By CAPT Edward Lundquist, USN (Ret)
Courtesy of Surface SITREP. Republished with the permission of the Surface Navy Association.
Navy combatants are designed for high-end warfighting, with sophisticated sensors, weapons and combat management systems. But the most common mission for warships today may be “visit, board, search and seizure,” or VBSS.
Running ridged hull inflatable boats and sending boarding parties aboard ships, boats or dhows isn’t glamorous.
“It isn’t naval warfare in the classical sense,” says Hellenic Navy Commodore Ioannis Pavlopoulos, the Commandant of the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre (NMIOTC) at Souda Bay, Crete.
“It’s not fighting ships or submarines or aircraft,” says Pavlopoulos, who is both a SEAL and surface warfare officer who has been assigned to destroyers, and guided missile patrol boats and has commanded amphibious ships. “But it is important, and it can be dangerous. For that reason, training of boarding parties is extremely valuable.”
Maritime interdiction operations (MIO) are defined by the NATO Allied Maritime Interdiction Operations publication (ATP-71) as “The operations conducted to enforce prohibition on the maritime movement of specified persons or materials within a defined geographic area.”
That means MIO is more like a law enforcement function than a military mission. Nevertheless naval commands can deploy to remote areas of the world and in international waters where MIO may be required, such as the Arabian Gulf or Gulf of Aden.
Many warships on their way to operate in the Arabian Gulf, Indian Ocean or the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea pass the Greek island of Crete, where NMIOTC is conveniently located to help train commands, staffs and boarding parties for MIO and visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) missions.
Interdiction of criminal elements at sea is a law enforcement function, but only navies and coast guards or other armed maritime agencies have the ability to conduct interdiction operations at sea. In some cases in international waters, national coast guards do not have authority, so the navies do the job. “It is necessary to providing proper training on international law,” Pavlopoulos said.
“We’re trying to instill a law enforcement culture to naval forces,” said Italian Navy Commander Corrado Campana, the Director of Training Support. “We’re creating a mindset; a culture of law.”
NMIOTC stresses proficiency in typically military skills such as marksmanship and weapons handling, but the school also teaches how to respond to a crime scene, collect evidence, and treat suspects or prisoners. Everything they do has legal implications. Improperly following procedures or adhering to the law can result in suspects being released or court cases dismissed, or even the prisoners suing the boarding team.
What sets NMIOTC apart from other training opportunities is simulation training and ships dedicated for training. According to Hellenic Navy Commander Spyridon Lagaras, the chief of staff at NMIOTC, the 2,500-ton ex-HS Aris (A 74), formerly the Hellenic Naval Academy cadet training ship, serves as a realistic platform for live training for a variety of boarding scenarios.
The ship is equipped with smoke, flashing strobes, booby traps, noise to create confusion, role players to be rescued, detained or captured. Trainees use weapons that fire small paint pellet rounds. During the course of training, the difficulty and complexity of the scenarios can be increased. There are numerous cameras to monitor progress of training evolutions, ensure safety, and provide video for debriefing. When the teams leave they take with them a DVD with the video of their training. Aris will soon be joined by a decommissioned mine countermeasures ship, the ex-HS Alkyion (M211), which is at NMIOTC now and being modified for live training.
Training is adapted for the requirement, the teams being trained, and the anticipated operating environment, Lagaras says. The most dangerous boardings are conducted only by Special Operations Forces (SOF); ship VBSS teams are drilled in lower-risk consensual or unopposed boardings, or in some cases uncooperative boardings.
NMIOT’s simulators can create multi-role scenarios that can be repeated if required, and programmed to simulate anticipated operations, serving as mission rehearsal. Those missions can then be rehearsed aboard the Aris.
NMIOTC has an international and joint staff, with Greece as the hosting nation, and is one of seven NATO training facilities. It received accreditation in 2013 by Allied Command Transformation, which is good for six years, and contributes directly to force integration and interoperability within the alliance and partner nations. The “just in time” training supports Allied Command Operations for units who are on their way to conduct actual MIO operations.
