Striking yet another blow at the very heart of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, Indian warship INS Mysore and its marine commandos thwarted a hijack attempt on an Ethiopian merchant vessel on Saturday and captured 23 pirates and a large arms cache in the operation. ( Watch )
The arrest of the 23 pirates (12 Somali and 11 Yemeni) and the arms haul is the largest such seizure in the ongoing anti-piracy operations off Somalia. The confiscated arms and equipment included seven AK-47s, three other assault rifles, 13 loaded magazines, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with two rockets, several grenades, a GPS set and a mobile phone.
(h/t Stephen Ferrell)
Is it just me or is the phrase Indian warship kind of new and exciting and neat?
I liked “steaming at full speed, the deadly INS Mysore” too hf. What an Indian journalist can do when they choose to.
In the 1950s if some little kid read about an “Indian warship” he’d get a mental picture of a really huge birchbark canoe.
Is it just me or is the phrase Indian warship kind of new and exciting and neat?
Unless you are Pakistani.
Oh to see an Indian “Great White Fleet”.
/denounced for racial overtones
Somebody’s got a funny idea of what a “large arms cache” is. That’s not even enough for a decent day at the range.
I don’t mind our Indian allies taking charge of this pirate mess in the Gulf of Aden. I would like it better if some of our carrier pilots would get the opportunity to practice splashing some of these maggot pirates…
Still, it may be better PR to let the Indians deal with it…
We don’t get to summarily execute anyone anywhere anymore ever I guess is a big part of the takeaway here and I think that changes the definition of piracy a lot significantly.
Aaargh matey! Will ya be havin’ fries with that?
“In The Navy” Starring Joey Hairplugs and Hillarity Clinton.
“Aaargh matey! ”
More like: ” Allan Ackbar you infidel”
I’m in a slow-motion argument with Orrin Judd about that subject. Look, I like libertarian theories as theories, but in the real world they generally turn out to be, well, the word is “sophomoric”.
The US Navy won’t get involved, for a number of reasons. At the top of that list is the legal climate. The Navy knows damned well that they’d better leave no survivors at all, lest they wind up in the Hague for “war crimes” or sued/arrested right here for failure to read the guys their Miranda rights.
We also have a completely wrong mix of vessels for that duty. The USN considers a 4,000 ton ship a “frigate”, too small to bother with — and they aren’t ordering any more. Sending an Arleigh Burke-class “destroyer” (actually, bigger than some WWII cruisers) to swat pirates is like killing flies with a pile driver. Does a number on the flies, but watch out for the collateral damage…
What we need, about now, is 100 or 200 supersized Coast Guard cutters. Start with a Fletcher (2,000 tons, practically a lifeboat by today’s standards) and power it with one of the new single-unit, maintenance-free nuclear reactors from Hitachi or GE. Twin screws. Forty knots, more or less, and all the crew not on duty could water-ski behind it at once, which they ought to do once in a while to show off.
Fit it out with lots of automatics, crew of 50 or so, LCDR (O-4) for a captain, two squads of Marines with a Lieutenant in charge and all their toys. That would give plenty of room to make the quarters relatively luxurious, so the boat could stay out for a while. Give it about six vertical-launch cells, two turrets from the Abrams with Rheinmetall 100 mm (fully stabilized, when you really want to reach out and touch someone), a row of Ma Deuce fifty-calibers, and a couple of torpedo tubes with one mounted and one reload, and that’s about it. Half-a-dozen Zodiacs for shore expeditions and a forty-foot launch. Paint it white with a red-white-blue slash down the bow like the red one for the Coast Guard.
In a stand-up fight with a “real” naval unit it wouldn’t be much better than the average yacht, but it’d be just the ticket for anti-pirate duty. Manning? Hah. You’d have to fight the volunteers off with sticks, and possibly tear gas.
Regards,
Ric
Forty knots, more or less, and all the crew not on duty could water-ski behind it at once, which they ought to do once in a while to show off.
