The next phase of the training involves boarding and searching a derelict vessel in Sydney Harbour where role plays and various scenarios play out before the boarding team members are certified to join a warship’s actual boarding party. Unfortunately, that vessel is nothing like a Middle Eastern fishing dhow so each team relies on the US Coast Guard training facility in Bahrain to familiarise themselves with a genuine fishing dhow.
The US Coast Guard’s boarding methods are regarded as the gold standard, and time spent practising on its genuine dhow is regarded as vital by the boarding teams. Given the number of boardings undertaken by the RAN in the Middle East since the early 1990s it is remarkable that it does not have a training dhow. Instead, it has an old Indonesian fishing boat moored in Darwin Harbour that is used by patrol boat boarding parties on border protection duties.
Every RAN ship deploys with two boarding teams, each led by a boarding officer with a senior Petty Officer as 2IC. Once the formal training is out of the way the boarding officers must bring themselves up to speed on the additional aspects of a particular mission. Each ship compiles a post-operational report – a vital reference document for boarding officers and their teams. For example, there are several United Nations resolutions covering the operations of the maritime task groups deployed under the Combined Maritime Forces.
‘We looked at reports from ships that were up there at the time, and we spoke to people who had done it before to get an idea about what needed to happen,’ Maher says.
Before undertaking boardings, the teams are also run through a series of detailed presentations by the intelligence officer and the principal warfare officer. These presentations usually include detailed slide shows depicting where drugs and weapons have been found by previous teams.
Maher says the key to a successful boarding team is flexibility, and the training must reflect the diversity of the probable demands on the teams.
‘Navy can’t pigeonhole our training too much because we need to be diverse enough to change our operations quickly,’ he says. ‘There’s a defined set of skills for counter-narcotics, just as there is for counter-piracy. There are similarities between the two but the difference then lies in when you get to a certain point. If it’s piracy you’ve got to be very careful of the legal ramifications. So for the piracy, because they can get prosecuted, it’s very much a police exercise as in you’ve got to get all your evidence and you’ve got to make sure it’s all recorded properly. You do that crime scene stuff, which we got taught a little bit. That’s where you bring your police coxswain over. For counter-narcotics it goes down a different path because it’s searching for the drugs. They’ve got those hidden and you have to go looking for them.’
Retired navy chief Vice Admiral Russ Shalders was the Commanding Officer of Darwin in the first Arabian Gulf task group back in 1990. Reflecting on his experience in the Gulf he told a Sea Power Centre seminar in 2003 that it had quickly become apparent that the navy needed to develop a capability to board suspect vessels, so as to verify the presence or otherwise of prohibited cargo. From early on it was also clear that the relationship between a ship’s helicopter(s) and her boarding teams would be crucial to mission success.
During her first deployment, along with HMA Ships Success and Adelaide, Darwin was directly involved in just five boardings of vessels that were steaming both into and out of Iraqi waters. To put that into perspective, for the same period there were 996 boardings by the multinational naval force that included the Australian task group.
Shalders says the key to successful boarding operations was gaining the initiative early and maintaining it throughout. ‘It was necessary to generate a degree of momentum and to keep the opposition on the defensive.’
‘Initiative’ and ‘momentum’ remain guiding principles for RAN boarding operations to this day. Many of the tactics, techniques and procedures adopted by the early boarding parties were developed by the US Coast Guard and adopted by the first Australian teams.
Former Rear Admiral Bill Dovers was the CO of the guided missile frigate HMAS Adelaide on Damask 1 and he described the American approach as a revelation. ‘They recommended that we order shotguns, which we did, as their technique in those days was to fire them into the deck at an angle so the pellets spread out at ankle level. They assured us this would stop people doing things that might be harmful.’
The RAN’s approach in those days was to arm boarding parties with high-powered assault rifles and a policy of ‘shoot to kill’ if anyone became aggressive.
‘We had no graduated force for boardings,’ Dover told the 2003 seminar.
Another former navy chief, Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs, was CO of HMAS Arunta in the Gulf in the post ‘Shock and Awe’ phase between June and December 2003. This was a crucial time in the evolution of boarding operations following the first boarding of local fishing dhows by HMAS Kanimbla in February 2002, when her teams boarded sixteen vessels in one day.
Until then operations had been aimed at larger ships, but the oil discovered in the cargo holds of the traditional wooden vessels and the dates and other illicit cargoes to follow proved that the dhows were part of the smuggling chain and were being used widely to break the embargo. The floodgates opened between June and November 2002 when Arunta and Melbourne conducted hundreds of boardings, including up to thirty in a single day.
Before the arrival of the Anzac Class frigate Arunta, boarding parties consisted of fourteen members or ‘sticks’, but that was soon scaled back to six, which was more than enough manpower to secure and search a twenty-metre dhow.
‘The average dhow carried a crew of between eight and twelve and could be handled by a six-person stick,’ Griggs says.
Arunta operated five of the six-person boarding sticks, and that placed considerable strain on the ship’s company.
