Ahoy, Galrahn

Galrahn weighs in with a provocative analysis of the situation at sea around the Horn of Africa and declares that the USN’s approach is working precisely because it’s encouraging other counties to deploy ships and work together:
The US policy has been to do nothing and allow the development of an international response. We are witnessing [...]

Pirate Petri Dish

Josh Marshall, no military guru he, is nonetheless onto something as he looks briefly at the piracy situation:
Historically, the rising incidence of piracy has frequently, if not always, been a sign of the receding reach of whatever great power has taken on responsibility for policing the sea lanes. The decline of the Hellenistic monarchies in [...]

Getting Medieval

Well, the Somalis are at it again, seizing yet another large vessel. Meanwhile, our JCS chairman is slack-jawed at the audacity of it all, pronouncing himself “stunned” that the pirates could range so far and wide for prey. One would think that our Navy hasn’t fought any ship-to-ship battles late … oh, right.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering [...]

We Need Us A Convoy

The blogs are a-twitter over the latest Somali-related act of piracy, the taking of an oil supertanker off the coast of Tanzania. Wired, EagleSpeak and Information Dissemination all have posts up. Most start by riffing off the Fifth Fleet news release announcing the seizure, which is mostly a declaration of impotence:
“Our presence in the region [...]

Intellectual Prerequisite

Galrahn has a mandatory reading list:
if you read this blog and have not read Ian Toll’s book Six Frigates, it is basically a party foul in the context of spilling your red wine on your boss at the Christmas party.
I wouldn’t go quite far, but Toll’s work is excellent particularly for his examination of the economic [...]

Sonar, Subs & Whales

Galrahn dives into the Supreme Court’s USN sonar decision. I haven’t read the opinion yet but respect G’s technical expertise. Start your research here. I will say I consider the opinion a good thing. You don’t want to go into ASW not knowing how to use active.

Unions Seek Piracy Crackdown

The USN’s indifference to the piracy situation off Somalia isn’t winning this country any friends:
If civil aircraft were being hijacked on a daily basis, the response of governments would be very different.  Yet ships, which are the lifeblood of the global economy, are seemingly out of sight and out of mind.  This apparent indifference to [...]

Ahoy, Mateys

The piracy situation off Somalia has gotten rather out of hand. Visit EagleSpeak for all the gory details. The USN is in do-nothing mode when frankly a few well-aimed shots from a 5-inch gun would go a long way toward cleaning things up. Galrahn is unhappy:
When piracy, a problem that directly effects free trade, is [...]

Victory at Sea

Robert Kaplan:
Stanley Weeks is a Washington-based naval and defense-policy analyst for a Fortune 500 commercial consulting company. Over the course of his career, he has done everything from mentoring the new Albanian navy to advising U.S. combatant commanders about how to defend against missiles. When I spoke to him in his office in McLean, Virginia, [...]

Man, Not Monkey

Aviation Week wonders if the Navy is fully with the program when it comes to UAVs:
The Navy also worries about drone reliability and safety.
The Navy developed its first unmanned combat aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter, which operated off destroyers and frigates, was plagued by accidents and pilot error, and [...]