Looking For Tripwires

Nations cooperate to patrol Persian Gulf waters as Iraqi Navy trains to assume security responsibility

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

Thirty months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the reborn Iraqi Navy is making headway in its training to assume security responsibility of its ports and coastal waters from coalition navies.

That is the deckplate view of U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Blake Novak, commanding officer of the Island-class 110-foot cutter Wrangel, one of six patrol boats assigned to the Coast Guard’s Patrol Force Southwest Asia based in Bahrain.

“Over the past three months, I’ve seen quite an improvement with the Iraqi Navy,” Novak said. “[They] should definitely feel a sense of accomplishment because they are starting to take over a lot of the security measures. They’re conducting more operations. They’re starting to work on a maintenance and logistics plan for their vessels.

“When I first got here, they had just barely started doing that,” he said. Now, when operating in the northern Persian Gulf, “they’re out there on a regular basis and they’re integrated with coalition forces. To me, that’s a huge step, because, ultimately, that’s the goal of NAVCENT (Naval Forces Central Command) — for the Iraqis to take over their security.”

The Iraqi Navy is being trained primarily by the U.K. Royal Navy at the port of Umm Qasr, but also is being shown the techniques of maritime security operations (MSOs) by other coalition navies and coast guards.

“We’ve taken Iraqi [sailors] on board, shown them how we conduct boardings, and walked them through everything from how to make approaches on vessels from a distance to how to look for certain tripwires to ensure that it’s safe to come alongside,” Novak said.

MSOs are the major mission for most of the U.S. and coalition naval units in the NAVCENT area of operations, including the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea.

“[MSOs] encompass all those skill sets that we do as mariners to deter, disrupt and deny the use of the maritime environment from our enemies or potential enemies,” said Capt. Hank Miranda, commander, Destroyer Squadron 50, the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s resident surface command.

MSOs include visit, board, search and seizure (also known as maritime intercept operations, or MIOs), the most intensive activity the ships are engaged in day to day as they look for terrorists, smugglers, illegal immigrants and pirates. MSOs also involve protecting sea lanes and key infrastructure — such as oil facilities — and providing humanitarian relief and assistance to mariners in distress.

Miranda just assumed operational command of Task Force 58, the MSO organization in the northern Persian Gulf adjacent to Iraq, rotating in to succeed a Royal Australian Navy admiral. MSOs in the central and southern gulf are normally run by the commander of a visiting carrier strike group, and MSOs outside the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the gulf are conducted under the command of a coalition flag officer.

“The boss likes to use me as the utility infielder so if there is a gap in task force commanders I take their place,” Miranda said, describing his role in preserving continuity and corporate knowledge of MSOs. “One of the big missions I have is helping the Iraqi Navy stand up their capabilities and play a bigger role in security operations up there.”

Miranda’s squadron, based in Bahrain, is an oddity in that he has no destroyers in his immediate command. His 10-ship squadron includes the four Cyclone-class 170-foot coastal patrol ships, two coastal minehunters, two mine countermeasures ships and the six Coast Guard cutters, as well as four MH-53E mine countermeasures helicopters. On occasion, a cruiser, destroyer or frigate would be assigned temporarily for a certain mission.

“One-third of our surface forces out here are comprised of ships from allied countries,” Miranda said. “They make a huge contribution to the amount of forces that we have here.”

Allies contributing ships to the MSOs in the gulf as of August included the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy and Iraq. Outside the gulf, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Pakistan provided naval units to support Operation Enduring Freedom. In the recent past, ships from Poland, Singapore, Spain and New Zealand also participated.

Foreign boarding teams “are trained by their home navies although we do conduct training together for exercises,” Miranda said. “Their boarding teams are very similar to ours and our procedures are very similar.

“I’ve been doing that MIO stuff since 1991. Then, the focus was enforcing U.N. sanctions, boardings to search ships to prohibit certain items from leaving and entering Iraq. It has changed a lot because now our boardings are focused on intel. Most of our boarding teams talk with the fishermen, and we even give them care packages now. So it’s a whole different flavor of interaction.”