‘I knew we were getting close to the bone when my executive officer was the boat coxswain [driver] for one of the boarding parties,’ he says.
It was evident that the number of crew trained for boarding party duty was insufficient, and by the end of her time on station Arunta had trained up an extra eight sailors for boarding operations. After 2002, all RAN ships deployed under either Combined Task Force 150 (counter-terrorism) or 151 (counter-piracy) carried appropriate numbers of qualified boarding party members.
Boarding parties are mostly made up of young men and women trained as boatswain’s mates who have seamanship skills such as refuelling at sea, berthing and small-boat handling and maritime security – including close range weapons, small arms and fast-roping from a helicopter. They also undertake other general duties such as lookouts, watch keeping and steering the ship (as helmsmen). Sailors from other trades who wish to join the boarding teams are also put through the boarding section of the maritime security course.
Chief Petty Officer Kevin Harris is one of the navy’s most experienced maritime security trainers. The twenty-nine-year RAN veteran from Tasmania was posted to HMAS Cerberus in 2016 as the senior instructor in the maritime security section of the boatswains’ facility at the navy’s biggest training school.
‘Anybody [including officers] who wants to be a specialist boarding party member will come here,’ he says. ‘We do deliver the same boarding party courses away from the school on an as-needed basis, but preferably we’d like everyone to come down south.’
Training begins with a comprehensive look at ‘use of force’ and the legal aspects of how and when force can be applied.
‘We cover boarding party theory and what they can expect to see out there, what they should be doing, things they’re looking for and how they should move around vessels,’ he says. ‘Then we go into a practical aspect where there’s three days devoted to that and they form up into teams. We take them through how to insert onto a vessel, how to conduct sweep searches and then we slowly ramp that up until they’re safe and ready for assessment in three days.’
The final day’s practical training and assessment takes place on vessel
s such as workboats that are attached to the seamanship school. All trainees are qualified to conduct different types of boardings and are also trained in fast-rope insertion from a helicopter. Kevin Harris says there have been very few instances where a boarding was not completed because the RAN team was unable to insert.
However, he says that nothing can prepare a person for the real thing, and each sailor has a clear memory of his or her first boarding operation. ‘I don’t think you ever forget that first time you smelled the dhow. We do as much as we can to prepare them with photos but it pales in comparison to the real thing.’
All non-officer navy recruits spend three months at HMAS Cerberus before moving into their specialist trade courses such as marine or electrical technician, cooks, stores, writers or clerks, stewards, communicators and of course seaman boatswain. The latter includes fourteen weeks of intensive training. Harris himself has done three postings to the Gulf region on board HMA Ships Perth, Brisbane and Stuart. He says that one of the most important assets for any boarding party member is an ability to communicate effectively.
‘You quite often find that your best boarding party members are simply those who are most personable, those who can sit down and have a chat or spin yarns and just talk to people one on one,’ he says. ‘That’s probably the most important asset for a boarding party, so the more of those you get the better, regardless of what your trade is. You want people who just have that natural gift of getting along with others. There is a saying that, “The happier the crew are of the vessel we are boarding, the easier the boarding is going to be.” We say from the outset that you’re there to put everyone at ease, make them happy so that it makes your job easier and you can depart as quickly as possible with the least inconvenience.’
PIRACY
6
Skulls and crossbones
Unlike Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, the modern-day version of the high seas criminal drives a fast boat, carries a satellite phone and is armed to the teeth with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles.
As another tinsel town production, Captain Phillips, portrayed vividly, the twenty-first-century pirate has none of the swashbuckling mystery but all of the cold-blooded menace and desperation of the killers who roamed the high seas causing mayhem under the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger.
By 2005 piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the Horn of Africa had become a major global problem when brazen gangs of heavily armed Somali pirates routinely attacked cargo and passenger ships. This is one of the busiest and most important seaways on earth and is the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
In 2008, the Royal Australian Navy decided that it should beef up its capacity for dealing with the desperate pirates who had shown a willingness to kill to achieve their goals. Lieutenant Jace Hutchison was the man they turned to.
The navy clearance diver and former special-forces commando had precisely the skill set required to stand up what was to become known as the Enhanced Boarding Capability brick. ‘Brick’ is an Australian term used to describe a group of military personnel (usually army but also navy) formed into a specialised fire team.
Hutchison’s job was to man and train a ‘level four’ boarding team made up of navy clearance divers who were capable of using lethal force if and when necessary. That meant not only training to a much higher level than a standard boarding party, but also finding a group of nine clearance divers to make up the team.
‘Because of my experience, I was designated as the person to build that capability and to form the team and to take the first team over to the ship in the Gulf,’ he says. ‘I was the right fellow with the right qualifications in the right place at the right time.’
Hutchison initially requested a fourteen-person unit but was given only nine. He was also able to use his contacts in 2 Commando for help with training facilities.
