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Expert: Navy doesn’t need war on piracy

The U.S. Navy and its international allies should take care they don’t start a “war on piracy,” as the U.S. declared “wars” on terror and drugs, a top maritime security analyst said Tuesday.

Piracy will never be completely eliminated, Rand Corp. researcher Peter Chalk said, but it can be managed and defended against to the point that it becomes just another cost of international commerce. What’s more, the international system can probably withstand a great deal more attacks and hijackings beyond the recent spike off Somalia, he said, given the scale of global trade.

Although Chalk cautioned that there are few reliable figures when it comes to the costs of piracy, he said a rough estimate is that global piracy costs the world about $16 billion per year, although he noted that figure is a conservative guess because many pirate attacks aren’t reported. The total yearly value of international maritime trade is more than $7.8 trillion, making the losses to piracy comparatively minor.

As with other piracy experts, Chalk said the lawlessness off Somalia’s coast was a symptom of its anarchy on land. The absence of authorities gives pirates the ability to hijack ships and take them to ports where no police will try to free them. Also, pirate payoffs give locals a stake in helping the attacks continue. Short of invading the coastal towns that serve as pirate havens, experts have said, there is no way to strike at more than the symptoms of piracy.

Chalk also echoed other experts with his view that the U.S. and European naval patrols off Somalia could never stop all the attacks over hundreds of square miles, nor even serve as a deterrent for pirates who have proven to be wily, inventive operators. As such, the European Union’s new anti-piracy patrol, with four ships, won’t have much of an effect, Chalk said.

The U.S. commander in charge of the waters off Somalia, Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, told CNN on Monday that he thought it would take a force of 61 warships to safeguard the sea lanes just in the Gulf of Aden, compared with the 14 international ships now patrolling off the Horn of Africa. If the U.S. Navy alone had to provide a force that size, it would take every destroyer and cruiser in the fleet, plus three frigates.

But Chalk suggested there were nonmilitary techniques that could at least help cut back on the number of hijackings. If foreign agencies tried to spur local development in the pirate-haven towns, it could lessen the appeal of the money that came in from piracy, he said, although he cautioned that some attacks probably would still take place.

He also cautioned that pirates’ recent successes could presage new maritime terrorist attacks. There’s almost no hard evidence linking Somali pirates with Islamic terrorists, Chalk said, but terror groups could use the lessons from pirate attacks for future operations. Terrorists could also become regular third-party buyers of weapons and other goods seized by pirates.

Cruise ships and civilian ferries —“the softest of the soft targets” — are at particular risk for small-boat suicide attacks, Chalk said. Most governments treat ferries more as mass transit than as commercial vessels, he said, and the way such ships are built makes them especially susceptible to catastrophic attacks. The 2004 bombing of Philippine SuperFerry 14, which killed 116 people, cost just $400 for 8 pounds of dynamite hidden in a television set, Chalk said.