Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
Rear Admiral Philip Jones, RN
12 FEBRUARY 2009
Q1 Chairman: Admiral,
can I welcome you to the Committee. As I quickly mentioned to
you, the area of Somalia is one which the Committee has taken
some interest in, given the complexity and the innovations that
are happening there in terms particularly of EU policy, and so
I am very pleased that you are able to join us. I need to tell
you that the session is recorded and you will receive a transcript.
If there is anything there that you do not feel is correct, you
have the ability to come back to us and put that right. I wonder
whether you want to make any brief introductory remarks before
we start with the questions, or give any background, or whether
you would like us to move into the questions.
Rear Admiral Jones: Thank you, my Lord Chairman.
I have not made any prepared statement to make at the outset,
and so I think I am happy to step straight into questions. I have
seen some of the likely questions that you would ask and I think
they cover a very comprehensive element of the operation. I suppose,
perhaps just to put it in context, what I have been hugely seized
with is how many novel issues we are dealing with here. It is
the first ever EU maritime operation conducted under ESDP. I am
the first ever UK commander of an EU operation under ESDP, so
there are two very significant firsts there, and I think that
the range of other navies that we are dealing with in the area
has been an absolute first. It is many hundreds of years since
we were working with Chinese naval vessels in these waters and
the range of other navies that are contributing to counter-piracy
makes it quite a unique experience, so I am well aware we are
breaking new ground here and, I think, setting a trend for the
future.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Perhaps I ought to warn you that as well as the questions we have
here, and we will make sure there is discipline on our side, particularly
also the area of intelligence and also command and control are
additional ones which I think probably members will want to ask,
but, Lord Anderson, perhaps I could ask you to start.
Q2 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Congratulations
on all these firsts.
Rear Admiral Jones: Thank you.
Q3 Lord Anderson of Swansea: The actual
genesis of the operation: why EU and who had the command before
the EU took over in December, was it?
Rear Admiral Jones: Yes. The EU operation began
on 13 December when we declared initial operational capability
with the force having arrived in theatre. In a sense it took over
from no-one; it was a new operation.
Q4 Lord Anderson of Swansea: It was not,
like in Bosnia, a NATO element which moved on to the EU?
Rear Admiral Jones: No, not formally. There
was a NATO Standing Maritime Group operating in the area for most
of the autumn 2008. As I understand it, they had planned to be
in that part of the world anyway and had extended their operation
to take on an element of counter-piracy. That deployment was due
to cease in December 2008 in any event. The ships were due to
return to their normal operating area in the Mediterranean and
that happened to coincide with the point at which we were able,
after our initial planning, to commence the EU operation. In the
end there was a useful degree of continuity with the counter-piracy
effort effectively passing from NATO to the EU, but it had not
been formally planned that way.
Q5 Lord Anderson of Swansea: In your
professional judgment, does this tell us anything about the United
States' attitude to EU operations, as, for example, set out by
Vice President Biden at the Munich speech? Does it show it a greater
confidence in the United States about what the EU is able to do?
Rear Admiral Jones: I believe it does. The very
clear intent I was given, the very clear lines of support that
were extended to me right from the outset, from coalition maritime
forces in Bahrain, which is the US-led wider operation against
terrorism, piracy, narcotic smuggling and people smuggling, was
that they very much welcomed any additional force coming into
the theatre, particularly a force with a focus on counter-piracy,
which clearly Operation Atalanta have, and that they regarded
it as a very helpful contribution that the EU was making to the
wider international community efforts to counter-piracy and they
certainly from my perspective applied no judgment as to whether
that was the right thing to do or not. Going back to your earlier
question—why the EU—I had a very profound sense while
working with the EU Secretariat under the guidance of the EU Council,
while setting up the operation, that it was a very strong sense
from almost all Member States that this was an activity that needed
countering—piracy—and that this was an opportunity
to launch a maritime operation under the ESDP, for the first time,
to capture the intent of a range of EU Member States who were
not formally part of the coalition that was already operating
in a theatre and, in some cases, not part of NATO either but could
contribute in this way. The fact that we were able to stand up
the operation so quickly has proved the intent that was there
in Member States to do that.
