Comments on
Chris Bray, The Vast Majesty of Naval Warfare and Stuff,
HNN Cliopatria [pseudonym], Apr 28, 2009
(04/28/2009 09:25 PM)
"We're Men, We're Manly Men, We're Men in Tights!!"
I ran across a photograph recently, which showed a white
Persian cat chasing a deer through a suburban street. It
was almost ridiculous in the cat's insistence that it was
really a panther, and the deer's acceptance of a prima-facie absurd
claim. One kick from a cloven hoof, and you have a very
dead cat. But that didn't happen.
http://www.guzer.com/pictures/cat_chases_deer.php
I think we may be dealing with something
approximately similar. It is probably a mistake to understand
this as a straight military encounter. Perhaps it should
be understood as a form of theater. I have not been able to find a
complete circumstantial account of the attack. However, a
composite report runs as follows:
The pirates approached the MV MSC Melody in a rubber
boat of the Zodiac type, fired Kalashnikovs at it for
about four minutes, and then attempted to board, using a rope ladder
and grapnel, on the port bow, presumably the foredeck. Passengers
immediately reacted by throwing deck chairs
down on the pirates, and the Israeli security team
came up with fire hoses and pistols issued by the
captain. They fired just enough not to convince the pirates
not to board, and then stopped. The pirates pursued the ship
for another fifteen minutes before departing.
Parenthetically, the ship is owned by the firm which owned
the old Achille Lauro. That probably explains the Israeli
connection.
One man behind a parapet is worth ten men in the open. When
the parapet is substantially elevated, say the wing of a ship's
bridge, and the men in the open are confined to a small
boat, with no room to take cover, the ratio rises to a
hundred to one. American Navy SEALs would have responded to the
first automatic weapons fire with a single fusillade of their
own which would surely have killed all the pirates, and sunk
their boat, within a minute or so. One burst from a single
assault rifle would have done it. For that matter, even
a deer rife or a twelve-gauge shotgun, firing down into a
small boat from, say, fifty feet above the water, at a range
of maybe a hundred feet, must have been murderous in
effect. Both weapons are conventionally considered as less
restricted than a pistol, not more. It would be one thing if
the Somalis were boarding ships in human-wave attacks of hundreds--
but they aren't. In almost every case, the boarding
party is substantially smaller than the ship crew.
The Israeli security team seems to have done the absolute least
required to prevent the pirates from boarding, and they seem to have
deliberately refrained from capturing prisoners, or even
compelling the pirates to throw their weapons overboard. In short,
they were apparently concerned with not making the Somalis
lose face. What emerges is that the Italians were forced to
reveal a small part of their arsenal when
the pirates actually started climbing aboard.
Presumably they had a machine gun as well, but they did
not have to admit it (plausible deniability). Cruise
ships are the upper class of the sea, second only to
naval sailors, and they probably have some privileges
which other people don't have. For one thing, they don't
need to visit any particular port, and that gives them
leverage against port authorities who might ask awkward
questions about a locker in the captain's cabin.
In the captures of third-world freighters, one has to suspect
that there is an element of the pirates buying the ship from its
crew, at the expense of the owner, particularly if half the
crew is in a state of debt-slavery and therefore doesn't have
anything worth stealing. All the pirates have to do, in that case,
is to put on enough of a Sherwood Forest act to keep the
ship crew out of trouble at home, enough to make the owner look like
a heel if he tries to prosecute them for mu
tiny. Read Eric Hobsbawm's _Bandits_ and _Primitive Rebels_ for a
discussion of the "Social Bandit." A fairly typical episode
involved a Calabrian bandit cleaning out the cashbox of an
estate he raided, and then handing out all the grain to the
peasants. It may be that it is socially obligatory
for a Somali pirate to give the ship crew a generous tip when they
are eventually released.
(04/30/2009 07:59 AM)
What a Somali pirate might be able to do, at no cost to
himself, is to give every sailor his passport and other papers
back, thus making the sailor a "free agent." Then too, there
are known cases of riots for the purpose of destroying legal
evidence of debt, certain communal riots in East Bengal during
the 1930's, with Muslim peasants acting against Hindu
zamindars (tax farmers or landlords, the distinction being obscure
in India).
I think that all the more expensive ships, such as the cruise ships,
the American-flag ships, and the container ships which haul
containers for the big stores such as Wal-Mart, IKEA, etc.,
will be getting water cannon, simply to keep
the insurers happy. The cannon don't cost very much to install,
and, being overtly installed, they can be wired into a central
control system, destroyer-fashion. This means that one man-- the
captain-- can shoot the entire battery, directing a quasi-robotic
system, and at need, he can do it from the engine room
as well. Ships fitted with water cannon will find it
advantageous to overtly display them, shooting jets of water high up
in the air, to be visible at a distance of a mile or
more. Once it becomes generally known that the system is
robotic, and frankly inhuman, it is no imputation on a pirate's
courage if he chooses not to attack a ship thus equipped.
I don't know if this is relevant, but there are certain tourist
railroads in the American West, the kind which operate
steam locomotives, which employ actors to play
at being train robbers.
Another point: the United States Navy would naturally
prefer that all ocean commerce was carried in ships expensive
enough to support American sailors, that is, big, fast ships
with highly automated/mechanized loading systems, which can turn
around in a day or so at either end of the voyage, and which
are fitted with suitably luxurious crew quarters. This kind of ship
tends to run rather at odds with convoys, but it is also the kind of
ship which would be politically easier to arm, since it travels over
a definite route between two countries. The concept of
"innocent passage" would be replaced by specific reciprocal
agreements, of the type traditionally applied to airlines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Melody
http://www.lloydslist.com/ll/news/msc-melody-uses-firepower-to-repel-east-africa-piracy-attack/20017643749.htm
http://www.cruise-addicts.com/news/msc_cruises/169255-MSC-Melody-captain-tells-battle-with-pirates.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1173805/Cruise-ship-opens-pirates-Somalis-attack-luxury-liner-AK47s.html
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/2369378/Nelson-woman-in-pirate-terror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Cruises
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Achille_Lauro
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