Combined Task Force 151 hunts down pirates in the Gulf of Aden

[thedrifter]

Combined Task Force 151 hunts down pirates in the Gulf of Aden
By James Warden, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, March 29, 2009

Photo gallery: Pirate hunters in the Gulf of Aden

http://www.stripes.com/09/mar09/pirates/

(Day One of a two-day series)

THE GULF OF ADEN — The USS Boxer is an impressive ship, purpose-built to show up on the horizon and grab a well-protected beach from a determined enemy. An array of helicopters can spot threats before they ever see the amphibious assault ship. Harrier jets can pound them into the ground. And hovercrafts can carry hundreds of Marines and their armored vehicles to storm the beach.

But the Boxer isn’t facing off against an enemy navy. Instead, it’s looking for small groups of men in far less impressive skiffs who are armed only with a few AKs and perhaps a rocket-propelled grenade or two. These men are pirates, and they’ve cost the shipping industry money out of proportion to their small boats and weak weapons.

The Boxer is the flagship for Combined Task Force 151, a joint effort between the U.S., Danish and Turkish navies to prevent pirates from attacking merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden just off Somalia’s coast.

Piracy in the gulf arose out of the anarchy in Somalia. With the country unable to defend its territory, fishing boats from other countries came into its waters to haul in fish illegally. Angry Somali fishermen captured these boats and ransomed them as retribution, but they quickly realized they could make a lucrative living by capturing larger boats unrelated to their initial complaints.

Picking out pirates is harder than just looking for the Jolly Roger. Many legitimate small boats ply the Gulf of Aden. The pirates can pose as one of these boats whenever a warship or military aircraft passes by.

"A skiff is a skiff is a skiff," said Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, the task force commander. "There’s not a pirate skiff like there’s a fighter aircraft or a commercial aircraft."

Marine Sgt. Alex Azcuenaga, an aerial gunner for a UH-1Y Huey, spends his days in the sky trying to distinguish pirate skiffs from all the other small boats. Dhows with lots of people or small boats without fishing nets catch his eye, although even these can be innocent.

"There’s always that shady boat that’s just out there randomly," he said.

But Azcuenaga said his mission is not that different from what he did in Iraq.

"It’s really all about the same when you tie it in together," he said. "You’re still doing recon and escorting."

These challenges put small, fast boats at the front of the fight. Small teams on the Navy’s rigid-hulled inflatable boats speed out ahead of the large warships to confront any pirates they encounter. Pirate attacks on merchant ships have been getting more aggressive lately, but they invariably surrender in the face of these well-trained, well-armed teams.

"I’d say this is more of a street war," McKnight said. "This is down and dirty."

CTF 151 is not the only anti-piracy effort in the gulf. The European Union has its own task force — although its mission is simply to protect humanitarian aid shipments, not specifically to fight pirates. (The Danish navy is working with the Americans because that country opted out of the EU’s military pact for fear of undermining NATO, and cannot take part in the EU’s military operations.)

Russia and China have sent their own ships, as well. They escort convoys of ships from their own countries through the pirate-infested waters. In all, ships from about two dozen countries are working together to defend the merchant ships, despite the varied missions.

"I’ve been in the Navy 30 years. I never thought I’d be working with the Russians, the Chinese, Pakistan, India," McKnight said. "I exchange e-mails with the Chinese and the Russians. Bet you never thought that would happen."

Danish Navy Capt. Dan B. Termansen, commander of the HDMS Absalon, said the effort has made clear progress. Successful pirate attacks have dropped off with increasing numbers of ships. The Absalon, alone, had found 88 suspected pirates as of the week March 15. That’s over one-third of the approximately 250 pirates that all the nations in the gulf had found in the more than 200 days that they’ve been patrolling the waters. Termansen was quick to note that none of the suspects they captured were repeat offenders.

"They probably think when they come ashore they want another career," he said.