It also has a role in concept and doctrine development and experimentation.
“We operate with several academia, academic and research institutions, not only within the alliance but also outside.
We like to keep our door open to see what’s happening outside,” said Campana.
When commands can’t visit Crete, the training can be exported with mobile training teams from NMIOTC, but would not get the full benefit of the assets and resources at the center.
Pavlopoulos said that numerous government labs, academic institutions and commercial activities come to Souda Bay for test and evaluation of new equipment and concepts.
The training is not just for NATO nations. Officers from Comoros, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles and Tanzania recently completed Advanced Maritime Law Enforcement/ Training of Trainers course, offered under the auspices of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the Djibouti Code of Conduct (DCoC).
“The trainees of the 13th Session of the IMO/DCoC initiative, along with NMIOTC Instructors, are going to deliver training at Jeddah Saudi Arabia in March 2015. So we are training the trainers coming from the Djibouti Code of Conduct States, to be able to teach criminal investigation at sea to their compatriots,” said Pavlopoulos.
SOF personnel can also train in disrupting different configurations of pirate or terrorist camps using the two small islands in the bay used exclusively for that purpose.
“Every one of our ships has enjoyed the realistic VBSS training they received at NMIOTC,” says Capt. Jim Aiken, Commander of Destroyer Squadron 60. “It’s an impressive facility. Law enforcement is a complex operation, and it’s a great way to leverage our NATO partners to get the training we need for our ships when they are far from CONUS.”
According to Cmdr. Chuck Hampton, Commanding Officer of USS Donald Cook (DDG 75), the NMIOTC training is effective and efficient.
“We sent a team through there on our last patrol. Anytime we can leverage a facility like that in theater without sending folks back to the states is a win.”
A legacy of boarding
For many centuries boarding was the main—and often the only—method of naval warfare. When Thucydides wrote the “Peloponnesian War” in 402 B.C., he described the boarding techniques saying they were “the ancient way of fighting”, in contrast with the most recent ramming techniques which were emerging as novel tactical choice.
Throughout the centuries, warships were designed to fight at close quarters, and were built to come alongside and capture an enemy, or a prize.
According to retired U.S. Navy Capt. Jeff Kline and retired Swedish Navy Capt. Bo Wallender, of the Naval Postgraduate School’s Littoral Operations Center, such operations favored the bold and audacious. “The Romans were better soldiers than sailors, but found that the corvus, a device developed to hold their ships fast to an opponent’s and allow their soldiers to cross over to the enemy vessels where they could defeat their enemy by overcoming their weakness and exploiting their strength,” they wrote in Lions in the Littoral - Leadership on Risk’s Edge, for the Swedish Royal Society of Naval Sciences.
Even recently, many navies use specialized units to carry out boarding operations, rather than relying on the ships’ crews, which Annati says is not very different from what was done for many centuries, when boarding was the core of naval warfare and an infantry fighting force was specifically embarked in any man-of-war.
Steam propulsion and better artillery changed things, and naval warfare turned to sinking ships rather than taking them. “While there have been some notable exceptions, over the years the world’s navies lost the capability to carry out a boarding. Whenever called to this type of operation, crews had to resolve to impromptu tactics, techniques and equipment,” said Rear Adm. Massimo Annati, who is retired from the Italian Navy and now chairs the European
Working Group for Non-Lethal Weapons. He is the author of the book, Boarders Away, Twenty-five Centuries of Shipboard Fighting, published in Italian by Murisa.
According to Annati, many navies today have designated special military units to carry out boarding operations, rather than relying on ship’s company, not so different from centuries past, when boarding was the core of naval warfare and an infantry fighting force was specifically embarked on a man-of-war. That changed when NATO navies were faced with complex embargo operations during both the Iraqi and Balkan conflicts. Boarding became more important, and also as new challenges surfaced and joined the old ones: piracy, terrorism, WMD transfer, narco-trafficking, and weapons smuggling.
