Don't let your guard down now!
(BRUSSELS2) “ Despite recent encouraging news, the time is not right for scaling back efforts” ! The message to members of the shipping industry is all the more powerful as it has been delivered jointly by the three main coalition anti-piracy forces - EU (Eunavfor Atalanta), NATO (Ocean Shield) and the American-led coalition (CTF 151). If the drop in piracy is very real (the International Maritime Bureau has just announced a 54% drop in piracy worldwide) and continues, month after month, pirate hunters fear that commercial vessel owners relax their efforts and abandon some of the security measures taken. Measures that may actually seem cumbersome to shipowners, costly in financial terms as well as logistics or personnel on the ship.
Tactical success is reversible
For the deputy commander of Operation Atalanta, Italian Rear Admiral Gualtiero Mattesi: “We have before us a tactical but reversible success. It is essential that the pressure on pirates and their business model is maintained, even amplified. The strategic context like the situation in Somalia allowing the pirates to act has not yet fundamentally changed”. “En joining forces, anti-piracy efforts today are more effective and can do more than any single ship, navy, country or organization alone he continues. Corn " even with all this military presence, the efforts of our naval forces cannot guarantee the security of the region ". The application of best practices - Best Management Practices" which is now in version 4 (BMP4 to download here) is therefore more important than ever.
A message addressed to both industry and governments
A fear already expressed on several occasions by several interlocutors which is addressed not only to the world of industry but also to governments. The same Rear Admiral Mattesi had already warned, during a recent seminar held during the summer in Paris: " Recent progress is reversible if the sources of piracy are not tackled. BMPs and the capabilities of forces in the area must be maintained while strengthening the capacity of regional states on the ground. It will take time ". And Admiral Jacques Launay, head of Eucap Nestor, also confirmed it to us. Eucap Nestor is not an exit strategy for the anti-piracy operation at sea, at least not only. " Once we have seen the combination of these effects on land, we can then consider reducing the sail area on the high seas.»
Marines of all countries, unite?
The fear also expressed, mezzo vocce, by many (navy) officers, defense or anti-piracy officials, is that the States, taking advantage of its good results, are thinking little by little of reducing the workforce on place of the different navies. And, in the process, certain equipment or fleet renewal programs. An option that is not theoretical at a time when the weight of debt and budgetary restrictions weigh on all European and Western state budgets. For the navies of the different countries involved, these operations are, in fact, not only the demonstration of their know-how and their efficiency but also of their concrete usefulness, in the service of the economy and the population of their country. Witness the good response index of the Dutch in a recent survey which estimated that we could cut the new JSF plane and a number of expenditures of the armies but not the fight against piracy (read: In the Netherlands, withdrawal into oneself becomes the norm). A not insignificant umbrella, in the battle which is beginning in each country between the "Financialists" on the one hand, and the various General Staffs on the other, even between the General Staffs, in these times when ferocity, the budgetary "cut-cut"...
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