Man I wish I could do photoshop.
They don’t wanna mess with this guy.
All them bombs we dropped on Somalia sure did wonders there.
Boy Howdy, Ize a proud ‘Merican!
All them bombs we dropped on Somalia sure did wonders there.
Boy Howdy, Ize a proud ‘Merican!
You do realize you just voted that same bunch back in office?
Any word whose root is “real-” is inapplicable to alphie, B. Moe.
Regards,
Ric
Parsnip,
If
weClinton had posessed the will to finished the job in Somalia, there wouldn’t be pirates operating out of there today…All them airplanes crashing into New York, Wash DC and PA
bombs we dropped on Somaliasure did wonders there.Ric,
You’re right about the ship you describe; guys would be lining up for pirate hunting!
Think maybe you shoud substitute a couple of M61 Vulcan’s for some of the M2’s?
Ric,
If you don’t know of it Information Dissemination might interest you.
The high-seas Indian Fleet. I do not joke:
Kipling’s heart would swell with pride.
“Comment by parsnip on 12/13 @ 7:29 pm #
All them bombs we dropped on Somalia sure did wonders there.
Boy Howdy, Ize a proud ‘Merican!”
Typical hate-America reactionary leftard, our alpo.
“The 3:10 To Obama”
Well, OK, Bob, but there’s a soft spot in my heart for the 30-caliber GE “Minigun” version, as used on the A7D and E. All tracer loadout. I’ll see your light saber, and raise…
Yeah, comatus, somewhere in Heaven Kipling is grinning and laughing out loud in delight.
And, in fact, there are big advantages to us in simply subsidizing the Indians if they need it. It is, after all, called the Indian Ocean, and they’re coming right along in their ability to patrol it. Big plus: if they’re subpoenaed to den Haag for cruelty to Little Brown People, unlike us they can just laugh.
Regards,
Ric
“The 3:10 To Obamaâ€Â
dre, I just finished watching that on TCM or whatever last hour. Van Hefling, Glenn Ford, directed by Delmar Davies. The 1955 version. Classy; not as noisy as the remake..
30 caliber minigun means more rounds for the same buck, Ric. All tracer loadout sounds a lot like a light saber to me…
Also, great point about the Indian Navy, the region, and den Haag…
Kinda hard to call them RAAAAAACISTS! for killin’ Somalis and Yemenis…
So Ric, how about some more like the USCGC Bertholf?
And, if you made it a multi-service crew, I’d volunteer.
Bertholf is a cool ship, Staff Sergeant, but it’s not what I’m thinking of. For one thing, it’s about twice as big. The ships our guys fought in, and depended on, during WWII ranged from 1700 to 5000 tons, with the great majority (the Fletcher class and its descendants) being in the 2000 to 3000 ton range.
Any given ship can only be in one place at a time, and that gives the bad guys the option of being where it ain’t. It doesn’t matter if the skipper has a magic wand that’ll make opposition vanish in a puff of smoke if it’s on the other side of the world at the time — or even the other side of the island. My specific goals are:
–Little and cheap, so we can have lots of them
–Long endurance and fast
–Small crew, so we can man lots of them (and the crews can live in luxury)
–Not valid as a “force projection” hull, so welcome almost anywhere.
So: No helicopters. No great big intimidating guns. Paint it white, like a cutter. In fact, I’d say call in a yacht designer to come up with fiberglass falsework around a skeletal superstructure — to be sacrificed at need, but containing rec areas and staterooms for visiting VIPs (usable by the crew, who would draw lots for the privilege, or reconfigurable to stuff with refugees at need), and swoopy enough to anchor at Cannes and not look like a hatchet in the silverware drawer. Nothing on it would be secret, so it could pull in at a marina just about anywhere and invite all the rich guys over for a party, and it’s little enough that just about any harbor that can accommodate the larger yachts has room for it.
