty or forty or even fifty - long range, 22+ knot sloops equipped with a medium helicopter, machine guns and auto-cannons and a crew of around 40-50 men for the cost of ONE Arleigh Burke destroyer.

The dirty word in all the above is, of course, ESCORTS.

So the real question is - in an era where everyone talks endlessly about asymmetric warfare, why have these ships not been built already? Where is the failure of imagination and what institutional barriers need to fall?