Murphy Martin. Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money. Piracy & Maritime Terrorism in the Modern World
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ASSESSING ThE ThREAT
So where is the threat or risk?
is book set out to answer three questions:
1. What form does piracy take in the contemporary world and does it
present a threat to international security?
2. What is maritime terrorism and does it, too, present a threat to interna-
tional security?
3. Are piracy and maritime terrorism similar or linked and, if they are,
does this present a threat to international security?
What form does piracy take in the contemporary world and does it present a
threat to international security? e phenomenon of piracy occurs locally
around the globe in what Samuel pyeatt Menefee has called “piracy clus-
ters”. e occurrence and survival of “common piracy” are determined by
a number of factors, the balance between which varies from location to
location. International shipping passing the Somali coast or calling at spe-
cific ports in Indonesia, the philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Tanzania,
peru, Santos in Brazil and Kingston in Jamaica are at some risk. however,
the shipping routes between the world’s major economies, which carry the
bulk of the world’s trade, are largely unaffected. Even where these routes
traverse areas where pirates are active, such as the Malacca Straits, the Gulf
of Aden or the Sulu Sea, ships are rarely attacked, particularly if they take
adequate precautions, unless they slow down, anchor or stop.
1
pirates have
1 Marcus hand, ‘Anti-piracy lookouts credited with foiling Somali hijack gangs’,
Lloyd’s List, 20 Aug. 2007; Bateman, ‘Assessing the threat of maritime terrorism:
Issues for the Asia-pacific region’, p. 81. however, it must be recognised that
taking adequate precautions is easy to say but harder to do. Attention is diffi-
cult to sustain and declines naturally as the watch becomes fatigued. Standards
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small boats, weak states, dirty money
a negligible effect on world trade. As Steve Carmel, a Senior Vice president
of the Maersk Line, has put it: “piracy is a large issue for regional, coastwise
trade in some parts of the world, like Africa … but for international trade
and the ships that facilitate it – not so much”.
2
however, while the precise number is unlikely to exceed the numbers
killed or injured on the roads of most major countries, many mariners are
killed, wounded, kidnapped or traumatised in some way every year.
3
Trau-
matic memories can often stay with victims long after the event. erefore,
whatever the effect might be on trade, the potential danger piracy presents
to all seafarers, and the fear it induces, which extends to those on large
ships and yachts, cannot be ignored. Its affect on crews is much more seri-
ous than many in the shipping industry, and in flag and littoral states, are
prepared to admit.
Furthermore, any reservation that the threats to international shipping
have been overstated cannot be extended to the threat piracy presents to
coastal communities, fishermen and local shipping. is threat has gener-
ally been underestimated, if not ignored, as have the consequential links
between piracy and overfishing (often by corruptly accredited foreign boats
that in some cases are associated with organised crime).
4
piracy could threaten the international trade and shipping system
(as opposed to individual ships) if a maritime or environmental disaster
caused by pirate activity, direct or inadvertent, were to disrupt tightly pro-
grammed shipping schedules. Some states are more sensitive to this threat
than others, particularly those such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China
whose supply routes pass through Southeast Asian waters. e potential
consequences that significant disruption might have on economic stability
of watch-keeping slip and precautions such as locking accommodation doors
(itself a contravention of safety procedure) can be forgotten. pirates tend to at-
tack at twilight when visibility is curtailed or at night when watch-keepers have
already been on duty for several hours.
2 Steve Carmel. ‘Commercial Shipping and the Maritime Strategy’. NWCR, Vol.
61, No. 2, Spring 2008 p. 43.
3 e IMB recorded 317 violent incidents against seafarers in 2006, but given the
scale of under-reporting this must be regarded as a partial figure: ICC-IMB pi-
racy Report 2006, Table 8, p. 10. Numbers of road deaths (in 2001) have been
compared with terrorism fatalities by N. Wilson and G. ompson: ‘Deaths
from international terrorism compared with road crash deaths in OECD coun-
tries’, Injury Prevention, vol. 12, no. 4, 1 Aug. 2006, pp. 332-3.
4 And not merely between overfishing and piracy but between overfishing and
illegal migration. See, for example, Sharon LaFraniere, ‘Europe takes Africa’s
fish, and boatloads of migrants follow’, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2008.