Q6 Lord Jones: Admiral Jones, are you
satisfied with the scope and wording of the current mandate of
the European Union operation? What can you tell us about the Operational
Plan for the EU mission itself?
Rear Admiral Jones: Thank you, my Lord. Yes,
I am happy with the scope and wording of the current mandate.
I had an opportunity to influence the shaping of the political
direction that was given to the EU operation. My team were invited
to work alongside the EU military staff in crafting the initiating
directive within which we did our planning, and then, indeed,
we effectively wrote the Operation Plan alongside the EU military
staff, which was a very useful piece of joined-up activity, where
we brought our maritime expertise within the operational headquarters
to bear against our wider experience of writing operational plans
for EU operations, and we have produced an OPLAN that I think
is comprehensive, is clear and is standing the test of time. We
are very much conducting operations against that OPLAN and finding
that the prioritisation of tasking within it is exactly how we
are doing operations on the ground, and that, I think, is testament
to the good work that was done to set the plan up.
Lord Jones: My last question is a very
simple one. Which side do you support this weekend! Thank you.
Chairman: Lord Hamilton, you wanted
to raise intelligence.
Q7 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: We did not
give you notice of this, but Lord Inge and I thought it was rather
a critical element of the whole thing. You are sitting in Northwood.
Where is your information coming from? Are you getting satellite
imagery? How do you know what is actually happening in the theatre
for which you have control? Can you actually identify pirate boats
and say that somebody should be heading off? Can you tell us how
that process is working as far as you are concerned?
Rear Admiral Jones: Yes. Thank you, my Lord.
Firstly, there is a well-found structure within the EU military
staff for establishing the intelligence support to an EU military
operation. We have activated that. That pulls in the best efforts
of intelligence support from all Member States to make sure that
the operational headquarters has the best strategic intelligence
available. That, I think, as you can imagine, is quite challenging
for Somalia itself. There is not a lot of direct intelligence
available for that, but certainly what is happening at sea we
are able to tap in much more to the fairly sophisticated recognised
maritime pictures that are available now to maritime forces based
on satellite and wider surveillance. We have not had to do it
all on our own; one of the key things about the co-ordination
that is happening amongst all naval forces in the area is that
there is a lot of shared intelligence taking place. We have liaison
officers between my force at sea in the Gulf of Aden with all
of the other task forces who are working there, both the Coalition
Maritime Force and their two task forces, one counter-piracy,
one counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics. We are working closely
with both of them, and we also have access, through my liaison
team working in Coalition Maritime Force headquarters in Bahrain,
to much of the intelligence that they have available that they
are sharing across the wider coalition—they have made that
available to the EU—so in terms of strategic intelligence,
I think we have a good enough picture in which to mount the operation.
The tactical day-to-day intelligence is a constant challenge and
we have a range of facilities in the Gulf of Aden to help us do
that. We are finding increasingly that that which we gained from
airborne surveillance platforms is absolutely crucial. The maritime
patrol aircraft which fly both directly in support of the Atalanta
Operation from their base in Djibouti, together with those who
fly in support of other operations, but we also share their picture,
are absolutely pivotal because they can see the movements of pirate
vessels at a much greater range and much more effectively, looking
down, than we can always get from surface-borne radars and visual
pictures. We are finding also that helicopter flying from the
surface ships doing counter-piracy are much more able to cover
a wider area and use their whole range of sensors to detect the
movement of pirate vessels. It is quite hard to pick up small
pirate skiffs on a rough sea day until you are very close to them,
so the detection of pirate activity and, hence, the ability to
react to any pirate attacks is very dependent on that surveillance
activity, and we are getting better and better experience at how
to cue the warships on to potential pirate attack based on surveillance
from other activities, but it is a constant challenge in the very
large area of sea we are trying to do this in.
Q8 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Can you identify
a pirate boat? Presumably there is a risk of it being confused
with somebody who is fishing, or is it a distinctly different
craft?
