Warships assigned to piracy patrols rarely engage pirates on their own. He commands a new three-ship, counter-pirate task force. drag along a couple skiffs with it and have probably 10 or 15, 20 pirates on board, and then they'll send the skiffs out to go after a merchant vessel," McKnight said.
"What we tend to see happen is a mothership will. Today, pirates use motherships for nearly all their attacks. / *** All warfare is based on deception. It was more than three months before the pirates released Semlow and her crew. Instead, they commandeered the harmless-looking freighter to launch their next attack. Mvita said the pirates had no interest in Semlow's cargo. Crewman Juma Mvita, from the Kenyan merchant ship Semlow, discovered this the hard way in 2005, when about a dozen armed Somalis intercepted his ship. They began capturing trawlers and small freighters for use as motherships. The skiffs were too slow and too flimsy to catch anything but the most rickety of vessels. Their personal firearms and their small, motor-propelled wooden fishing boats, called skiffs. The reason was simple: Most pirates were former fishermen and had only the tools of a typical fishermen. In the early days of Somali piracy, in the 1990s, pirates ranged only a few miles from their hometowns and threatened just a few thousand square miles of ocean. To beat pirates in potentially violent showdowns, the Navy has adopted the pirates' tactics of using "mother ships" carrying fast boats to spring on opponents. The rise in piracy, and consequent rise in the cost of shipping insurance, drove up the cost of shipping petroleum, electronics and food. Sirius Star was released in January after an estimated $3 million ransom was paid, but the other ships, and about 200 crew, remain in pirates' hands. dollars or more, according to the United Nations. It was here that pirates scored their biggest victory last autumn, seizing the supertanker Sirius Star, laden with $100 million in crude oil.īesides Sirius Star, Somali sea bandits hijacked more than 40 large vessels last year, ransoming about 30 of them for a million U.S. Northumberland was the first warship on the scene from a new European Union task force, charged with patrolling the southern flank of the 2-million-square-mile piracy zone, near Mombasa. Most of the other warships deployed to fight pirates in the region are concentrated north of Somalia, close to the Suez Canal, through which 10 percent of the world's sea trade passes. On that hot December morning, Northumberland - one of just 17 such ships in the Royal Navy - opened up a new front in the unprecedented international war on Somali pirates.
As far as send-offs go, Northumberland's was low-key, but the understated nature of the departure belied the importance of her mission.
On the deck of the 460-foot frigate, a smattering of British sailors gazed back. When Northumberland slipped out of Mombasa harbor in southern Kenya at the end of last year, a few reporters and gawkers stood on the banks. The Royal Navy is also hitting back at pirates by using some of the pirates' own tricks. To wage today's battles against pirates who took control of 42 ships and captured 815 sailors last year, the Royal Navy is combining machines and methods forged during the Cold War with centuries-old naval warfare skills. Navy attributes the "dramatic" reduction in the number of attacks to the deployment of a British warship, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Northumberland, and the coordinated task force of which she is part. Experts disagree about what has led to the reduction, with some suggesting that bad weather had played its part, but Rear Adm. Regardless of the combat arena, military professionals follow some of the strategic guidelines that are stated in the Art of War.Īfter hitting the headlines last year, successful pirate attacks have been on the wane in the early months of 2009, despite a failed attack on a British cruise ship earlier this month.