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assessing the threat
in the region has attracted the attention of the united States and also India,
which is concerned that the presence of additional naval forces engaged in
SLOC protection might affect security in the Indian Ocean.
piracy is an organised activity. More organised gangs can affect inter-
national security more severely. It is when piracy is linked to national or
transnational organised crime that it presents the greatest threat. is is the
point at which piracy’s connections to wider criminal activity, such as the
illicit movement of drugs, counterfeit goods and trafficked people, mean
that it can help to fuel the corruption that protects such activity, which in
turn limits economic opportunity by imposing the unproductive burden of
high security costs on what are generally already fragile economies. Along-
side other maritime crimes, such as arms and drug smuggling, people-
trafficking, illegal oil bunkering and illegal fishing, piracy can weaken and
destabilise states, a process with security implications that extend beyond
the crime itself.
What is maritime terrorism and does it, too, present a threat to international
security? Maritime terrorism is, quite simply, terrorism at or from the sea.
It became a subject of great concern after the 9/11 attacks because secu-
rity officials and public commentators, fearful of another attack on the
same scale, drew a false analogy between the inherent features of aircraft,
as used by terrorists, and those of ships, despite the fact that very few ter-
rorist attacks at sea had occurred. Notwithstanding plentiful theoretical
opportunities such attacks have remained rare, so rare that this category
does not even merit a separate mention in the uS State Department’s Pat-
terns of Global Terrorism and Country Reports on Terrorism.
5
e reasons
why have been discussed: the need for specific maritime skills; the need for
specialised equipment; the fact that most terrorists are land-centric, even
urban, have no affinity with the maritime environment and no incentive
to change because the land is target rich and their operational outlooks are
generally conservative; the fact that terrorist groups have limited resources
to invest in new theatres while at the same time innovating and investing
in the technology they need to stay ahead in their chosen terrestrial target
spectrum; and finally the more restricted publicity potential of maritime
targets towards which land-based audiences, for the most part, feel little
empathy. Should attacks take place in the future the targets that appear
5 e uS Department of State published Patterns of Global Terrorism until 2003,
after which they were replaced by Country Reports on Terrorism. See http://www.
state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/
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small boats, weak states, dirty money
most at risk are warships because of their supreme iconic status, cruise ships
and ferries for their mass casualty potential, and coastal or offshore oil and
gas infrastructure to create supply shortages.
Terrorism, however, is a tactic, not an end in itself. e speculative
focus on large-scale attacks has tended to obscure the fact that none of
the groups that have mounted terrorist attacks at sea have taken to the
water for that reason alone. Details are understandably hard to come by
but it is reasonable to assume that, compared with logistical support, ter-
rorism has played an insignificant part in most groups’ maritime activity.
Groups need to move men and equipment to support their land cam-
paigns and earn money to support these operations. One group alone,
the LTTE’s Sea Tigers, has gone further by combining terrorist attacks,
logistical support and limited sea control activity to the point where it
can be regarded as a “non-state navy”.
Are piracy and maritime terrorism similar or linked and, if they are, does this
present a threat to international security? Since the events of 9/11, a strain
in security discourse has yoked piracy and maritime terrorism together;
has viewed them as complementary to the point where some commenta-
tors have suggested that a “piracy-terrorism” nexus exists or might exist
in the future.
6
e impetus behind this can again be traced back to the
false analogy between aircraft and ships which led to the suggestion that
pirates could help terrorists learn how to steal and control ships for attack
purposes. ‘Nexus’ is an evocative word that needs to be used with care be-
cause, in this context, it can gloss over the motivational and operational
reasons that generally keep criminals and terrorists apart and imply an
instrumentality that does not exist.
Nevertheless, because the factors that encourage and sustain pirates
and terrorist groups’ use of the sea are broadly similar, their activities and
operating areas can overlap and, if not shared currently, might provide
one or the other with opportunities in the future. ese similarities are
most apparent when terrorist groups steal or extort money from seafar-
ers and coastal villages, the clearest examples of which have occurred in
the Malaysian-philippine-Indonesian maritime tri-border region and on
the rivers and coastal waters of Nigeria. Despite these commonalities, no
concrete links between pirates and terrorists have so far been uncovered.
6 Andrew holt, ‘plugging the holes in maritime security’, e Jamestown Foun-
dation Terrorism Monitor, vol. 2, no. 9, 6 May 2004, p. 7. See also the fuller dis-
cussion in Chalk. e Maritime Dimension of International Security, pp. 31-3.
