Captain Free, Pirates Dead

Just today, Captain Phillips of the Mearsk Alabama is free. Recall that he was captured by pirates (somewhat voluntarily, to protect his crew) on their way off the ship that the crew was taking control of.

During the past few days, US Navy vessels were actually towing the lifeboat with the Captain and 4 pirates on board. One pirate went onto a naval vessel to negotiate. Capt. Phillips, who was tied up due to having previously attempted to escape, probably noticed that there were snipers aboard the US Navy vessels, and dove into the water once more (again, tied up). A pirate freaked, and swung an AK in the Captain's direction. This was enough provocation for the Navy SEAL snipers, with a mandate directly from the US president, to open fire. All three pirates on the lifeboat were killed in seconds, and the fourth pirate was taken into custody. The SEALs then went to get him out of the water, and he's been flown to the USS Boxer to get medical attention and a good meal.

Capt. Phillips will probably get interviewed a number of times about the incident, but his behavior seems to indicate that he highly values not being a burden on his country/company/friends, not being a hostage that other people have to pay to bail out. Multiple times, he's put his life on the line to get away with minimal help, where sitting pretty would have had a much higher success rate of getting home.

His and his crew's behavior, along with the behavior and success of the US Navy, is likely to set a powerful precedent in the Horn of Africa. The US, 7 and a half years removed from 9/11, is still incredibly sensitive about hijacking, hostage-taking, and other acts perpetrated on its civilians by others. The US government, and the citizens under fire, will make life especially difficult for the individuals that are foolish enough to assault Americans. The response by all actors involved is impressive, both in execution and in manner. The US has just significantly raised the stakes for piracy in a world that once welcomed it through soft responses and an obsession with not stepping on toes.

Whether the US will take this incident and propel it to attack pirate sites in Somalia is somewhat unclear, but I think it's unlikely. I'm actually not sure what international waters treaties that the US has signed might say, but they probably don't involve land attacks, particularly since some form of sovereignty is largely assumed (and Somalia's sovereignty is mostly a joke). That said, if the US can plausibly project a strong likelihood of fatal failure to any pirates looking for vessels, then they'll start to deter pirates on the margins, which is a fine start.

Hijacking Update: Getting the Captain Back

Pentagon reports were a bit premature, and lacked a few key details about the hijacking. I think I've managed to piece most of them together.

When the crew overpowered the pirates and took one of them into custody, the pirates managed to take the captain of the vessel hostage. The crew tried to negotiate for the captain with the last pirate, but the trade never happened, and the other pirates escaped on a lifeboat. The USS Bainbridge, a missile destroyer, has arrived on scene with FBI hostage negotiators to seek his release. The Mearsk Alabama is on its way, under armed guard, to Kenya to deliver the aid supplies.

I'll try to keep you updated on the fate of the captain, as well as that of the pirates.

American Crew Retakes Hijacked Ship

Within the last day the Mearsk Alabama, with a 20-person American crew, was hijacked off the coast of Somalia while carrying aid supplies from Denmark to Kenya. This marked the first time since 1800 that an American crew had been successfully taken by pirates. The hijacking was tough--the four pirates chased the vessel for 5 hours, and were repeatedly knocked away by powerful water hoses.

The shipping company had pirate insurance (this exists), and was ready to pay to get the ordeal over with. But they didn't get the time to negotiate.

The 20 American crewmen overpowered the four pirates, taking one into custody on the ship. Pentagon reports have confirmed that the ship is back under American control. Watching the story unfold, I was wondering whether the US Navy would try to bail the crew out, and it appeared that they had been asked to back off by the ship's owner, who was ready to pay up (or, alternatively, knew what his crew was capable of).

If word of the incident spreads, Somali pirates may come better-armed in the future, but they would then risk escalating the problem to the point that it becomes less costly to the rest of the world to simply hunt and kill the pirates, rather than patrol and pay ransoms.

But Americans don't react passively these days to being hijacked, and probably won't ever again. Somali pirates may be better about doing their homework on their target in the future.

The Impact of the Gates Reshuffle

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently announced massive cuts in and reshuffling of US military budget priorities. The move has a whole lot of people in a huff, but exactly those thatyou'd expect: the defense industry, congress, and big wigs in the military. I'll first contest that absolutely no cut in military spending (save appropriations for wars abroad) will make any of these folks happy, so I have no problems with ignoring their opinions and getting straight to the facts. The industry's objections should be self-evident. Congress has a series of constituencies to answer to, very many of whom have an army base or a plant or something related in their home towns--just go look at the military bases all over the US; Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics (probably the 4 hardest hit, in order) have dozens of US offices/factories each, and dozens of suppliers, who have dozens of suppliers. And the military, like all bureaucratic departments, loves toys, loves money, and doesn't like being targeted. Anyway. That budget.

