Stavridis: Cooperation Key in Tackling Piracy Threat

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By Donna MilesAmerican Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2012 – Hoping tobuild on successes over the past year in combating piracy, the top U.S.commander in Europe and other key stakeholders in the fight gathered in Londonthis week to help chart the way forward.
Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, who alsoserves as the NATO commander, joined leaders from the NATO Maritime ComponentCommand, European Union, shipping security officials and other experts toexplore ways to improve their cooperation in tackling this transnationalthreat.
“We face a significant global problemthat has caused extensive and expensive disruptions to the global maritimegrid,” Stavridis noted in his blog post on the U.S. European Command website.“In particular, off the Horn of Africa in the northern Indian Ocean, we’ve seenhundreds of pirate attacks and dozens of successful hijackings over the pastyears.”
He estimated costs to the internationalcommunity as high as $5 billion to $10 billion per year, noting that hundredsof mariners have been held hostage by pirates for ransom.
“Although the success rate and thenumbers of attacks are down this year, we still have seven ships and more than100 hostages held by Somali pirates on the largely ungoverned east coast ofAfrica,” the admiral said.
NATO, the European Union and a varietyof other nations, including Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Iran andthe Gulf States, have come together to help address this problem, he noted.With a fleet that averages 20 to 30 ships, they patrol waters stretching fromthe Red Sea, past the Gulf of Aden and down into the northern Indian Ocean.
Shared concern about the problem ledlast week to the first bilateral counter-piracy exercise between the UnitedStates and China. Crew from the guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S.Churchill and other Navy assets joined Chinese People’s Liberation Army seaelements, including the frigate Yi Yang, for training near the Horn of Africa.
The sailors’ focus was on bilateralinteroperability in detecting, boarding and searching suspected vessels, aswell as the ability of both Chinese and American naval assets to respond topirated vessels, a USS Winston S. Churchill spokesman reported.
Meanwhile, the shipping industry hasimplemented best business practices: traveling in convoys, hardening theirdefenses such as stringing concertina wire along their decks, posting lookoutsand hiring private teams, Stavridis reported. They appear to be paying off, hesaid, recognizing that although many ships with embarked private security teamshave been attacked, none has been successfully hijacked.
Participants at this week’s conference,co-hosted by the U.N.-sponsored International Maritime Organization, discussedways to increase cooperation between shippers and protecting forces and ways tomove ashore to pre-empt pirate strikes and disrupt pirates’ bases and logisticssystems.
Another focus, Stavridis said, was onbuilding capacity within local coast guards and to applying a comprehensiveapproach to make piracy less attractive as an occupation.