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assessing the threat
Disorder and the sea: out of sight, out of mind
If, when looked at in isolation from other varieties of maritime disorder
and from any links it might have to organised crime, piracy is a localised
problem, and if, when looked at similarly in isolation, maritime terrorism
does not present a major challenge, why should either be regarded as threat
to international security? Should they instead be seen as two aspects of a
more generalised problem of maritime disorder?
roughout history the sea has been an anarchic province. e real ex-
tent of that anarchy has varied according to the interest and determina-
tion of the predominant maritime power of each age to protect shipping
and suppress lawlessness. In our own era, when the idea of national self-
determination has become the deciding principle of international relations,
conferences have replaced corvettes. At conferences, lines have been drawn
on the surface of the oceans, designating this part territorial waters and that
part an economic zone, but like the lines drawn on maps of Africa by Euro-
pean imperialists, they can bear little relation to reality. Of course, they can
help facilitate economic exploitation. Nations can more easily carve up the
seabed for oil or mineral extraction, for example (although this is far from
certain as disputes over the South China Sea between China, Vietnam, the
philippines and Indonesia have demonstrated
7
). But seafarers know that
once over the horizon they are on their own and that their problems are all
too often out of sight and out of mind. It is as it always was: to paraphrase
J.C. Wylie, the ultimate determinant is the man in a boat with a gun.
8
If
that man is a pirate or a terrorist he almost certainly gets what he wants. If
that man is on board a navy or coast guard vessel he should win but there
is a good chance he will not, as initial contact between the uSS Carter
7 See, for example, henry J. Kenny, ‘e South China Sea: A Dangerous
Ground’, NWCR, Summer 1996 and Michael Studeman, ‘Calculating China’s
advances in the South China Sea: Identifying the triggers of ‘expansionism’’,
NWCR, Spring 1998. e dispute lessened greatly after 1995 when China
adopted a diplomatic strategy which emphasised that the country was pursuing
economic not territorial goals, and that every state in the region could benefit
from its economic expansion. Ralf Emmers, ‘What explains the de-escalation
of the Spratly’s Dispute?’ IDSS Commentary, 5 Dec. 2006. Nonetheless, all the
disputes and claims in the South China Sea remain latent and vulnerable to
renewed Chinese assertiveness. See Barry Wain, ‘All at sea over resources in East
Asia’, Yale Global, 14 Aug. 2007.
8 Wylie wrote: ‘e ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with
a gun’: J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General eory of Power Control, New
Brunswick: Rutgers up, 1967, p. 85.
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small boats, weak states, dirty money
Hall and pirates off Somalia and the Alondra Rainbow case involving India
both demonstrated in their separate ways. If international law is the most
concrete expression of international society, the idea of nations working
together often expressing that cooperation through law, then piracy spe-
cifically, but maritime disorder generally, demonstrates it has a profound
and humbling limit. Law that cannot or will not be implemented is no law
at all.
9
Disputes over boundaries, arguments over what these boundaries
mean, ambiguity over the status of ships operating within these bounda-
ries, the willingness or unwillingness of states to exercise their responsibili-
ties under international law or under their own laws, all contribute to the
perpetuation of maritime anarchy.
Maritime disorder and initiatives for tackling it
Where order has been present it has been kept by a maritime hegemon; it
has depended on the self-interest of an imperial or global power or pow-
ers to enforce it, whether alone or with the help of regional allies. In the
absence of such a power or powers, seafarers have generally been subject to
the depredations of criminal pirates or state-sponsored privateers.
An anarchic state obtains on the high seas in particular. In the case of
failed states (such as Somalia) or weak states (such as Sierra Leone and
Guinea-Bissau), the absence of regulation and law enforcement may extend
right up to the coast.
10
Even in the case of slightly stronger states (such as
Indonesia, the philippines and Bangladesh), it may extend to the coast
in areas away from major population centres and, because of inadequate
law enforcement or corruption, can effectively include major ports such as
Chittagong in Bangladesh and Lagos in Nigeria.
Confronted by this comparatively unregulated realm, and in order to
erode the advantages this confers on criminals and terrorists, some states
have devised strategies designed to gain greater understanding of the threats,
criminal and political, which thrive there. e uS strategy to achieve “mar-
itime domain awareness” is one example. e scheme is complex. Defini-
tions of its purpose, and expectations about what can be achieved cost-
effectively, change regularly. To succeed in its broad aim of building an
9 Law with order: e sad irony is that the law of piracy was ‘a traditional monu-
ment to the policy of peace and protected uses of the seas’, but this monument
is a tombstone if no state is prepared to enforce it. See omas J. Clingan, Jr.
‘e law of piracy’ in Ellen, Piracy at Sea, pp. 171-2.
10 Foreign policy and the Fund for peace, ‘e failed states index 2007’, Foreign
Policy, July/Aug. 2007.