Ships in the fight

USS Boxer
Country: United States
Type: Amphibious assault ship
Length: 844 feet
Personnel: Usually between 2,500 and 3,000
Weapons: three 20 mm rapid-fire guns, four 50 cal machine guns, four 25 mm machine guns, and various missiles
Helicopters: Up to 12 CH-46 Sea Knights, four CH-53 Sea Stallions, three UH-1 Hueys and four AH-1W Super Cobras (SH-60 Seahawks have been substituted for some aircraft during this deployment)
Airplanes: Up to six AV-8B Harriers

USS Gettysburg
Country: United States
Type: Cruiser
Length: 567 feet
Personnel: 364
Weapons: two 5 inch guns, two 20 mm rapid-fire guns, torpedoes and various missiles
Helicopters: Up to two SH-60 Seahawks

HDMS Absalon
Country: Denmark
Type: A cross between a frigate and a support ship
Length: 450 feet
Personnel: 120 to 180 in the Gulf of Aden
Weapons: one 5-inch gun, two 35 mm guns, six 12.7mm machine guns, torpedoes and various missiles
Helicopters: Up to two

TCG Giresun
Country: Turkey
Type: Frigate
Length: 450 feet
Personnel: About 220
Weapons: Various missiles
Helicopters: One

Pirate skiff
Length: 20 to 60 feet
Personnel: Three to seven per boat
Weapons: AKs and sometimes rocket-propelled grenades
Other: powered by dual engines, almost exclusively made by Honda; pirates use GPS to navigate and satellite phones to communicate


SOURCES: U.S. Navy, Combined Task Force 151, Turkish Undersecretariat for Defence Industries, Danish Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organization

Pirate standard operating procedures

1. The pirates launch near Bosaso on Somalia’s northern coast in groups of two or three skiffs using GPS to navigate. Each skiff contains three to seven pirates. Sometimes a larger "mothership" tows smaller boats behind it.

2. They overnight off the coast of Yemen, turning off their engines to conserve fuel.

3. They attack any vulnerable boat near them when morning arrives, often beginning by strafing the bridge with AK-47s to tell the ship to stop. The pirates climb aboard using ladders and grappling hooks and secure the boat, working from the bridge down through the ship. If no ships are in the area, they continue drifting and try again until fuel runs low.

4. The pirates steer the ship to cities on Somalia’s east coast, such as Bargaal, Eyl, Garaad and Hobyo, and give it to another group of pirates. Along the way, a "pirate code" keeps violence in check by docking the pay of anyone who harms the ship or the crew.


SOURCE: Combined Task Force 151, UN Operational Satellite Application Programme

The telltale signs of a pirate skiff

Weapons, especially larger ones like rocket-propelled grenades.

Crowded boats. The skiffs are usually loaded down with more people than a fishing boat would need.

Excess fuel.

Ladders and grappling hooks.

The lack of nets and other fishing equipment.


SOURCE: Combined Task Force 151

[thedrifter]

The law of the seas
U.S. troops gather evidence for prosecution of Aden piracy
By James Warden, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, March 30, 2009

The second part of a series.

THE GULF OF ADEN — When American forces in the Gulf of Aden find a suspected pirate skiff, they don’t send in the Marines, Navy SEALs or other combat forces. The first people to confront the suspected pirates are members of a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment.

That’s because the military is handling Somalia’s piracy as a criminal problem, not as a military one. Big warships notwithstanding, sailors are combating the pirates with an eye toward a successful criminal prosecution in Kenyan courts, and that requires a whole team of legal and law enforcement personnel.

"Going back centuries, piracy has always been a crime, an international crime, punishable by courts," said Navy Lt. Paul Richelmi, a lawyer on the USS Boxer.

Each country in Combined Task Force 151, the U.S.-led counter-piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden, focuses on criminal prosecution instead of offensive operations, and has worked out its own way to prosecute the pirates it catches. The American process works through the Kenyan system using Coast Guard and Navy personnel to collect the evidence.

Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Dave Ratner and the other members of the eight-person Law Enforcement Detachment 409 on USS Boxer have experience chasing drug sellers and other smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The smugglers are trying to move cargo around, while the pirates are committing violent acts. But the rest of the work is largely similar.

"We’re here to chase people in small craft like we do in the Caribbean and the Pacific," he said. "What they’re doing, they’re simply violating the law."

