We have been chatting about piracy recently, especially in the context of whether one needs a full fat frigate or something less fighty but does it make any difference what you have if your rules of engagement prevent anything useful being done anyway?
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For counter piracy, as one task force commander put it, you need ships with a gun, a boat, and a helicopter. So If you are building for that purpose that would be all you need, but Navy’s are not built for that purpose. If you happen to have an AAW cruiser in the area–because it needs to be in the vicinity, it will work as well (or better).
Many ships doing counter piracy in the Indian Ocean (IO) were not sent to the IO to do counter piracy. They were sent to do counter piracy, because they were in the IO.
It is a horror story but not one we should add to our list of ‘responsibilities’. I’m not even sure we should be out chasing pirates. There are plenty of arms sold into Africa and the middle east to enable the ‘better’ countries in that area to take a lead in the issues. To the extent piracy impacts EU shipping and trade, then yes, have an EU task force out there, but the RoE for piracy should be shoot on sight. Its the only way they will get the message. That makes it easier for mission requirements – full fat frigate
Chuck, that’s backwards. Most of the ships assigned there are dispatched in combined nations task forces from their home countries, not because they were already there. How else would you explain Holland, German, French and Japanese ships et al when they have absolutely no territorial reason to be in that area at all?
The UK needs to go back to basics on asylum rules. I doubt if you would have got far telling a 1950s judge that an SS death camp guard could not be deported to Germany as he might face the death penalty. We need to update this. Asylum should be for the innocent, not the guilty. So no asylum for murderers, rapists, terrorists, hijackers, pirates. So if the RN spots a traficker throwing people overboard they should be able to arrest the traficker & hand him to whichever local jurisdiction is most likely to hang him.
The Telegraph article first: they may as well run a story entitled “the horror of almost everything about East Africa and most of the rest of the world: why the UK is forced to turn a blind eye”
I think this is just one of the many nasty things that happens in the third world under the gaze of the more developed nations, with no obvious fix. The small part of this particular horror story which occurs at sea is where we find the refugees in most phyical danger perhaps… but machine-gunning their taxi driver is not going to solve anything, at sea or on land.
RoE more generally – they protect our own people as much as anything, the second they become a bit slack/fuzzy/open (however you want to put it) there are going to be a lot of confused upper deck sentries wondering whether to start shooting… perhaps there’s an argument for a full-fat warship right there, the officers and men on board are much more likely to make the right choice.
My personal view is that if we send a ship to go looking for trouble, as we do off East Africa, send a warship. It doesn’t matter if ‘trouble’ is a just bloke with an AK-47 – deciding whether to shoot him is a ‘warfare’ job just as much as pulling the trigger is.
OPVs sound great but they should stick to the parts of the world where things are a bit more gentlemanly.
Observer said “how else would you explain Holland”
@x
Pedent.
@Observer December 27, 2012 at 21:16 “Chuck, that’s backwards. Most of the ships assigned there are dispatched in combined nations task forces from their home countries, not because they were already there. How else would you explain Holland, German, French and Japanese ships et al when they have absolutely no territorial reason to be in that area at all?
Quite correct for those countries, I was thinking in terms of the US and UK where they normally keep ships in that area.
As for the others, do these warships have anything else pressing to do? They build the warships for other purposes, but when they are not using them for war they might as well be used for counter-piracy. China is using this as a reason to exercise distant deployment and learn from others. A lot of it seems more demonstration than substance, although they are doing some useful work along the way.
Basic point, the ships are not built for counter-piracy, they are built for other reasons, then they are used for counter-piracy because that is what they have, even if vastly overqualified for the purpose.