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assessing the threat
intelligible picture of threats at sea that is clear and accurate enough for ac-
tion to be taken demands that several substantial technical and procedural
problems are overcome. e peculiarly American temptation to place too
much emphasis on technical solutions, which in this case would translate
into an over-dependence on surveillance unsupported by the necessary in-
telligence, needs to be checked. Nonetheless, the scale of the project and
the difficulties that it faces illustrate the immensity of the challenges posed
by the ever changing and multiple character of illicit maritime activity.
e recognition that no one state can hope to control this activity came
when Admiral Mike Mullen, when he was the uS Navy’s Chief of Naval
Operations, called for the creation of a “thousand-ship navy” (TSN) in
2006. e idea was that navies and other users of the sea, commercial as
well as state, should, regardless of their capabilities or technical sophistica-
tion, work to promote global maritime security by cooperating to confront
common problems such as terrorism and arms smuggling.
11
e concept,
which is now referred to more frequently as the “Global Maritime partner-
ship” (GMp), had first been outlined a year before in the article by John
Morgan and Charles W. Martoglio published in the uS Naval Institute’s
Proceedings in which pirates, human traffickers, drug smugglers and other
criminals were identified—alongside political non-state actors, and other
concerns such as environmental degradation and what has been termed
Illegal, unreported and unregulated (Iuu) fishing—as being amongst the
transnational threats that the power of the world’s maritime organisations
should be harnessed to confront.
12
e attempts by some navies to lay un-
due stress on the threats of piracy and maritime terrorism, or the two threats
together, are misplaced as they can lay their proponents open to charges of
exaggeration. piracy and maritime terrorism are only two crimes amongst
several that contribute to, or feed on, maritime disorder. e real challenge,
as Morgan and Martoglio identified, lies in the control and suppression of
a cat’s cradle of interrelated threats, which because they can challenge free
navigation and undermine the manageable exploitation of the world’s seas,
have the potential to affect relations between states.
What exactly GMp might mean in practice has been difficult to deter-
mine, in part because the uS Navy has been at pains to stress the voluntary
11 Admiral Mike Mullen, ‘Remarks to the 17
th
International Seapower Sympo-
sium, Naval War College, Newport, RI’, 21 Sept. 2005.
12 John G. Morgan and Charles W. Martoglio, ‘e 1,000-ship navy: Global mar-
itime network’, uS Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 131, no. 11, Nov. 2005, pp.
14-17.
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small boats, weak states, dirty money
nature of any association, and has consequently avoided explicit prescrip-
tions about what should be included. Whilst, in broad terms, the aim is to
encourage information sharing to achieve a common awareness of the types
and quantity of illicit maritime activity, the additional capabilities needed
in order to place the necessary ships and aircraft in positions where they can
intercept or deter criminals and terrorists, are daunting.
13
Consequently,
as most navies currently lack the capacity to act on such information ef-
fectively, the concept also extends to capacity building, and it has been
suggested that major navies, the uS Navy in particular, should provide
support and assistance to enable this to happen. Despite the uS Navy’s
attempts to minimise its own role, such suggestions have nonetheless pro-
voked accusations that it was attempting to play what one commentator
called “globo-cop” in the maritime arena.
14
MDA and GMp are both attempts at security arrangements that, while
not compromising irreparably the principle of free navigation, grapple with
a problem of maritime disorder that is growing with apparent rapidity as
all forms of maritime exploitation intensify and illicit activity keeps pace.
In this context, those who argue that maritime security can be ensured
though multilateral treaties or regimes in anything other than a limited or
temporary sense, without the leadership of a hegemonic power, have scant
evidence upon which to base their faith.
e restless sea
pressures on the sea have been mounting steadily since 1945. Since the end
of the Cold War the incidence of piracy has risen. e volume of both le-
gitimate goods and smuggled goods such as drugs, arms, natural resources,
slaves and other illegal migrants transported by sea have both increased
substantially while fish stocks have been depleted, in some areas almost to
exhaustion. Exploitation of the sea has now reached unprecedented levels
driven by the rapidly rising demand for resources and living space on land
due to population growth and environmental degradation.
15
In a move-
13 See, for example, George Galdorisi and Darren Sutton, ‘Achieving the global
maritime partnership: Operational needs and technical realities’, RUSI Defence
Systems, June 2007, pp. 68-71.
14 Gurpreet S. Kuranar, ‘‘ousand-ship Navy’: A reincarnation of controversial
pSI?’, Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (New Delhi), Strategic Com-
ments, 28 Dec. 2006.
