Piracy Is Only Partially a Shore-based Problem

Herb Carmen, the Navy's Thinker in Residence at the Center for a New American Security and someone whose work I am coming to enjoy, has written a blog post that Tom Ricks has picked up on his Foreign Policy blog here.

All is well thus far for the unsuspecting reader--except that I was led to Ricks' post by a post by Carmen on Facebook in which he links to Ricks' post. Carmen appends the link with the following comment: "Gotta look ashore to stop piracy at sea."

I've heard this line of thinking before, and Martin Murphy (another friend, though not on Facebook) is growing prosperous as its leading proponent. That said, when I hear it, I cringe, not because it isn't partially true--because it is. But it has become one of those DC area "truths" that has become so firmly fixed in the lexicon of the piracy discussion that it is not often critiqued for completeness. More insidious though, is the fact that I have on more than one occasion--in person and on television--witnessed uniform wearing flag officers of the world's most powerful Navy hew to this line, generally in response to a question about "what is the Navy going to do about this?" Not wishing to get drawn into the argument/discussion of piracy as force structure driver, the flag officer tends to try and diminish the impact that Naval forces actually have on the problem, pointing rather to their organization, funding and logistics ashore.

I have used the line (which I alone seem to find funny) that calling piracy a shore-based problem is a little like the DC Chief of Police describing an open-air drug market as a "foreign policy problem". At some level of abstraction, the Chief of Police is correct--as are Carmen, and Murphy, and the unnamed flag officers. But at the level of action and consequences, that drug market is a local police issue, and piracy is an issue for sea-based forces. Will all the action take place at sea? No. Will capturing and killing pirates at sea have an impact? Absolutely. Empty chairs at pirate dinner tables (a.k.a the removal of incentives) whether through incarceration or expiration will serve as a message to others looking to join in the fun. Will forces from the sea likely be a large part of whatever action occurs ashore? Yes. Are such activities likely to be planned largely by representatives of the maritime forces? Yes.

Piracy has become the issue that "jumped the shark", taking us from a paradigm in which Jointness worship has been replaced by Interagency worship, the evidence of which can be seen in Naval Officers of various ranks not seeing the importance of OWNING a mission that is some ways is at the heart of the birth of all navies. The "piracy is a land-based" problem is tailor-made for the "Interagency", giving all sorts of opportunities for "root cause" discussions, diplomacy and development, and international cooperation. None of this is bad, mind you. None of it. What is bad is that the Navy seems content to join the orchestra, when it should be conducting it.

Bryan McGrath

The European Response to Haiti: United in Diversity

Where Information Dissemination has so far mainly focussed on the US response on the Haiti earthquake, here's a brief analysis of the European response.

Leadership
Let's start with asking that all important question: Who's in charge? The answer to the question is fairly easy. It's Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Have we seen her so far? Only very briefly.
The problem Ashton has is that she has 'competition' when it comes to Foreign Affairs. The competition are:
Spain, which holds the current Presidency of the Council of the EU.
Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council.
José Manuel Boroso, the President of the European Commission.
All the 27 ministers of Development Aid from the EU members.
Larger members making their own policy (think about France with its international donor conference).

This all makes that there is one guarantee with a EU answer to problems: it takes about forever before there's a general agreement on actions to be taken.

As a Dutch saying goes: with Baroness Ashton the EU isn't going to win the war. She was absent from European Defence Summit in Majorca on february the 24th, the first one since her installment. Javier Solana always attended these meetings and at this one NATO secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was also present. Ashton, however, decided that it was much more important to attended the inauguration of President Yanukovych in Ukraine.
That doesn't give much hope for the future.

Money
So the only thing that the EU has commonly decided on is to pledge €330 million in aid. (That only took them SIX days, so it was a really quick response in EU-time.)
But member states have also pledged money separately. The Netherlands national government has promised about €44.5 million besides the EU offer. So it's almost impossible to figure out what the total amount is. Especially because some of the amounts are hard to decipher. Let me explain why that is.
That Dutch promise is made up of the immediate offer of 1 million. Later 2 million was added and then another 41,5 million. The last amount came about because the Dutch minister of Development Aid promised to match what the Dutch public would raise during a telethon. But only in the Dutch press the distinction is made everywhere else you only see the total amount of €83 million raised by the telethon.