No over-the-horizon weapons except the VLS cells, which wouldn’t have any reloads. No ASW capacity except maybe a decent sonar that can uplink to any Aegis in the vicinity for analysis. I didn’t mention, above, that it needs a CIWS to ward off Iranian missile boats, but it does. Decent air-search radar (again with uplink capability) but little or no antiaircraft facility.
It’s not a warship. It’s a sheepdog. It fights pirates and escorts merchies and invites the Mayor over for tea. In the original conception of the Constitution’s Framers, the Navy was the President’s sidearm. This is a pistol in the drawer of his nightstand, handy when things go bump in the night. He doesn’t necessarily need a street-sweeper loaded with 00 buck; it might just be the neighbor’s cat, and in fact that’s the way to bet.
Regards,
Ric
Jeffersonian: “Somebody’s got a funny idea of what a “large arms cache†is. That’s not even enough for a decent day at the range.”
Given that the Indian’s retained British colonial gun control law, I’d have to say that, to the natives,it is an embarrassment of riches.
And, for the record, all you really need for these punks are good old American PT boats — small, fast and over-gunned.
At anchor in Philadelphia lies Olympia, Dewey’s flagship, as pleasant a motor-yacht as you’ll find anywhere (hammocks!), and the precise answer to your specification. Across the river is the New Jersey, which has also never let us down. Now if we only had a Navy Yard…
“Inform the tyrant that an American man of war is even now at sea, with a bone in her teeth…”
HSV-2 then?
1668 tons, complement of 42 with berthing for 107, 45 knots capable and 4500 miles range at 30 knots cruising.
Oh, and only $160m/copy, so the cheapest ship in the fleet.
I think what Ric is describing is an updated version of this
http://www.geocities.com/pt_king/
weirdness… https://www.proteinwisdom.com/ isn’t loading for me – page load error – consistently – but https://proteinwisdom.com/ works just fine. This is very odd.
cleared my cache and all is well
Actually Ric, what you’re really thinking about is one step down from the Fletcher class, the Destroyer Escort. From Wikipedia:
The Buckley class seems suitable, and you could probably drop some things such as depth charges and hedgehogs (ASW mortars) for other things.
Hmm Muslim terrrorists captured by an Indian Naval vessel?
Interesting
Another development from the subcontinent:
Pakistan claims that the Indian Air Force has been probing its airspace. India denies.
Not a DE, SDN — the other thing that made DEs practical was that submarines were slow. That isn’t true any more.
HSV-2 is much more like it. Turn a lot of that cargo space into luxurious living quarters, and use more of it for the weapons suite I mentioned. If you want to keep the Diesels instead of using the reactor, double the bunkerage. (I wasn’t aware that 20,000 HP water jets were available. Cool. Run high-pressure pipes from the pumps to mounts along the rail(s), for cases when you’d rather not make loud noises.) Since it was built as a car ferry, keep some of that space aft, and along with the pinnace bring along a limo and a couple of small cars, VIP-entertainment and/or liberty, for the use of.
Sheepdogs, PR, and “good duty” suitable for use as an assignment to reward sailors who Done Good elsewhere.
Regards,
Ric
The penalty for being caught with more than a bolt action rifle (for sharks) should be to shackle those weapons to their ankles and let them off about 300 meters from the beach. Any that swim ashore can try again.
It won’t happen but it would make alternative careers more attractive.
#12 Ric:
Had the same discussion with my brother. The small frigate was discussed, but for a lot of work in that area we thought repeat Asheville class gunboats would be the ticket to deal with much of the threat. Reactivating Perry class frigates would also help. They can be navy if they have a Coast Guard away-crew for the legalities.
A pirate ship found? Since we can’t hand them outright, just sink the weapons, disable the vessel, and bring them close to home and let them go in – if they can. He’s put some of the ideas up on discussion boards and has had contact with some merchant marine officers.
Note: I have called this ‘Kipling’s World’ before.