The biggest-ticket blow is the F-22 Raptor. It's a beautiful aircraft, but at $138 million each, it's an absurdly expensive item. At $83 million, the uglier F-35 gets the job done at less than 2/3 the price. And while the F-35 isn't quite as "cutting edge" an air superiority fighter as the F-22, it's still better than anything else out there, and certainly better than anything the US is actually going to have to shoot at for the next 20 years, which is about the lifetime if most of these planes. The F-22 / F-35 dualism has been a bit like a VHS / Beta gimpfight, and it has been incredibly inefficient. If the Defense Department wants to pay the defense industry a few million bucks per year to keep the R+D departments coming up with new ideas, that's lovely, but paying top dollar for planes that are 95% redundant is like paying people to dig holes and fill them in again. And to be fair, Gates is accelerating the F-35 program to fill the replacement quotas for the Air Force--they'll get toys, just not the diversity they want. And yes, there will be fewer jobs, because the production lines will be vastly more efficient.

The next item that's getting whacked is the Boeing YAL-1 anti-missile laser. Another big-ticket project, which actually is relatively cheap compared to the above-listed items, still probably has very little practical application in the near future, and doesn't need much more in the way of development--just production. The point of the aircraft would be to shoot down theatre ballistic missiles (TBMs) or intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Sounds lovely. But the YAL-1 would have to be circling over the launch sites of such missiles, with near-complete air superiority already established. The instances in which the US air force is going to be over a country, armed with serious ballistic missiles but no anti-air weapons, are vanishingly few. This did happen in the Gulf War, and it was a serious political issue that almost made the war a disaster--so the impulse to develop this technology is understandable. And it is cool. But it is a waste of money.

Gates is ending production of the C-17 Globemaster, which is a big ol' cargo plane. And a good one. But the primary rationale: We have enough. They have long lifespans, and we already have vastly more airlift capability than the rest of the world combined. This is nice for NATO missions, but Gates may be quietly telling the world: "Stop freeriding off American airpower. Buy your own." Will Europe respond? No idea. But I think it's sensible.

Additionally, the $87 billion ground portion of the Future Combat Systems revamp, which includes light combat vehicles, a logistics/utility vehicle, and a number of unmanned ground vehicles, is getting scaled back, though it's unclear to me by quite how much.

The final big-line item that is going down is ground based anti-ICBM missile defense. We've been testing it for 20 years against dummy missiles, and it has a pretty good track record. But 20 years ago, the Soviets were able to make decoy, evasion, chaff, E/M, and other technologies that could trick the interceptor. Trying to hit a missile with a missile is hard enough, especially in mid-flight/entry, when it is going stupidly quickly. But when it is ducking, weaving, deploying decoys, sending confusing E/M signals, sending chaff, etc, it's nearly impossible. I'm not even sure it would be feasible to build enough of these to make the probabilities work out if someone sent a few dozen nukes at us--we might get a few. But the probabilities start getting so vanishingly small that the tens of billions of dollars that the program still calls for are looking to not be worth it.

Now, the Gates budget is still over $500 billion. Most of the new money is going into anti-insurgent and anti-terror technologies that assist with tactical urban warfare knowledge, communication, troop protection, and other asymmetric-warfare issues (where Future Combat Systems-type stuff is mostly useless in these environments). This is, frankly, pretty smart. Projecting into the next 20 years, the likelihood of a war with China or Russia is absurdly small, where the likelihood of a war against militants/insurgents of some sort is much higher. US spending in the area will also enable the US to help other countries fighting their own counterinsurgencies, like Colombia, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan (which will be going on in some aspect for many years, like it or not), the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and a whole host of others. A re-shifting of priorities is late in coming.

Change is hard. It has the potential to be tough on some American workers. But, frankly, it might actually be better to pay the laid-off workers to dig holes and fill them in again. The United States currently still has a mostly-Cold War budget, and needs to focus the wars it's fighting, and the ones it's going to fight in the next 20 years. If it doesn't win them, deter them, prevent them, or otherwise alleviate them, the problems for itself and its allies will be far greater than what the Russians can do in Ukraine, or the Chinese in Taiwan. The US Congress will probably frustrate the effort, but may say, "well, I guess we can just spend more." But the shifting of priorities--hopefully something Gates can concentrate on over the next 8 years--will put the US military in a much better position to be able to deal with the problems it's actually facing.

