Shoot the Archer, Not the Arrow

One of the basic tenets of air defense is that it is better to kill the missile launching platform than it is to have to shoot at all of the missiles. That is one of the reasons why the Navy, during the Cold War, spent so heavily on E-2Cs, F-14s, Phoenix missiles, anti-ship Tomahawks, S-3s and escorts towing long passive sonar arrays. The idea was, in a war, to shoot down the Bears, Badgers and Backfires, and sink the Krivaks, Kashins, Karas, Echoes and Charlies before they could fire their missiles. The principle was called "shoot the archer, not the arrow."

Now let's think about what is going on off the coast of Somalia. Pirates are grabbing ships and holding them, sometimes for months on end, until the shipowners cough up cash to ransom them. The response of the world's industrialized powers, at least those nations with warships capable of operations away from their home waters, has been to send ships to patrol the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast.

Somalia has coastline on both the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. I have not heard of pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden; it is too narrow and they'd be too easy to find. Somalia's coastline along the Indian Ocean is more than 1,000 miles long. The pirates have been taking ships as far as 300 miles off the coast. (This may be a method for them to find targets.) Do the math. That is 300,000 square miles of ocean that has to be patrolled, looking for small pirate motherships and the high-speed boats used for the attacks.

I submit that if the goal is to stop pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia, that trying to intercept the motherships or the attack boats at sea is a damn near impossible task and, to be blunt about it, a fool's errand. The motherships and the attack boats are not sailing craft, they are powered vessels. That means that they have to have supporting facilities ashore. The ships and boats have to be provisioned. They have to be refueled. They have to be maintained. The supplies to do that have to be transported to the pirates' ports. The pirates have to live somewhere. The ransom has to be washed through some sort of transfer services.

Every nation involved in the suppression effort has an intelligence service. CIA, MI6, SVR, DGSE, MSS, I would expect all of them to have some capability in this area. The support network should be identified. And then it should be attacked. The bases and the support system are the archers, the pirate boats themselves are the arrows. Without the ability to refuel, reprovision, repair and rearm, the boats themselves will become useless.

Shoot the archer, not the arrow.

Update: The pirates are indeed taking ships in the Gulf of Aden.