I’m going to do this. The first e-mail to my brother the major earlier this year. I also posted it at Cold Fury back in March (I think):
Matt, I have been giving this a bit more thought. The post-WWII set-up is dead physically and is dying fast mentally. Sovereignty and other such fictions were important in the world when you had two superpower blocs ready to play a round of ‘bounce the rubble’. Then, being very circumspect with borders was important if only to prevent a general war from breaking out. But that world is the world of the late twentieth century and means very little now, and world leaders are beginning to understand this. 9/11 only accelerated this effect.
Sovereignty is where you exercise it and extends only as far as your writ. If you do not control an area you are not sovereign over it, no matter what the map says. If you allow a tribe or a rebel group or gang to use your claimed territory to attack a neighbor, that neighbor can respond with a punitive expedition. Complain all you want, but if you couldn’t stop it, you aren’t the sovereign. This Colombian excursion is merely the latest example. Others are the FATA in Pakistan. The Pakistanis can’t control the tribes there so the US is raiding that area. South Lebanon is another area, with Hezbollahstan facing Israel. Somalia is another, with Ethiopia launching a punitive expedition just a short time ago. I’m sure you can find other examples.
To be candid, I believe we are reverting to the usual way things are run. We are going back to the world as it was in the nineteenth century – a Kiplingesque world of Tommies and Gunboats and punitive expeditions. A world where borders are usually fuzzy and only become clear and set when someone makes it clear that the border is there, where sovereignty is reserved for the grownups and not for every group that can make a flag and get a seat at the UN. A world of brigands and pirates – though we may use different terms for these groups – where a frigate must be on patrol in certain areas to keep sea lanes open.
The post-WWII arrangement was artificial, it was unique in the history of the world. To have two major powers as opposed to several major powers jockeying for position, power, and glory was unheard of in prior years. We came to see that as the norm and the Kiplingesque world as abnormal. We deluded ourselves into thinking that way, that international organizations could actually mean something, that talk could solve all problems, and that bullets wouldn’t have to fly somewhere out in lower Absurdistan or western Revoltia. These delusions were shattered along with the former Yugoslavia, the prime example of that type of thinking, created in committee along with the grand-daddy of international organizations – the League of Nations.
The wonder is we didn’t see the artificial order shattering when it did. I should have earlier, I think you did. Perhaps I didn’t see it because to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge Kipling, and all of the PC-accusations of imperialism, racism, militarism, aggression and so forth that are thrown at that type of thought. Whatever the reason, many people still do not see the return of Kipling, especially in the civilized areas of the west. Denial is a strong psychological defense, but it is well past the time to put denial to the side and see the world as it really is – the jockeying powers, the gradations of sovereignty, the pointlessness and utter ignorability of transnational organizations, and the fact that no matter the acronym of the group or its supposed philosophical underpinnings they can be pursued wherever you think you have the strength to follow them.
“For you all love the screw-guns — the screw-guns they all love you!”
http://www.readprint.com/work-959/Rudyard-Kipling
The second e-mail, also posted at Cold Fury:
Kipling’s World – Part II.
Matt, here is something else.
Kipling’s World never truly went away. The history of the third world since WWII, since the demise of the great empires, is a history of Kipling’s World. The actions of various ‘nations’ in Africa and their constituent tribes is the best example I can think of to demonstrate this. The post -WWII veneer (a continuation and finalization of what happened after WWI) could never properly account for what happened in the former colonial lands. The massacres, the civil wars, the genocides, the oppression of one clan or tribe by another – none of that fit into the veneer of trans-national organizations and the re-ordering of the world according to the UN charter. It was ignored by the diplomats and the think-tank scholars who had bought into the veneer of order that all of the great ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were to create. To acknowledge it was to acknowledge that their most precious plans and projects wouldn’t work.
Unfortunately, those ideas ran head on into history and human behavior and power-lust and lost. True, the dictators and strongmen of those third world nations paid lip-service to the post-war arrangements. Why would they do otherwise? Doing so gave them respectability with the major powers and the intellectuals who created the post-war order. It gave them access to money, and military equipment – everything that would be needed to maintain their power. And they would exercise their power as they wished while mouthing the proper phrases; exercising power as it always was exercised, as Kipling described it, as the cold record of history recorded it.
