The USS Bainbridge (Navy photo)

Ironic as it may appear, Naval reformers think the successful rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates may have highlighted structural imbalances in the U.S. Navy’s ability to handle irregular warfare — just as difficulties experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan awakened the U.S. Army to counterinsurgency requirements.

To be sure, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, the liberation of Phillips after five days of captivity by what Defense Secretary Bob Gates called “untrained teenagers” off the Somali coast was an unambiguous victory. Three Navy SEALs parachuted into the region, swam aboard the USS Bainbridge, which U.S. Central Command dispatched to monitor the area after the pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama, and fired three shots at night to kill three pirates and free Phillips. As an example of an irregular challenge to global commerce — pirates in small boats armed with crude weapons have hijacked 18 ships in 2009 alone — the United States deployed a minimum of force and used it effectively. “Three Seals, three shots, three take-downs,” an anonymous U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal with evident pride.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The trouble, experts say, is that beyond the rescue lie warning signs about continued threats from low-tech adversaries operating in shallow waters. The current U.S. Naval strategy, written under then-Navy chief Adm. Mike Mullen — now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — has won plaudits for emphasizing increased international maritime cooperation. But reformers say it hasn’t gone far enough to restructure the Navy around low-intensity operations and support to special operations forces, rather than operations far out at sea. “You have to have a balanced force,” said Eric Wertheim, a columnist for “Proceedings,” the journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, and author of “Combat Fleets of The World,” in an interview.

What Wertheim and like-minded Naval theorists have in mind isn’t a rebalance of the U.S. fleet overwhelmingly for close-encounter anti-piracy missions, but increasing Naval capabilities for such actions alongside traditional Naval priorities like deterring and fighting adversaries far out in the oceans and protecting shipping lanes. In that respect, they sound much like their ground-force counterparts who argue for a place in the U.S. Army to emphasize counterinsurgency operations as well as combat between two traditional states’ armies. The Maersk Alabama incident may have provided public attention to the threats they’ve been warning about. “Before, [the Navy] didn’t see a need for it,” said Raymond Pritchett, a U.S. Naval Institute analyst and blogger, though he cautioned that it still might not. “There’s a maverick community in surface-warfare community that’s pushing for” greater low-intensity conflict efforts.

In the wake of the Phillips hostage situation and rescue — which saturated media coverage last week — the Obama administration and the military have pledged to make anti-piracy efforts a priority. In a Tuesday morning interview with ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” Mullen said the military would think “broadly and widely and deeply” about what to do about piracy. President Obama said that the U.S. had to “continue to be prepared to confront” piracy in collaboration with other nations.

The incident threw into relief an effort that Defense Secretary Bob Gates began earlier last week. On April 6, Gates unveiled a defense budget that accelerated a Navy program to build the Littoral Combat Ship, a light and fast ship capable of operating in coastal waters that are too shallow for other Naval ships. “It is the kind of capability that would have enormous value against fast boats, for example, in the Persian Gulf,” Gates told a blogger conference call on Wednesday. “You don’t need a $5 billion-ship to go after pirates.” Pirates had boarded the Maersk Alabama just that morning.

While the Littoral Combat Ship has been beset by cost problems, the concept of such a vessel has long been embraced by Naval reformers, who see both international maritime cooperation and coastal operations as critical to protecting the freedom of the seas for global commerce. Pritchett noted that the Navy has been slow to embrace the concept. Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Navy gave many of many of its coastal patrol vessels to the U.S. Coast Guard, “but found it needed them for offshore [operations] in Iraq,” he said.

“The Navy doesn’t always like to get involved in coastal operations,” said Wertheim. “It’s not always considered a core mission.” As a result, promoting coastal operations doesn’t always provide a Naval officer a steady path to career advancement.

In a November paper on maritime strategy for the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank that employed many Obama Pentagon officials, retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman argued that the Navy needed to invest more in ships that could handle coastal operations.” American security interests will have to be secured and advanced in tomorrow’s ‘contested zones’: the urbanized littorals of the rim lands of Asia and Africa,” Hoffman, who did not return a Tuesday phone call, wrote. “That will require more than a [deep] water fleet that commands the commons from standoff distance. He specifically called for “greater emphasis to smaller craft” beyond the Littoral Combat Ship that can facilitate what he termed “offshore partnering,” for international and commercial security.

