By John Burtis
Sunday, January 8, 2006
During the course of World War II, Winston Churchill termed military operations in the air, on land and at sea--triphibious warfare. and by august of 1945, The United States had become very good at their application.
Today, we have either been victimized by or fought al-Qaeda in all three of these theaters of operations. However, it appears to me that the use of the sea remains underutilized by the Islamist tyranny, limited by their lack of familiarity with seagoing modalities and by the very immensity of the oceans, but it may grow in intensity and importance in the very near future.
Oil is and will remain a primary import, if and until the environmentalists and their willing accomplices allow america greater petroleum exploration at home. Because it is produced in the Near East, North africa, Indonesia and the Caribbean rim, it must arrive by sea. Because it travels by water across vast, relatively uninhabited and poorly patrolled distances, it is vulnerable to disruption by piracy, destruction and diversion. and the slightest interruption of the oil trade will lead to another spike in prices or possible economic calamity.
Incursions into the sea lanes are not easy to plan, however. Unlike airport Road in Baghdad, crowded nightclubs in Bali, or packed London double-decker busses, the vast oceanic trade routes are not a target rich environment. However, there exists a series of specific bottlenecks, like the Suez Canal, the Straits of Malacca, which now accounts for 56% of the world's piracy, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Because of their proximity to al-Qaeda land, these are sure to provide al-Qaeda with a ready-made tactical area of operations.
But there have a series of seaborne attacks to give us pause and to prepare us for the upcoming battles with Islamo-fascism, all of which telegraph the types of weaponry and tactics to be encountered, from suicide boats to armed hijacking on the high seas, from warships and tankers to occupied ferries, while they demonstrate al-Qaeda's growing maritime sophistication.
In January of 2000, an overloaded suicide boat sank in aden, Yemen, while attempting to blow up the USS The Sullivans. It turns out that the boat was packed a little too heavily with munitions to float, but al-Qaeda had worked these kinks out later in the fall, when the USS Cole was attacked in the same location in October, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39 with another suicide boat packed with C-4. Bin-Laden's boys had apparently used a type of shaped charge to channel the blast into the interior of the ship, increasing the carnage.
In a strikingly similar replay of the attack on the Cole, another boatload of homicide bombers exploded against the French supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, setting it afire, in October of 2002, during US operations in afghanistan and the US build-up for the invasion of Iraq.
In a surprise change of tactics, in March of 2003, highly trained and heavily armed pirates, possibly al-Qaeda trained commandos, wearing black outfits and hoods, seized the Dewi Madrim tanker in the Straits of Malacca. This operation turned out to be a dry run, as they drove around for an hour, tested their skills at the helm, and departed. They came aboard using grappling hooks, slapped the quartermaster around after putting flex cuffs on him, and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
But by February of 2004, they were back to their old pyrotechnic tricks of the trade, when an al-Qaeda connected abu-Sayyef blast destroyed SuperFerry 14 in the Philippines, killing 118 and leaving the ship wrecked on the beach.
a suicide attack killed 3 members of the USS Firebolt's boarding party, in april of 2004, when an explosive laden dhow self-detonated during an apparent attack on an Iraqi oil terminal, as they approached in their inflatable boat.
Finally, the USS Kearsarge and the USS ashland dodged a rocket attack in aqaba, Jordan, as the ships were departing the harbor, in august of 2005, which luckily caused no casualties or damage.
While Congress dithers with the Patriot act, as Democrats accuse President Bush of treading on our rights one minute and not doing enough to protect us the next, while liberals now routinely call for his impeachment for protecting us, it is time to turn our weary eyes to the open ocean, where the protection of the sea lanes remains an absolute necessity, and with it a strong and resolute navy.
and by this I don't mean a John Kerry, smoke and mirrors, I was for it before I was against it, navy. The US Navy has been in a slow decline for a considerable period of time, most notably in the Clinton years. Budgets have declined as our social entitlements grow. Carrier air groups have shrunk from 80 planes to some 58. There is talk of limiting the number of aircraft carriers. There is a lack of mine sweepers, needed to eliminate those cheap but deadly ship killers, so effective in the narrow choke points. The cost of fuel has curtailed flight training. Economy rules the waves.
In 1798, when confronted by another batch of tyrannical pirates ravaging our shipping interests and looting our ships, Representative Robert Goodloe Harper rose in Congress to denounce their activities, crying, "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute."
His words ring true today. It's time to spend money imperative for our survival as a nation and stop spending it on social sops, pleasurable inducements, and ever cheaper drugs. It's time to stop thinking that somebody else should always pay for something we think we oughtta have. It's also high time to stop spending money on resplendent memorials to our esteemed civilian dead and continue preventing their annihilation by whatever means is necessary.
Take the fight to the enemy. Make him pay.
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