“Boarding operations require a number of competences and skills that are usually foreign to naval experience, including boat handling, getting onboard by multiple means, tactical and close-quarter operations, searching, and collecting intelligence and evidence,” said Annati.
Warships today are being designed with an eye to the requirements of the embarked military force, including additional accommodations and space for boats and special equipment, even holding cells for prisoners. New fast, long range, and high-capacity RHIBs are replacing the old whaler life-boats, and new solutions for launching and recovering the boats, such as stern ramps, stabilized davits and cranes, are faster and safer. New technologies provide dedicated communications and data links so teams can share imagery and biometric data with the parent warship, and the team can be advised of the recognized surface data picture around them.
“NMIOTC was established to revive and improve a competency which, not long ago, was believed to belong to the history books,” Annati says. “Boarding operations today are for a different purpose, and require new and different skills, but NMIOTC is the place where sailors can hone their skills for what the current world requires.”
There are a wide number of specific training programs at NMIOTC, aimed to fulfill the different needs: from counter piracy to counter-WMD; from the command team to the boarding team; including all the specific issues like small arms training, container inspection, tactical sweep, RHIB insertion, and biometrics collection, which are usually not part of the normal crew training process, Annati says.
“The International contacts and exchanges with different entities—navies, coast guards, special forces, and law enforcement units—further enlarge the wealth of the training process,” he said.
“Nowadays one would probably wonder whether Thucydides would be more surprised to see that today, after some 25 centuries, the ancient technique came back, or if he would be more proud to see that the new NATO Maritime Interdiction Operation Training Center (NMITOC) is located right in Greece,” Annati says.
San Diego Training
The Afloat Training Group San Diego (ATGSD) trains and certifies the fleet in various warfare areas to meet the Fleet Response Plan. Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) is a Unit Tactical warfare area that provides training, assessment, and certification for shipboard assigned VBSS teams.
“Our goal here at ATGSD is to provide advanced training tactics, ‘outside of the box’ thinking methods, and increase VBSS warfare proficiency by building on the foundation that they have from the non-compliant boarding (NCB) formal course of instruction,” says Senior Chief Master at Arms Russ Treider.
Treider says the ATG training revolves around one 10-man fully qualified scalable team, two fully qualified Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB) crews, intelligence specialists and assigned personnel and the liaison officer (LNO). The 10-man team includes a boarding officer (BO), assistant boarding officer (ABO), two mechanical breachers, two rated engineers, or two personnel qualified in sounding and security, and four security team members. The RHIB crew consists of a boat coxswain, boat engineer, search and rescue (SAR) Swimmer, or bow hook qualified personnel.
Teams are trained in “approach, assist and visit” (AAV), where teams pull alongside vessels without actually boarding them to meet, gain rapport, and pick up intelligence about any recent questionable activities a vessel’s crew may have seen or heard of.
“In regards to NCB and compliant boardings, we evaluate and train the boarding team on their hook and pole procedures, climbing ability, tactical team movement, mental preparation and tactical mindset, personnel search techniques, non-lethal offensive and defensive tactics, communications skills, and other techniques,”
Treider says. “We teach the entire team to climb, board, reset the hook, set security posture and identify their path to the objective of the mission. We try to keep every training evolution as realistic as possible, from actual boarding operations on a contracted ship with opposing forces (OPFOR) personnel role playing as the crew, to hook and pole procedures that require conduct missions to combat piracy, smuggling, human trafficking and drug trade”
“For missions that have previously been handled by special operations forces, having certified VBSS teams onboard their own ship provides commanding officers an extra hand to deal with these non-typical surface warfare issues,” Treider says.
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(Courtesy of U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Rob Aylward) |
(Courtesy of U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Shannon M. Smith) |
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(Courtesy of U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ja'lon A. Rhinehart) |
(Courtesy of U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ja'lon A. Rhinehart) |