Rear Admiral Jones: No, that is a very significant
challenge. Understanding what a pirate is is a very significant
legal challenge as well. A pirate is only a pirate when he is
committing an act of piracy, and what we are finding frequently
is that he may be a people smuggler over night taking Somalia
personnel to Yemen for a fee, he may then turn into a fisherman
the next morning and then, in the afternoon, go out to do some
piracy, and it is only when he commits the act of piracy that
he becomes liable to arrest and prosecution by the maritime forces
there. We are becoming more adept at working out when is he likely
to be a pirate, even while masquerading as a fishermen, based
on the sort of equipment they are carrying in their vessels: if
they have a lot of fuel, if they have engines on their boats to
go faster than they need to for fishing, and particularly if they
are carrying pirate equipment, which is fairly easy to detect—the
ladders they use to get on board a ship, for example—and
so we are, in our boarding and searching and investigating around
the Gulf of Aden, much more able to detect what might be a pirate
ship based on possession of that sort of equipment, and certainly
weaponry, which you do not need to fish with, becomes a very clear
indicator.
Q9 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Were you comfortable
with the Indian craft that was blown out of the water by the Indians?
There was some question afterwards that there may have been hostages
below deck.
Rear Admiral Jones: That incident happened just
before Operation Atalanta launched, and it was at a time of a
very significant rise in the number of pirate attacks on their
ships and, frustratingly, many of them were successful at that
stage. There were many fewer warships in the Gulf of Aden at that
stage. We were watching all of those operations with a great degree
of fascination. It was almost like a piece of joint mission preparation
for us. We were witnessing other nations, other warships, experiencing
pirate attacks and working out how to cope with them and using
that to test our own methods. I think in many ways what that incident
exposed, as I have just relayed, is how difficult it is to work
out what is a pirate ship and what is not and, in that particular
case, what is a pirate mother ship and what is a hijacked ship
that pirates are now on board. It is very difficult to work out,
just by looking at the ship, just by talking to it on VHF radio,
what you are actually dealing with. I think it is likely, with
the gift of hindsight, that they might have made a wrong call
that day, but I think we have all learned from that and used it
to apply the techniques that the Indians used that day to our
own surveillance, our own questioning, our own interrogation and
our own use of rules of engagement to apply in a particular situation.
Lord Swinfen: What is the intelligence
available to the pirates in the way of routes of merchant ships
and the loads that they are carrying so that you can identify
what may be a potential target to a pirate, and what would you
like to do about it?
Q10 Lord Inge: Could I just add to that
question. You talked about the intelligence you were given in
Bahrain and elsewhere. Are there any capability gaps in that intelligence
relating to what Lord Swinfen has just asked you?
Rear Admiral Jones: Thank you, my Lord. It is
very difficult to know exactly what the pirates know and it is
very difficult to know exactly what their sources of information
are. We believe, depending on whereabouts in Somalia they are
operating from, they are operating under difference influences.
We believe it is a very clan-based structure. Some of those clans
are subject to the influence of the Islamic tribes—the Al-Shabab
and Al-Islamiya—some are very clearly not: those operating
in the less Islamicised areas in the north of Somalia. We go out
of our way in all of our interaction with the merchant shipping
community to try and protect the information they give to us about
their likely transits. We ran a website called the Maritime Security
Centre Horn of Africa, which has been one of the unexpected and
very significant successes of the operation, where almost all
of the shipping companies that transit through the Gulf of Aden
register with this website and give us information about their
transiting ships. In return we offer them, through this website,
advice about self-protective measures their ships can take while
transiting and also information about where our warships are likely
to be such that we can offer the highest degree of protection
to them. We take great steps to guarantee the security of that
website, such that it is impossible to get onto it and register
and get information from it unless you are a registered and verified
ship owner, and so we do not believe that pirates get information
that way, but the plethora of technologies available in the maritime
domain in the last few years that enables ships to be tracked,
the ability using some of those technologies to get access to
that information on the world-wide web, is clearly making the
whereabouts of merchant ships much more accessible in the public
domain than was ever the case before, and that is a factor we
have to think about. In answer to your question, my Lord, about
where the intelligence gaps are, I think, as I suggested earlier,
the biggest thing we do not know is exactly what is happening
on the land in Somalia, what are the influence on the pirates,
what is causing them to do what they do, what causes peaks and
troughs in pirate activity? We have, for example, been in a bit
of a trough lately, which has coincided with the start of Atalanta,
a much reduced level of pirate attacks, and certainly a very much
reduced level of successful pirate captures of ships. We have
attributed that to a range of issues, one of which we think may
be a rebalancing of the risk/reward calculation that the pirates
make before they set out to sea to do an attack, but just literally
in the last couple of days there has been a resurgence and they
are back out at sea. The weather is better, they have many fewer
ships that are currently held off the coast of Somalia awaiting
release after ransom has been paid.
