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| Africa Horn |
| Orders about Pirates to Change: Disrupt, Deter and Capture |
| 2009-01-18 |
| From a Jan 15th DoD News Briefing with Vice Adm. Gortney from the Pentagon H/T Blackfive Q Can you talk a little bit about the operation in more detail? And what do your forces do if they encounter suspicious boats, especially if they're not in the act of doing something? Do you have the authority to deal with those folks, in any way, in international waters? And what are your orders regarding any detainees that you might take? ADM. GORTNEY: Currently I'm going to have to take you back just a few, take you back just a few days. But when the activity spiked in the middle of August, we sat down. We knew we had -- our current process wasn't working, and we had to take a new look at it. We knew that the problem of piracy started ashore. And it's because there is not a rule of law. There isn't a governance. There isn't economic stability. There isn't a court system that will hold these criminals responsible for their actions. And so the ultimate solution is ashore proper. So we had to focus on prevention efforts at sea. And we developed a campaign plan. We created, working with the International Maritime Organization, the Maritime Security Patrol Area, a place to channel the shipping, so that we can concentrate naval activity, to make our naval activity more effective, because we knew we would be ineffective alone. And we went off on three lines of influence. The first one was to bring more navies into it, international navies, to bring more of the international community to help solve this international problem and to bring more navies into it. The second one was to work with the shipping industry on best practices to, what can they do to prevent pirates from successfully getting onboard their vessel? And the third line of influence was to work through the interagency process to find a way to solve what we call the persons under control: When we capture a pirate, where do we take him? Where do we hold him? Where -- what court system tries him and holds him? If they're found guilty, hold them accountable for their actions. We've had great effects in the first two -- once again, 14 nations at that are down there. The shipping industry is having the greatest impact. They're doing a terrific job of sharing best practices, speed, maneuver and non-kinetic defensive measures that will prevent pirates from getting on board the vessel. And we have had great effect on that. And we've actually gotten -- in the last six weeks there's only been four successful piracy attacks. The down side of that, though, is that the attacks continue. And if we're going to be -- whether there's -- the -- they're all -- all the rest have been unsuccessful, and if we're going to be effective, it's coming to closure on our last one, where we capture the pirates and take them to a court of law and, if they're found guilty, hold them accountable for their actions. We're close with that. The State Department's close on finalizing an agreement with one of the nations out there. And once we get that authority, then we're going to change my orders. And my orders right now to the coalition are disrupt, deter, but do not capture. But once we get the authorities, what we -- that we need there and a place to take them, then we're going to go -- my orders will change to disrupt, deter and capture, and try and hold them accountable for their actions. |
| Posted by:Sherry |
| #1 Cool! One helpful thing would be to build the guardrails around the edges of the ship in such a manner that grappling hooks are useless. If things keep hardening up, however, the pirates will come to the point where they will just start shooting ships with RPGs as punishment for being too difficult to hijack. We have time to think about what we are going to do about this now, but the answer is going to lie along the lines of some kind of "disproportional" response so they never get to the point where their tiny minds start thinking along those lines. |
| Posted by: gorb 2009-01-18 15:42 |