The team boards the boats of suspected pirates with a focus on preserving evidence. Every member of the team is subject to be called to testify in Kenyan courts and trained in how to testify and what types of evidence those courts are looking for.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service takes over once the Coast Guardsmen have the skiff secured. They gather evidence in much the same way as a stateside investigator would. Each piece of evidence gets logged, secured and tracked from the time the investigators get it until the time they hand it over to Kenyan authorities. For added weight, someone videotapes the ship’s entire encounter with the pirates. After they return to the ship, the investigators then write up a report of everything they find and turn it over with the evidence to the Kenyan authorities.

Said Richelmi: "For us, the trick is collecting the evidence and attributing it to each individual pirate and handing it over to Kenya."

The pirates are taken back to the USS Boxer if the task force commander determines that there’s enough evidence to detain them. The Americans don’t interrogate the suspects because the Kenyans only accept confessions done in front of Kenyan magistrates, Richelmi said. They don’t even try to uncover the piracy networks as intelligence officers in Iraq do with insurgent cells.

"Our job is just to get the evidence for them," Richelmi said. "If they (the Kenyans) want to get confessions, that’s fine. We don’t do that."

Instead, the ship acts more like a county jail, said Petty Officer 1st Class Steven Lester, a master of arms on the USS Boxer. Sailors simply get basic personal information from the pirates, such as their name or the language they speak, and check them over for any injuries or diseases, which are taken care of on the ship if found.

The pirates are then given clean clothes and confined in an empty space on the main vehicle deck that serves as a makeshift jail, Lester said, adding that leaders didn’t want to use the ship’s brig for the pirates. The masters of arms have ringed plywood around the space, the width of a two-car garage and twice as long. The task force then hands the suspects to Kenyan authorities for prosecution at the first opportunity.

"We’re acting as a moving holding facility," he said.


How Combined Task Force 151 fights the pirates

PATROLLING: Some countries not in the task force have their navies escort convoys of ships from their own countries. This provides extra protection, but it also slows traffic and limits the area that the navy ships can cover. It could also make the governments liable for any ships that the pirates successfully capture. Instead, the CTF 151 ships spend their days patrolling a specific area.

DISTRESS CALL: The vessel under attack calls nearby navy ships over bridge-to-bridge radio. The military advises the ship under attack to take evasive maneuvers and warns them not to stop.

AERIAL VIEW: The navy ship launches helicopters if it doesn’t already have them in the air. Because of their speed, the aircraft arrive on scene first and begin identifying the pirate skiffs by looking at the contents of the boats. Video records the entire encounter.

SMALL BOATS: A boarding party, whose composition varies depending on which ship they came from, is launched in small "rigid-hulled inflatable boats." A sniper in one of the helicopters often provides additional cover.

CALL OUT: As the boarding party approaches, an interpreter asks the pirates over a loud speaker to put their hands in the air. The pirates almost always comply.

BOARDING: In the case of the United States, a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment team does the initial boarding. They first secure the skiff and those on board to make sure it’s not a threat. They then make sure it’s seaworthy. They then search the skiff and radio back what they find. If there’s sufficient evidence, they will detain the pirates.

INVESTIGATING: The Coast Guard team and Naval Criminal Investigative Service Personnel perform a crime scene investigation on the boat, taking photos and collecting evidence similar to terrestrial crime scenes.

SOURCE: CTF 151 and Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment 409

Ellie

[thedrifter]

U.S. troops’ anti-piracy mandate stops short of land efforts
By James Warden, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, March 31, 2009

DJIBOUTI — Countries around the world have devoted substantial sweat and treasure to securing the waters that Somali pirates prowl, but the military is largely ignoring the land that those pirates hail from — potentially limiting the effect that the largest anti-piracy effort in decades could have.

The military itself sees Somalia as an important part of the Horn of Africa’s maritime crisis. In a press briefing aboard the flagship for America’s anti-piracy task force, a slide listed three keys to success: "The Maritime Community," or merchant ships; "The Coalition," or the military; and "Governance in Somalia."

This should come as no surprise since successful anti-piracy efforts have had a land component throughout much of history. The Marines stormed Tripoli while fighting the Barbary pirates, an event immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn. Overland expeditions attacked settlements of the 17th-century Caribbean pirates who were the basis of the modern buccaneer stereotype.

As in Somalia, piracy in those cases arose out of a power vacuum. And in both cases, larger forces eventually eradicated piracy — colonialism in the case of the Barbary pirates, settlement and strengthened government for those in the Americas.