‘We’ve only got a small special-forces community. They are so busy that when it comes to things like that, unless they’re definitely going to get some gold out of it they’re always going to say, “It’s over to you, navy, it’s a navy problem,”’ he explains.
The divers were already well equipped with weapons and other specialised gear, but the navy had no close-quarters weapons ranges, for example. ‘We’ve already got radios; we’ve already got the right dress. It’s things like – to go and do close-quarters shooting you need specialist facilities, and so that’s where we leant on them [commandos] a little bit and formally requested support and they were happy to do that. You’ve got to have the right training, experience and resourcing and equipment to be able to do it, so it was specifically then noted for the divers to do it,’ he says.
Navy clearance divers are the special operations branch of the senior service and are trained to undertake a variety of roles from explosive ordnance detection and clearance to counter-terrorism and covert operations. There are two full-time teams of clearance divers. Team One is located at HMAS Waterhen at Waverton on the northwestern shore of Sydney Harbour and Team Four is based at HMAS Stirling south of Perth in WA. Team Three is the war team and is formed up only as required for specialised missions overseas, such as the 1999 East Timor crisis and the 2003 Iraq War.
As well as being very fit and well trained in close-order combat and weapons skills, navy divers use the latest technologies such as handheld personal sonars, robots and blast suits to complete their missions. Hazards abound. A video clip from a diver’s personal sonar shows what is clearly a large shark passing close to the diver in low-visibility conditions. Sharks are an occupational hazard for the divers, who have been used as guinea pigs to trial an array of anti-shark measures over the years, including electronic, acoustic and magnetic devices, special wetsuits and even chemical repellents.
The most famous navy diver of recent years is Paul de Gelder who lost an arm and a leg in 2009 in a fight to the death with a bull shark in Sydney Harbour during a counter-terrorism exercise just ten metres from the steps of Sydney Opera House.
Divers also served extensively in the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) role alongside the army in Uruzgan Province in landlocked Afghanistan using robots and blast suits to defuse insidious improvised explosive devices. This broad skill set made navy divers ideal to fill the enhanced boarding capability role for counter-piracy operations.
Hutchison and his team were deployed in the Anzac frigate HMAS Toowoomba as she was departing for the Gulf in mid-2009. Once in the area of operations they began boarding skiffs and other suspect vessels that crisscrossed the ocean between Africa and Yemen.
‘We were able to build up a pretty good picture of the patterns of life because if a forty-foot skiff had three people in it then you knew they weren’t pirates because they didn’t have enough people,’ he says. ‘They would probably be doing a run between Yemen and Somalia to trade fuel for fish. Maybe with the small skiffs normally it’s just fuel, but the bigger dhows would be trading fuel for fish so they take fish over and bring fuel back in the same hold.’
During one boarding, the dhow was simply a floating bomb with a hold full of fuel and the deck covered with drums of fuel. ‘It’s just like, “Don’t let any of them smoke while we’re on here. Let’s get off!”’
Another time they spotted a skiff with about sixty people on board speeding towards Yemen. The passengers had paid about a hundred dollars each to escape from Somalia in search of a better life.
Their first real pirate boarding occurred as they were training on the flight deck of Toowoomba. A merchant vessel about thirty kilometres away reported that it was under attack by armed men in a skiff. A helicopter from a German warship had intercepted the vessel and by the time Toowoomba’s RHIBs were on the scene the skiff was not moving.
‘We approached them guns up because we had reports that they were armed,’ says Hutchison. ‘There’s only really a couple of ways you can approach a boat on the ocean. We were out zooming ahead of the frigate and then we just came at them from two
different angles, guns up ready to go. I had two snipers in the front of my boats so they were always on them. We told them to put their hands on their heads. There were eight of them but we couldn’t see any weapons so a couple of our guys got in there, secured them and had a quick search. The next thing you know we had eight weapons – an RPG, six AK-47s and a G3 German assault rifle.’
Even the most desperate and foolhardy pirates seldom push back when confronted with heavily armed professional sailors who are dressed to kill. Prowling in the background is a modern warship that could reduce them to pink mist and their skiffs to a smoking memory in just a few seconds. Even so, intercepting criminals at sea is a dangerous and fraught business. Anything can happen at any time and lives are always on the line.
Once on board, the team secured the pirates’ guns and disposed of the ammunition, but because of a lack of international law covering piracy on the high seas in 2009, and no country where they could land the pirates, they had to set them free.
‘Our procedures aren’t to get in a gunfight and win that gunfight,’ he explains. ‘Our procedures are to defend ourselves, break contact and then get under cover. It’s all about applying force to the appropriate level and if it’s going to be a fight then we’ll just defend ourselves and get out of it. But there is a point when you close a contact where you must commit … because trying to get out of it is worse than going through with it. So, there’s always a point where I, or the 2IC, are going to commit the force. We trained and trained and trained to make sure our command team knew that. Everybody understood that if it was a worst-case scenario and we couldn’t break then we would go through with it and commit to the job.’
The Smack Track Page 7