Assets
The EU has hardly any assets, but its members do. So in true EU style there was hardly any coordination of all the individual efforts.
So what happened was some mad dash to send planes to Haiti. But it's a long flight to Haiti from Europe and a fair amount of planes couldn't land in Port-au-Prince because the airport was clogged up. The delays weren't too dramatic though, so these small scale efforts went reasonably well.

But the large scale effort is a real disappointment. Where are all those European LPDs, LHDs and carriers that were built because the future, since the Cold War is over, is in Sea Basing and disaster relief?
A few in Haiti, but mainly not going at all. And that's disappointing, since in total the EU members have 6 CV's, 2 LPH's, 2 LHD's, 11 LPD's, 4 LSD's

Spain has sent a LPD, the UK sent a LSD, Italy a CV and the Netherlands offered a LPD.
But it took these countries more than a week to offer them in the first place and not all vessels actually went. The Dutch LPD HNLMS Johan de Witt didn't go. The reason is the UN has said it will not be needed any more by the time it will get there. Now there's a shocker. That's what happens when you wait too long with a decision.
But the Dutch can now take the moral high ground. They offered and the UN has said it isn't necessary.

The EU will also send a European police force of 350. We all know that's going to be an invaluable contribution next to those 20,000+ American soldiers and 2,000 Canadian soldiers.

Conclusion
The EU members have definitely taken the EU motto “United in Diversity” quite literally. The lack of a coordinated response is certainly what unites them.

Any EU members still wondering why the US world doesn't take them serious, especially on a military level?

The European Commission's Seminar on Piracy

The Mobility and Transport department of the European Commission - the executive body of the EU - has a seminar today in Bruxelles called 'Piracy and armed robbery at sea: How best to protect seafarers'.

Looking at the agenda it seems like the focus of the seminar is on how seafarers can protect themselves, the impact of piracy on their personal lives and the economic consequences for shipping and insurance companies.
While this is an interesting subject, it's not one I'd discus with the Commission and if I were a seafarer or a shipping company I'd have different questions for the Commission.

I think the Commission should be discussing 2 points:
1. What's the role of the EU in protecting seafarers?
2. How best to protect seafarers.

While EU NAVFOR is the first maritime EU operation that's reasonably planned and not some haphazard action by individual members you can't help but wonder where all the EU vessels are. Together the EU members have about 120 frigates and destroyers. And they are struggling to deploy around 6 frigates a time.
So the role of the EU is to make sure its individual members deploy more resources to protect seafarers.

And on the second question the answer is simple: stop the piracy from happening.
And while the recent decision to expand the mission of Operation Atalanta to include control of Somali ports where pirates are based, as well as catching pirate mother ships will help, it's battling the symptons and ingnores the root of the problem. Because the root of the problem, as has been said by Galrahn and others often enough, is on land.
But who is seriously thinking the EU will intervene on land?

My Visit to the Air Command and Staff College

Apparently, it's now cool to ask why the country needs an independent Air Force. Last week, I traveled to the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama to participate on a panel about the future of air power. I had been invited because of an article I wrote several years ago titled "Abolish the Air Force". Also on the panel were two gentlemen from RAND who had much more first hand experience with air power than myself. The audience consisted of the faculty and student body of the ACSC, roughly 400 or so mid-career officers. Most of the attendees were USAF, but there were also generous contingents from the Army, USN, USMC, and a variety of foreign military organizations.

I didn't use slides, and I didn't deliver precisely this lecture, but the linked presentation nevertheless represents a good summary of my remarks. After introductory remarks of 12-15 minutes each, the panel got down to the serious business of answering audience questions. In addition to the panel, I sat in on morning and afternoon classes focusing on roughly the same topic, where I answered more questions.

Below is a very rough summary of the questions I fielded and the answers I gave:

Are you serious?
As a heart attack. Some articles are written as part of a particular debate, and can only really be understood in the context of that debate; the claims made intelligible to the participants in a way that they're not available to outsiders. In this case, however, it means what it means; I think that the Air Force should be folded into the other two services. However, if I fail to snuff out the Air Force, I won't consider the article a failure; part of the point is to get people to think about the contingency and malleability of our institutions.