Q11 Lord Inge: What numbers are we talking
about?
Rear Admiral Jones: We are down to, I think,
about nine held off the coast, when we were about double that
only about a month ago. Clearly, that is welcome, because each
one of those has a crew of between 20 and 40, normally, who are
held hostage for that period, so many of them are now free. We
do not know what drives their judgment, we do not know what makes
them come out, but we are attempting to play our part in loading
that risk/reward balance with a lot more risk: i.e. the risk of
detention, the risk of capture and the risk of suppression of
their pirate activity, and we certainly think that is a factor.
Q12 Lord Inge: Are the merchant ships
telling you when they have protective forces on board? In other
words, some of the merchant ships now are putting armed guards
on board as a reaction force. Are they telling you when that is
on board, or not?
Rear Admiral Jones: Yes, they are, my Lord.
That is an issue that we are often asked, whether we have a preference
either way. We do not. It is entirely up to the merchant ship
owners whether they want to do that. We attempt to offer to the
merchant ships advice about how to take self-protective measures
without the presence of a private security team on board. We have
seen lots of evidence of where ships have resisted pirate attack
without the presence of a team on board, but it is always helpful
for us to know that they are there; it is another factor we can
make in the judgment of vulnerability of a particular ship.
Q13 Lord Swinfen: Is the EU operation
having a real impact in deterring piracy and have you been successful
in protecting humanitarian shipments of the World Food Programme
destined for Somalia?
Rear Admiral Jones: I will take the second one
first, because that is easier. Protection of World Food Programme
shipping is my principal specified task, it is the number one
thing that I must do, and that is an element of the operation
that was picked up by the EU as a very clear part of my mandate
from a range of other nations who were doing that work. In the
earlier part of 2008, the French Navy, Canadian Navy and the Dutch
Navy were each in their own way contributing to that, and the
NATO Standing Maritime Group that was there before at the end
of the year was doing some of that too. We have picked that up
and are doing that almost exclusively now, and my force commander
in theatre will always allocate sufficient shipping from his task
force to cover that. We have escorted every World Food Programme
ship that has gone into Somalia since the middle of December and
so far have successfully enabled each of those ships to arrive
in port. Some of those are quite long transits: the ships are
quite slow and quite old, some of them are covering quite large
distances, depending on which port in Somalia they are going into,
but we have a very good working relationship with the World Food
Programme now, principally through their office in Nairobi, and
my force commander is working with them to look at the long-term
projection of the movement of their ships such that we can allocate
ships to their protection. We have so far escorted 10 ships in
the two months of the operation, which we think, on a rough calculation
of the amount of food they are carrying and the amount of mouths
they can feed, translates to about a million and a half Somalis
fed with enough food during that period, so I think that has been
a success story, but we are keenly aware that that is almost one
of the most vulnerable things we do. That is when the ships get
closest to the Somali coast. We take the ships right up to the
harbour entrance, and so we are constantly looking at where the
next threat to that particular element of the operation might
come from. In terms of the impact of deterring piracy—that
is my second specified task—that is something we are working
very hard to do principally in the Gulf of Aden now, which is
where most of the pirate attacks happen. We believe we are playing
our part in deterring pirate attacks, and that is partly through
the presence of warships. There is very clear anecdotal evidence
that, if they see a warship, if they see a grey ship or a military
helicopter that has clearly come from a warship, that is enough
to deter a pirate attack, but very often they cannot see the warship.