The trouble — as Gates will confront when he presents his budget request to Congress when it returns from recess next week — is that “Congress doesn’t consider small ships [part of] shipbuilding,” Pritchett said, and as a result “the Navy doesn’t ask for them” sufficiently. Shipbuilding is a jobs engine in states like Maine and Mississippi.

One way reformers confront the realities of addressing both Congressional pressure and low-intensity conflict is by proposing ships that can take on more than one mission, or by creating new naval formations that provide for a mixture of capabilities. One such proposal, called “Influence Squadrons” in the April issue of “Proceedings,” came from Navy Cmdr. Henry Hendrix. Hendrix envisioned a squadron composed of a panoply of naval assets, including destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Coastal Patrol ships “to operate close in” to the land and “an amphibious mother ship.”

Hendrix contended that the Influence Squadrons would provide multiple benefits. “Their understated capabilities would epitomize America’s peaceful, non-aggressive intent, and would carry out the new maritime strategy’s stated purpose of providing positive influence forward,” he wrote. In addition, they’d provide enough weaponry to “either dissuade or destroy pirate networks that might seek to prey upon increasingly vulnerable commercial sea lines of communication.”

Other recent anti-pirate activity lent apparent support to Hoffman’s “offshore partnering” strategy of robust maritime collaboration. Wertheim pointed to the Strait of Malacca, a waterway between Malaysia and Indonesia that is one of the most important commercial maritime traffic areas, as it bridges the Pacific and Indian oceans. Piracy in the area, a traditional problem, shot up in the mid-2000s. “Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia realized they have to coordinate, had to work together,” Wertheim said, and accordingly stepped up patrols in the waterway and shared radar and other intelligence assets. While the International Maritime Bureau still considers the strait to be vulnerable to piracy, it notes on its website that “the number of attacks have dropped due to the increase and aggressive patrols by the littoral states Authorities since July 2005.”

But not every aspect of piracy is exclusively a naval problem. Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security, noted that the piracy problem resulted from “ungoverned space” in Somalia, and as a result, U.S. efforts at coordinating international responsibilities could mitigate but not eliminate the problem. The new U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom, is “helpful for an international blessing” in terms of “coordinating states to allow the U.S. Navy and allied navies to use their ports,” but ultimately the problem is “no one has the appetite to go into Somalia and provide governance.”

Whether the “maverick community” Pritchett describes – and identifies with – will prove to be as influential as their counterinsurgent counterparts in the land-warfare community remains to be seen. But “this incident is what gets the American people going,” he said, and there is a robust international consensus – complete with over a dozen countries’ ship deployments to the waters where the Somali pirates operate and U.N. Security Council resolutions to confront piracy – behind the anti-pirate mission.

Maritime shipping “is a $7.8 trillion industry and there are a lot of trickle-down effects,” Pritchett said. “The insurance rate is going up and that’s going to make our goods cost more. That starts affecting global commerce, which is already struggling … none of this is in our interest.”

Update: Cmdr. Hendrix’s article appeared in the April 2009 issue of “Proceedings,” not “Parameters,” which is the Army War College journal, as this article mistakenly reported originally. We regret the error.

Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.

Namor the Sub-Mariner did not return a request for comment.

Based on the information I have … these are fundamentally two separate issues. I’m not going to say that there’s no possibility that there would be a connection or there wouldn’t be a connection at some point, but the piracy issue and the potential role of al-Qaeda are both a result and a continuing problem if you do not have a successful, comprehensive government in Mogadishu, in Somalia.

In other words, previous governments have been able to limit the piracy, And, of course, a legitimate government that is inclusive — but does not include al-Shabab and al-Qaeda sympathizers — would be able to minimize the role of al-Qaeda in Somalia.

So both problems are major issues for the United States. I would put the al-Qaeda one number one, and piracy certainly is important as well.

But the answer here is for this administration to — not just the members of Congress … — now the administration needs to step in and reach out to try to help this government that they’ve put together succeed. It’s time to try to see if it’ll work.