Heads Up: DPRK Launches its Rocket

North Korea did launch the "satellite" rocket less than half an hour ago, that is had been threatening to do.

Yonha, ROK's news agency, said that it might have actually been carrying a satellite, although it veered eastward so quickly that it was almost certainly not headed for space.

The Taepodong 2 rocket, which could hit Western US if carrying close to nothing (and of the N. Koreans could ever figure out how to use the damn thing), splashed into the Pacific Ocean after crossing Japanese airspace, as is usual.

Japan was ready to shoot it down, and was on high alert to do so. It had threatened multiple times to shoot it down, but for some reason didn't. They may have lost a beat due to trying to be conservative--two false alarms earlier in the week embarrassed the defense ministry. I'm a bit disappointed, to be honest. Shooting the rocket down would have been a clear sign that the Japan-ROK-US bloc was not going to tolerate such brinkmanship anymore. Alas.

Obama's Got Some Diplomatic Magic

It's a big week in diplomacy for the United States, particularly in Europe.

NATO and the G20 both met for some big conferences. Obama was at both.

As much as perennial protests hit G20, Obama seems to have wooed Europe's civil governments with his visit. Obama seems to have gotten some accord in the G20--not quite as much action as he was hoping for, but Sarkozy and Merkel are now likely to at least spend a bit less time railing on Obama's economic policies, and more time trying to come to a mutually beneficial solution.

Obama also held a town meeting in France, taking questions of a bunch of French and German folks, and to "listen." Apparently, they loved him.

At NATO, Obama hailed a "new chapter" in US-European relations. In a showing of support for the US, NATO handed over 5000 troops to Afghanistan to beef up security before elections. They're temporary, but it's more help than the US got in a long time, and it's the first showing in years that Afghanistan is a NATO war, not a US war with reluctant taggers-along. Additionally, Obama managed to convince Turkey to allow the Danish Prime Minster Rasmussen to head NATO (Turkey was worried because Rasmussen was involved with the Danish cartoonist's Mohammed-terrorist snafu, and NATO works on full consensus).

The US and Russia seem to be thawing a bit, which is bringing a sigh of relief to NATO. Apparently Medvedev and Obama are "comrades" now, after Obama showed up and said that Russia has "legitimate" interest in, and grievances with, NATO. Comrade Obama's clearly trying to soothe Russian frustration and try to integrate them into the European community, in hopes that they can be a part of the norm-centered Western order, rather than resorting to realpolitik. Medvedev responded with remarks that the Russians had no intentions of trying to bust NATO, and that they look forward to continuing to work together in regional security. In a sign of new cooperation, Comrades Obama and Medvedev agreed to push for extensive bilateral nuclear disarmament. If it can be pulled off, it will be a great trust-building measure, that will make the next 8 years (where Medvedev and Obama will both likely be still working together) possibly go a bit smoother. Such disarmament will save taxpayers a good few bucks, though I'm somewhat worried about Obama's hope to "rid the world of nuclear arms." I'm much more comfortable with the Russians and Americans being able to leverage nukes on rogue states than not. More importantly, having a second-strike capability is critical to keeping countries like Iran and North Korea from doing anything too drastic if they get themselves extensive arsenals. Comrade Obama may have even defused the Eastern European missile shield snafu by pledging to work together with Russia to create a missile shield to protect Russia and Europe from missiles coming from elsewhere (probably Iran, North Korea). I see no particular reason why the NATO-side of the system couldn't also shoot down potential Russian missiles.

Finally, thumbs up seem to be coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan on Obama's new strategy for Operation Enduring Freedom. In response to an earlier post of mine: it's possible that Obama and/or the media were portraying an overly-simplistic version of the strategy. In particular, if the Afghan government approves of the strategy, then it's not one that's going to leave the Taliban in charge, which means that most of the problems I cited are naught, which is frankly great news. Maybe he'll pull it off. Pakistan's even starting a symbolically and strategically very important joint operation with the US to hunt and kill Taliban leader Baitullah Meshud, who is apparently likely to become serious trouble in the near future. If such joint operations can slowly be increased, then NATO and the Pakistani army may be able to surround and squeeze the Pashtuni region and levy sufficient pressure on the Taliban to get them to the negotiating table.

It seems everyone across the pond is gaga for Obama. Maybe we can just all get along. But over the next few months, I'll at least be scrutinizing the president for real policy results.