Down at the level they are at in their skiffs, they can probably
only see a warship at about five miles away. If we are no closer
than that to them they will not see us and we will not achieve
the deterrent effect, so that is where we make copious use of
maritime patrol aircraft and helicopters, and, again, there is
good anecdotal evidence that those flying close to the pirate
skiff, particularly if it is about to amount an attack, can very
often be sufficient deterrent to cause them to stop; but there
is another level of deterrents, again, that we are looking at
now, which is how to deter them from leaving the coast at all.
Deterring the individual attack is one thing, but we need to deter
them from even contemplating piracy, and that is back to the risk/reward
balance, and I think there is a way to go yet before we can be
confident that we are deterring them attempting it at all.
Q14 Lord Swinfen: On that particular
point, if you have identified a pirate ship, are you allowed to
follow them on shore and apprehend the individual?
Rear Admiral Jones: If we have apprehended pirates
in the course of an act of piracy, then, yes, we are allowed to
detain them and then seek a route to prosecution.
Q15 Lord Swinfen: But you cannot follow
them on shore. If you are chasing them and they get to the shore
before you capture them, are you allowed to follow them on shore?
Rear Admiral Jones: We do not have the capacity
to do that, and neither do I have the clearance to do that at
the moment, but, in any event, we tend not to get into those particular
scenarios because, unless we have physically witnessed them doing
an act of piracy, they are not pirates, and so we would not be
in the game of chasing them away from a ship. Once we have got
them away from the ship, we let them go, but we are trying to
deter piracy rather than trying to arrest pirates. Sometimes the
two come together, but, if not, we will just do the deterrence
and not the detention.
Q16 Lord Anderson of Swansea: I am going
to ask about short-falls and cost, but if you saw a ship with
a ladder on it which could not be used for anything other than
piracy, it is like what lawyers call "going equipped"
and, presumably, they could then be apprehended?
Rear Admiral Jones: The policy we are employing,
my Lord, is to cause that particular pirate capability to cease;
so we will remove the pirate equipment from them. In fact, very
often they do that before we get there: once they see a warship
or a helicopter, they start ditching it over the side. If they
need some encouragement, then we will get there and do that for
them, but we then send them back on their way, making sure they
have enough food and fuel to reach shore, but without their pirate
equipment and without their weapons.
Q17 Lord Anderson of Swansea: First shortfalls
and then, if I may, costs. On shortfalls you gave evidence to
the Development Committee of the European Parliament, stating
that nine EU Member States were involved to ensure that the force
comprises up to six frigates and three to five maritime patrol
and reconnaissance aircraft, but then you identified the main
shortfalls as auxiliary support ships, such as those that carry
fuel, which would extend to the patrol area, deployable force
headquarters and Role 2 medical support facilities—that
is field hospitals on board ship. That was given a month ago.
Presumably that still broadly represents the current position?
Rear Admiral Jones: Yes, it does, my Lord, with
one or two changes to that, obviously, as the force flow is evolving
all the time. I do not have a dedicated EU tanker to support the
task force at the moment. We have been able to mitigate that by
tapping into resources of other maritime forces in theatre.
Q18 Lord Anderson of Swansea: You manage.
Rear Admiral Jones: We have managed that well.
Even if we could not do that, we would be able to fuel the ships
alongside in the ports in which they routinely go for logistic
support, maintenance and crew rest, but, of course, the more I
have to send them off to those ports the less time they are at
sea doing counter-piracy.
Q19 Lord Anderson of Swansea: To what
extent are the prospects improved? Do you see that many shortfalls
are likely to be remedied in the near future?
Rear Admiral Jones: Yes, they will. On a fuel
tanker the force commander in theatre, which is currently a Greek
Navy commodore, is handing over force command to a Spanish Navy
commodore in the first week of April. That will bring a small
change in the composition of the task force—some ships will
leave some ships will arrive. One of those arriving, the Spanish,
to support the Spanish force commander, will include a tanker,
so we will have our own dedicated tanker to support Atalanta through
that period, and we are looking at a range of agreements with
other regional states as well as coalition forces to provide tanker
support. The question of the infrastructure to support the force
headquarters ashore has moved on significantly since that evidence
was given. We have established a much more robust and secure logistics
base at Djibouti now where we have been aided very significantly
by French forces at Djibouti and Djibouti national forces.
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