Relations between the traditional Army and the USAAF were pretty bad prior to and during World War II; wouldn't a return to that structure simply recreate those debates?
Possibly, but I think that many of the questions that animated those debates have become obsolete. The debate in the interwar period became very polarized, with air advocates arguing that the ground army was literally useless, and ground advocates allocating only a very small role to aerial forces. While I'm suspicious of "history teaches us" arguments, I nevertheless think that history has taught us that ground and air units must work together in order to have tactical, operational, and strategic effect. The current arrangement, in my view, makes that more rather than less difficult. Moreover, I think that aerial forces were improperly allocated between the services during the interwar period, and that this allocation caused some of the tension. In particular, strategic air components, especially today but even then, are more at home in the Navy than in the Army.

You argue that the career of military officer isn't as specialized now as it was in the past. This seems crazy to me. Explain why you say such crazy things.
I think it's clear that individual military careers are more specialized now than they have ever been; the technical requirements of flying an aircraft or operating sophisticated computer equipment or doing dozens of other tasks take years to learn. However, this specialization is largely independent of branch organization; a USAF lieutenant could be trained in most of the tasks of a USN ensign without really missing a beat. This is to say that while military professionals specialize in lots of things, they don't really specialize in being an "Air Force officer," or at least not in a way that is meaningfully distinct from being a "Naval officer."

Why pick on the Air Force? Why not just create a unified military, like Canada or China?
Because I think that there's some logic to the "mission" justification for independent services. I think that it's possible for both the Army and the Navy to think about conducting war independent of each other, or at least that it's much more possible for the Army and Navy to do so than for the Air Force. Apart from strategic bombing, every mission that the Air Force conducts by nature involves tight cooperation with one of the other two services. It seems to me that, if this is the case, the use of airpower ought to be conceived of as an organic element of how the Army and the Navy manage military force.

But what about strategic bombing?
Like Robert Pape, I'm very skeptical of the effectiveness of strategic bombing campaigns. I think that they violate an essential Clauswitzian prescription by failing to disarm the enemy, and that consequently they inevitably leave the decision whether to concede or endure in the hands of the enemy. Moreover, I think that the existence of an independent Air Force creates a situation in which civilians are faced with bad, destructive options about the use of military force. The Air Force, like every single other bureaucratic institution in existence, by nature tries to acquire more resources and improve its competitive stance. Consequently, the Air Force has a vested interest in presenting its best case for military intervention, just as do the Army and the Navy. In the case of the Air Force, this best case appears to the untrained civilian eye to be a cheap, easy, and effective way to wage war. This leads, in my view, to poor decisions about military engagement.

But what of the Air Force's elite service tradition?Service traditions should be taken seriously; military organizations reinforce and emphasize tradition for a reason. Tradition and esprit de corps allow a military organization to function. I'm just not convinced that the Air Force elite service tradition is that much more effective than, say, the elite service tradition of the Marines or of naval aviators. This is to say that branch independence doesn't seem to be strictly necessary to the maintenance of an elite service tradition.

This is only a partial recap of the questions I answered; all of the questions were good, some I answered more than once, and most I answered less cogently than I suggest here. I was impressed, but not surprised, by the professionalism of the student body and the incisiveness of their questions.

Finally, I recently received a grant to work on an expanded version of this argument. Hopefully it will lead to some form of publication, although I don't yet have a sense of where or in what form. This project has, however, helped push back my work on the history of anti-submarine warfare.

2010 Patterson School Policy Simulation

Beginning on Friday at noon, the Patterson School ran a 22 hour simulation of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Patterson School policy simulations are designed to create situations in which student must make decisions in a limited time frame based on asymmetric and incomplete information. In the past, we have simulated a coup in Belarus, the death of Fidel Castro, and a hostage crisis in Afghanistan, among other events.

Structure:
The teams consisted of 5-6 students, led by either a faculty member or a recent graduate. The students played the foreign and defense policy principals of their respective states, with the leader playing the CoG (Russia and Iran both had two CoGs).

United States
United Nations
Israel
Iran
Iraq
Russia
Saudi Arabia

The simulation was primarily focused on the key political decisions associated with the fallout of the attack, rather than the military details. When necessary, Simulation Control (myself and two recent Patterson graduates) supplied information and made rulings regarding military efforts. The simulation was conducted in real time, although certain events were telescoped for playability and dramatic effect.

As was the case in the last two years, the Patterson School conducted the simulation in cooperation with the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications. Students from the SJT operated websites representing two news networks, Gulf News Service (an Al Jazeera clone) and International News Network (a CNN clone). These networks were managed by faculty from the SJT, and were independent from Simulation Control; on more than one occasion one of the networks declined to run stories from Simulation Control either because of a lack of confirmation or a lack of newsworthiness.