Boarding teams are equipped with assault weapons, 9mm pistols, personal protective gear and life vests, very much like a police special weapons and tactics team.

“On any given day, it’s dangerous. The most dangerous thing we do is put people in small boats in the water,” Miranda said. “Putting 12 guys in an RHIB (rigid-hull inflatable boat) and having them go out to a ship in very challenging sea states is very dangerous.”

For the crews of the Coast Guard patrol boats assigned to the squadron, boardings are “our bread and butter,” according to Novak. “I’ve found it to work very well with our integration because the U.S. Navy and NAVCENT realize that we have an expertise that the U.S. Navy just doesn’t have.”

For the Patrol Force headquarters, the greatest challenge is coordinating patrol schedules and maintenance periods to ensure adequate coverage of the northern gulf. An 85-person maintenance unit must cram maintenance in between the cutters’ heavy patrol schedules.

The Coast Guard crews in the gulf spend year-long tours, rotating in a modified sea swap, with half of each boat’s crew replaced each six months, in order to avoid situations where there are complete crews new to current operations. To prepare for operations in the gulf, replacement personnel receive five weeks of specialized training in Portsmouth and Blackwater, Va., in subjects such as tactics; intensive emergency medical care; chemical, biological, radiological defense; and decontamination and container climbing.

Novak said the biggest challenge for the patrol boat crews is the operations tempo. He estimates the six boats are operating at twice the tempo of a similar boat stationed in U.S. waters — 5,000 hours annually versus 2,500 hours.

The Wrangel is more heavily armed than its sister ships in home waters, which are equipped with the standard 25mm chain gun and two .50-caliber machine guns. The cutters in the gulf carry the chain gun and twin .50-caliber guns on each of two mounts, plus 40mm grenade launchers.

Patrols in the gulf typically are longer than those in the U.S. waters. (The length of the patrols is classified.) For that reason, the boat crews — typically 16-17 people on boats stateside — are increased to 21-22 to enable the boats to perform boardings around the clock and still leave enough crewmen on the boat for standing watches and resting.

Boarding and searching an 800-foot motor tanker takes 10 people — about half the crew of the Wrangel — upwards of three hours. Novak said a cutter typically would conduct six boardings, including small vessels such as coastal cargo freighters and fishing boats, in a 24-hour period.

“There are tripwires that we look for that are key points for us to want to board a vessel, but on a routine basis we are fairly liberal on boarding different vessels just to make sure that they are comfortable with everything that’s going on in the gulf region,” he said.

Novak estimates that 90 percent of the Coast Guardsmen in the Patrol Force “volunteered to be here, which, from a command perspective, makes a huge difference” in the morale of the crews.

Fishermen and commercial mariners feel safer with Coast Guard and Navy patrols in the area. Piracy is rampant in the Persian Gulf, Miranda said, and cargo dhows often are the victims. “If you are carrying goods with any value at all, you are definitely running the risk of pirates coming alongside at night and stealing your equipment,” he said.

Navy and Coast Guard MSO forces are benefiting from technologies such as scanners. During boardings, Miranda said, on “everything from a commercial tanker to a fishing dhow, when we take pictures of individuals and send them to a database, we instantly get feedback. We have set up a very workable and very effective coalition force intelligence center that has started the use of databases like that.”

Imaging and night-vision equipment allow seamless operations day or night. Biometric scanners soon will be in use, linked to the FBI database for near-real-time identity checks. “I expect that in the not-too-distant-future we’ll start getting things like bomb sniffers,” Novak said.

Unmanned systems also are making an impact in MSOs. “There’s a great percentage of the reconnaissance missions that are being done by unmanned aerial vehicles, and I see that as a huge difference in the time that I’ve been out here, in both day and night surveillance,” Miranda said.

He also sees a role for unmanned surface vehicles. “Last spring, we had a Royal Singapore [Navy] ship out here, the RSS Resolution. That ship was specifically designed for MSO activity with a minimal amount of people. They had robot-operated sensors like jet skis that went out with radar systems. They had an [unmanned] RHIB with a radar that could go several miles away from the ship and [query ships] with a microphone from the ship. It was a very impressive platform.”