In follow up to my post about the Mexican Border Drug War this week’s hostage taking of an American ship’s captain by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden offers another view of an absurd imbalance of military power and how it’s not doing the US any good.

USS Churchill v Pirates

The basic story is as follows. Somali pirates board an American container ship in the world’s most dangerous stretch of water. The(legitimately) brave captain of the vessel, Richard Phillips, thwarts the attempt to take the crew hostage, freeing the ship but having to give himself up as captive as a result. The Somali’s take Phillips aboard a lifeboat equipped with food and water to last ten days and cast off onto the ocean. A stand-off ensues with four Somali’s and their captive holed up in the lifeboat surrounded by US warships. Negotiations start. Richard Phillips makes an escape attempt last night but is recaptured. Phillips immediately crowned a hero back in the US(again legitimately).

Sticks n Stones

What is interesting to note is that even though piracy off the Somali coast has been going on for some years[1], during which the US navy has been actively involved in patrolling the region, it is only now that a US citizen has been taken hostage that the US news networks are reporting on the piracy. Not that it’s surprising given the US news media’s ultra-insular nature, but still it’s weird talking to people and having them say things like ‘Wow! Where did these pirates come from all of a sudden?’ Well, actually they’ve been there all along.

But that’s not the point here. What is the point is the absurd picture that the situation makes[2]. Three hundereds-of-million dollar US navy ships vs a little bobbing orange lifeboat sailed by four Africans and their one captive.

As Jonathan Stevenson writes: ‘Depending on one’s perspective, it may represent either the zenith or the nadir of asymmetric confrontation‘. It’s the exact same conundrum that the US military will face if they do throw up that wall of steel on the Mexican border; billions of dollars in equipment hanging around and looking cool but the sand still slips through their fingers.

I tell ya I can hit that lifeboat from a thousand miles out

And the most bizarre part of it is that the US military persists in presenting an image that can only be described as gamer-emo-rockstar-hometown-techno-hero and what you get from this sales pitch is a distorted view of the reality of modern war on forums like these.

Do you really think that a group of Somali tribesmen who’ve spent their entire lives witnessing war and death – real death – intermingled with the lives of their families are more scared of a nuclear powered warship than what they are of a machete?