And this all makes sense. Like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, the Somali pirates appear to be motivated by cold hard cash, not ideological fervor. The good news is that, as Feingold says, the revival of Somalia — both political and economic — would surely temper the attraction of piracy, which tends to have a higher mortality rate than other professions. The bad news, of course, is that stability remains a long ways off.

Pirates attacked another cargo ship early Tuesday morning in the Gulf of Aden, continuing a spate of attacks despite recent U.S. and French military action against hijackers in the waters.

Pirates attacked the M/V Irene between 1 and 2 a.m. local time Tuesday, about 100 miles southwest of Al Mukalla, Yemen, according to the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and pirate trackers. The ship was a St. Vincent and the Grenadines-flagged vessel, managed by a Greek company, and crewed by just over 20 sailors.

The pirates also have two Egyptian fishing ships with another 24 crewmembers. The Wall Street Journal notes that makes for 77 pirate attacks and 18 successful hijackings since the beginning of the year.

Bryan Whitman from the Office of the Secretary of Defense told me that “The Secretary of Defense requested the required authorities which were approved by the President to conduct this military operation.” Whitman adds that “In this particular circumstance, it was a matter of providing authority to the folks on-scene to immediately react to a very fluid situation.  Not really unusual.”

Adam’s conclusion, at least, should attract broad support:

I’d say in general though, it’s probably a mistake to assign a great deal of credit to the President either way–I think it’s clear that those who carried out the operation deserve the plaudits.

“He has saved the world,” grumbled Andy. “You are led to believe that this morning.”

“Had this led to a disastrous outcome we would be blasting the president,” said Grandy. “To the extent that the opposite happened, credit is due. If this is not a test it is certainly a pop quiz and I think the president aced it.”

“I would have given him credit,” said Andy, “had he stepped to the podium last week and said look, we’re taking care of this.”

Most of the callers agreed with Andy, which confuses me.

We had a fairly well-argued debate last year about the wisdom of the president “elevating” rogue states by meeting with their leaders. What could elevate a group of stateless pirates more than the president of the United States issuing a bellicose statement about them, marking them as a great threat to liberty, hunting them to the ends of the earth, and so on?

Knowing what we know now — that the president was monitoring the situation and by Friday night had ordered the successful Navy Seals rescue of the American hostage — it doesn’t make any sense to argue that the president should have made the situation worse. But I’m hearing that all over talk radio.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

And that’s a meme that just … doesn’t exist beyond some of the more fevered conservative imaginations. And not even that many fevered conservative imaginations!

Since President Obama came to office, he announced the deployment of 17,000 new troops to Afghanistan; expanded the scope of U.S. strategy in that war to include Pakistan; and then announced an expansive recommitment to both countries. His CIA director unequivocally announced, in public, that drone strikes are going to continue in Pakistan. He’s winding down the Iraq war in a way that has the support from the commanding general. Obama is, accordingly, being accused by some of being a warmonger.

(And let’s not forget that Obama chose the risky option of parachuting the SEAL team into the theater and having them work their ninja skills on the pirates to rescue Phillips. That suggests someone with not just a comfort level with using force, but an ability to distinguish between wise and unwise applications of it.)

It’s a stale trope of the media that a president who opposed the Iraq war is a rigid antiwar ideologue, but one unlikely to die from lack of evidence. “I don’t oppose to all wars,” Obama famously told a 2002 rally against invading Iraq. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Fancy that.

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Luckily, Eagle1 at the U.S. Naval Institute’s blog has a proposed course of action. Here’s a map-heavy series of options predicated on the idea that the United States will not invade Somalia.

One possibility, in use in the Gulf of Aden, is to flood the sea lanes with sea policemen or naval forces who serve to deter or stops assaults on shipping in their beat area. Another possibility, especially when you have limited naval assets, and which is also in use in the Gulf of Aden, is to provide escorts to single or multiple ships as they transit the risk areas during periods when the pirates are likely to be active  (low winds, day light hours or during periods of a bright moon) or escort ships that have proven to be at risk (low freeboard ships, slow transit speeds).

Put helicopters and UAVs in the air and learn the local fishing patterns to find the “fishing boats” that don’t act like the others. Use the helicopters to scout routes ahead of merchant ships.