Course of the Simulation:
The simulation began when the last Israeli aircraft left Iranian airspace at 12pm EST. In order to create an incentive for a second strike (and thus tension between the teams), Simulation Control posited an intelligence leak from Israel to Russia, then from Russia to Iran. This leak allowed Iran to organize its air defense network such that the effectiveness of the Israeli strike was reduced. Nevertheless, Iranian forces were badly mauled, losing dozens of interceptors and suffering damage to all key targets in exchange for downing seven Israeli bombers. One surviving pilot was eventually captured in Iran, and another was captured by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.

The Iranians responded with a limited ballistic missile strike against Israel. Most of the missiles were intercepted, about half by the United States and half by Israel. The remaining missiles did no significant damage. Iran also pressured Hezbollah and Hamas to engage Israel. Simulation Control proceeded on the assumption that both Hezbollah and Hamas would be reluctant to commit there full strength to this, and consequently the attacks in both north and south were light. Nevertheless, Israel became involved in a costly series of tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah.

Overall, however, the Iranians played it very cool. They made no effort to destabilize Iraq; in fact, they explicitly pressured affiliates in Iraq to refrain from attacks. Iran also made no attacks on Gulf shipping, or on any other targets. This posture clearly defied the expectations of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iraq, and Simulation Control. The lack of a strong Iranian response left attention squarely on Israel, in particular the violation of Saudi and Iraqi airspace in the course of the attack.

The destruction of above ground facilities at Natanz, and the consequent dispersal of stockpiled LEU, focused the attention of the United Nations and became a growing problem for Israel. Increased radiation levels were discovered in several neighboring countries, increasing pressure for a ceasefire and for the introduction of IAEA inspectors for damage assessment. The United States, the United Nations, and Saudi Arabia all pressed early for a formal ceasefire, while the Saudis and the Russians attempted to take advantage of back channel approaches in order to end the war. The Saudis, however, were involved in a double game; they were attempting to facilitate a second Israeli strike in order to finish off previously damaged targets while they were publicly pursuing the cease fire. For their troubles, Simulation Control blew up a police station in Medina.

The restrained attitudes of both the United States and Iran led to domestic difficulties in both countries. In Iran, Mousavi and the Green movement attacked the Iranian government from the right, accusing the Ahmadinejad regime of failing to respond adequately to the Israeli attacks. State security organizations, however, managed to hold the protests in check. In the United States, the Obama administration came under immediate assault from the right for failing to sufficiently support Israel. However, the mutual policies of restraint helped both the US and Iranian teams keep a lid on the situation; with only limited provocation, it was easier for the teams to ignore domestic critics. Simulation Control attempted to ramp up the domestic tension with a series of twitter feeds, but this didn't work as well as hoped. It's worth noting that the Friday evening/Shabbos timing of the attack probably would have limited the mobilization of domestic opposition within the United States.

Israel was hampered by an increasingly troubled relationship with the US, and by the lack of sufficient "bunker buster" ordnance. Eventually, at around 7:15 am on Saturday, they ordered a second strike, in spite of US refusals of in-flight refueling, replacement ordnance, and access to Iraqi airspace. This led to a dramatic confrontation with the United States over Iraq, with US SAMs eventually targeting and shooting down an Israeli F-16. Shortly after this took place, we called the simulation.

Evaluation:
This was the most intricate simulation that Patterson has run in several years, and it came off relatively well. As the purpose of the Patterson simulation is to place decision-making responsibility in the hands of tired, tense, ill-informed students, we made a decision long ago to sacrifice realism for drama. Obviously, a US shoot-down of an Israeli warplane is exceedingly unlikely to happen in the real world. Then again, the turn of events was very surprising to Simulation Control. To the extent that the simulation revealed anything of policy relevance, it suggested that a policy of restraint on the part of Iran could cause some serious strategic problems for Israel. Iran suffered substantial damage to its nuclear facilities and Air Force, but was generally perceived to have won a major diplomatic victory (although for reasons that were unclear to Simulation Control, relations with Russia soured). The United States also did relatively well; the US position in Iraq was not threatened, and there was no evident danger to the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Israel managed to cause some damage, but at the expense of serious tension with its major sponsor and a general perception of ineffectiveness.

For a more general take, see this article in the Kentucky Kernel.