The major powers and their diplomats and the think-tank scholars ignored the actions of these tyrants and what went on in their nations. The tyrants said the right things, it was all for the people, or for particular ideological reasons, and international order had to be preserved. But the reality was still ‘Kipling’s World’ and when the great powers couldn’t bribe to get the proper result they used the old tools – but always getting the right stamp put on their actions to provide the cover that they were acting with the interests of the post-war order at heart; peace-keeping missions in places where there was no peace because the issues were unsettled – issues that had to be ignored through the application of force lest the veneer be challenged. Or they ignored the atrocities happening because sovereignty had to be respected.
The mental contortions necessary to believe all of this were amazing, but humans can rationalize and justify their way out of anything, especially when a cherished belief or ideology is being threatened by reality. Or the possibility of another general war is brought up. Fear is an excellent motivator. ‘Kipling’s World’ was the enemy, is the enemy of all of the beliefs that have led to transnational organizations like the League of Nations or the United Nations, to ramshackle ‘nations’ like Yugoslavia or the nations of much of the third world (leaving out the Americas – those republics came into being before the transnational ideas got root and have some real reason to exist as they are). ‘Kipling’s World’ had to be denied; to acknowledge it meant acknowledging another Great War, one with atomic weapons. And always there were the two superpowers, warily watching each other, spouting the proper phrases, taking care of their spheres of influence, and forcing everyone to acknowledge the trans-national veneer that WWI and WWII created when those two conflicts ended. In one breath denying ‘Kipling’s World’ and in the other breath acknowledging it – but always under the breath. Sweet denial – wanting to forget, but unable to forget; unable to completely walk away from the reality that is outside of the committee room or the embassy reception.
The second superpower is gone and there is no replacement for it. Those who long for the return of the post-war veneer where the Congress of Vienna can dance without interruption continuously bring up a replacement for the vanquished superpower, be it the European Union, or China, or some other coalition – Iran’s or Venezuela’s. Any replacement would do so long as something could be created to shove ‘Kipling’s World’ back into the closet and return to the post-war settlement. It has been twenty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, and that hasn’t happened yet, and does not look to happen for the near-future*. In fact, I doubt it will happen again. ‘Kipling’s World’ is the natural order of the nations, trying to do otherwise will not work for long. The next fifty years will be bloody as the final remains of the post-war order are dealt with. ‘Nations’ will cease to exist, new ones will rise, borders will be redrawn again and again – see the Balkans for an example. This is the tide that is on us, and while lip-service can be given to whatever – stability, the international community – whatever, the tide must be swum with so as to bring the conclusion about with as little loss of life and treasure possible.
This is ‘Kipling’s World’ – “Ere, grab yer kit, Tommy; the trooper’s on the tide.â€Â
*Russia has roared back based on the income of gas and oil sales, but that is a fleeting wealth, one that Venezuela and Iran should be worried about. IIRC, Abu Dhabi and the UAE are taking steps for when the mineral wealth runs out, to encourage other industry and trade, to prepare for the future. Think of a Michigan mining or lumber town. When the resource being extracted runs out, then the wealth is gone the population dependant on it moves away and a ghost-town is left behind. Calumet, on the Keweenaw Peninsula, is an example. After the copper mines closed, it has drifted into a sleepy village. How many ghost-towns did we see here in Michigan, or out west in Colorado? When the petroleum runs out, look for ghost-nations.
Ric, if there’s actually a submarine threat things have moved well past piracy and I’d want a couple of Los Angeles class there ASAP.
That was why I said the first things that could go from the DE were the antisub weapons. Besides, if you don’t have helos your ASW capability these days is seriously degraded.
Depends on the pirate. Keira Knightly could definitely make for some hardness.
What? Oh. Probably just a bad choice of phrase. Forget it.