Yet the military’s approach to Somalia includes no similar land effort. Joint Task Force 151, the anti-piracy group, is strictly a maritime force, said Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, the task force commander.

That’s partly because responsibility for the piracy problem is split between units in the Gulf of Aden and units on land. McKnight’s task force falls under U.S. Central Command, which oversees hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but not Africa. Somalia instead sits in the domain of Africa Command — specifically, its subordinate command, the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA).

"AFRICOM is the land. We’re the sea. My charter is just in the water," McKnight said.

An AFRICOM spokesman said the piracy task force fell under CENTCOM because that command has long handled traffic through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. He would not discuss future operations in Somalia except to say that there were no imminent land-based operations.

AFRICOM is a recently created command that specializes in fusing military efforts with diplomacy and aid into a comprehensive foreign policy. Its military efforts tend more toward "soft power" approaches such as civil affairs and training other militaries.

Gen. William E. "Kip" Warden, the commander, told the House Appropriations Committee on March 19 that AFRICOM plays a part in bringing pirates ashore to neighboring countries for trial and in helping Somalia’s neighbors protect their territorial waters.

But AFRICOM isn’t working much with Somalia itself. The soft approach it favors requires a stable government and that’s something Somalia doesn’t have, said Rear Adm. Anthony M. Kurta, the CJTF-HOA commander.

"With the lack of a … well-functioning Somali government, CJTF-HOA currently has no ongoing capacity building with the Somali government," he said.

Said McKnight: "The problem with going ashore is there’s no pirate uniform."

Both AFRICOM and McKnight said the State Department would handle any diplomatic efforts with Somalis. Officials with the State Department did not return calls asking for comment.

Few in the military are eager to discuss the country where all the piracy originates. Task Force 151 said its mandate stops where the water ends. Ward says AFRICOM is following the State Department’s lead in foreign policy, while the command’s spokesmen insist it doesn’t have anything to do with piracy.

CJTF-HOA officials have said they are frustrated with the media’s misperception that the command is involved in anti-piracy efforts.

In effect, military leaders are hoping the situation in Somalia gets better — even as they recognize that the country is key to eradicating piracy.

McKnight said pirate attacks can be stopped purely from the sea with enough ships, but he acknowledged that it will take more to end piracy for good.

"I’m positive we can make a difference," he said. "Can it end? I don’t think it will ever end. We need to get Somalia a government and coast guard. … This is an enduring operation. We’re going to be out here for a while."

Some analysts have tentative hopes that Somalia’s president will be able to reunite the country. President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has already taken steps to win over many of the extremist groups who have torn the country apart. One effort has been introducing Shariah, or Islamic law, as the basis of the country’s legal process.

But with recent revelations that Somali provincial officials may even be backing piracy networks, the country may have a long way to go before stability on land calms the troubled waters just off its coast.

What puts a ship at risk of piracy?
A low "freeboard" — the height of the ship between the waterline and the deck — allows pirates to climb from their small boats onto the bigger ship
Slow speed
No lookouts or an inattentive watch
Traveling outside the International
Recognized Transit Corridor
Moving during the early morning
Not broadcasting a signal that identifies the ship to others


How merchants can guard their ships
Use the International Recognized Transit Corridor
Travel through high-risk areas in the dark
Use convoys
Sign in to the Horn of Africa’s Maritime Security Center before entering high-risk areas
Travel as fast as possible
Maintain lookouts
Set fire hoses and keep them running
Use all available lighting
Use lights and alerts to let the pirates know they’ve been spotted
Conduct evasive maneuvers when pirates attack
Most importantly: Never stop the ship for pirates

How the measures work in practice
MV Longchamp (liquid petroleum gas tanker): Captured by pirates on Jan. 29.

Not registered with the Maritime Security Center
No hoses
No lookouts, complacent crew
No attempt to speed up
Not on the vulnerable shipping list
MV Polaris (chemical and product tanker): Staved off a pirate attack on Feb. 11.
Coordinated with the Maritime Security Center
Broadcast a signal that identified itself to others
Posted lookouts
Active crew
Performed evasive maneuvers
Made a distress call to military forces

SOURCE: Combined Task Force 151

Pix's

http://www.stripes.com/09/mar09/land_final/

Ellie