15 With regard to pollution see, for example, Mike henderson, ‘No ocean is un-
tainted by the polluting hand of Man’, e Times, 15 Feb. 2008 and Magnus
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assessing the threat
ment that could be described as a “migration”, and which one astute ob-
server has described as a “scramble” to evoke parallels with the nineteenth-
century scramble for Africa,
16
states, people and corporations are turning to
the sea more than ever before for energy, in the form of offshore oil and gas
and structures that capture wind or tidal power, minerals, drinking water
distilled from the sea, and waste disposal, and are exploiting it more than
ever for food, both from increasingly depleted fish stocks and from fish
farmed in sheltered waters. Added to these pressures is the exploitation of
coastal areas by the wealthy portion of the world’s population for tourism
and leisure, including the building of structures on the sea itself, such as
those seen currently in South pacific island lagoons and the “palm island”
developments in Dubai. is is a trend that is likely to continue, as the
proportion of the world’s population able to afford such privileges grows.
Greater economic activity will create more targets for maritime crime and
terrorism.
pressure will also be felt on Mahan’s “great highway”. As the trend for
using fewer, and larger, cargo ships in a smaller number of giant ports con-
tinues (while the number of narrow chokepoints remains constant), and
the quantity of goods in transit grows, opportunities for damaging criminal
interdiction will increase.
17
As seaward movements intensify, and coastal activity increases, climate
change is likely simultaneously to cause the sea to encroach upon the land.
ese opposing pressures mean that the sea will become more contested in
the future.
18
Resource depletion and the loss of productive land to environ-
mental damage will increase the economic and political pressure on the lit-
torals and may well make conflict more likely. Currently international law,
in the form of uNCLOS, sets the limits of territorial seas and determines
the rights of states within their “exclusive economic zones”, that is, within
the portion of the sea (up to a limit not exceeding 200 nm from the coast)
Linklater, ‘Sea’s treasures may no longer be with us from here to eternity’, e
Times, 15 Feb. 2008.
16 Rear Admiral Chris parry, RN, ‘e future maritime strategic context’, RuSI
Future Maritime Operations Conference, London, 22-3 Nov. 2006.
17 Martin N. Murphy, ‘Disorder in the littorals: e irrelevance of expeditionary
warfare’, presentation delivered to the Netherlands Defence Academy Sympo-
sium, ‘Expeditionary operations–Effects and challenges’, Breda, 13-14 Dec.
2006.
18 ‘Realistic’ (pseudonym), ‘e route to irrelevance–or a Wake-up Call’, e Na-
val Review, vol. 94, no. 4, 2006, pp. 311-16; Justin Stares, ‘Eu seeks to extend
territorial powers’, Lloyd’s List, 19 July 2006.
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small boats, weak states, dirty money
over which a state has special rights over marine resources, thereby impos-
ing some degree of order on coastal regions. uNCLOS was the product of
a compromise between the often conflicting interests of coastal states and
maritime powers, and there is a danger that in the future political pressures
exerted by seaward migration and rising sea levels, and the attendant envi-
ronmental and security concerns, could create rifts between states as differ-
ences of interpretation give rise to disputes to the point where uNCLOS is
able to exert less and less force in practice, or even fractures.
What might change?
piracy and maritime terrorism have to date been localised problems that
have had little significant effect on international order. Against a back-
ground of an increasingly pressured environment that is not just theoreti-
cally anarchic but practically chaotic, there is no guarantee that this rela-
tively benign situation will continue. Furthermore, if change does happen
it could occur relatively quickly. While the scale of the increase can be
disputed, there is no doubt that the number of piracy incidents in tradi-
tional areas has grown over the last thirty years. In the cases of Somalia and
Nigeria it has grown from almost nothing in much less time. e number
of terrorist incidents might have increased from none to a few but they
have nonetheless changed in character from the chaos of the Achille Lauro
attack to the professionalism of the Cole, Limburg and Superferry 14 as-
saults. Over the same period the LTTE’s Sea Tigers grew from nothing to
a serious force that has fought the Sri Lankan navy to a virtual standstill,
instilled concern in the Indian Navy and provided an inspiration for other
insurgent groups. possible developments in maritime criminality and ter-
ror must be assessed in the context of rapid information and technological
transfer, coupled with upward trends in population and economic activity,
and the concomitant rising demand for marine resources. ese could ag-
gravate three kinds of threat and vulnerability in particular: criminality and
criminal-terrorist cooperation; weaknesses in the international maritime
transport system; and the threat of maritime insurgency.
19
Criminality and Criminal-Terrorist Cooperation. e speculation that pirates
and criminals might help terrorists to mount attacks at sea has not been ful-
19 Martin N. Murphy, Contemporary Piracy and Maritime Terrorism, Adelphi pa-
per no. 388. Abingdon and New York: Routledge for the International Institute
of Strategic Studies, 2007, p. 76.