AThe media had extensively reported 26/11 and has faithfully reported a few recent maritime disasters, including the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (over 400,000 tonnes of oil spilled), the Chinese port Dalian oil spill (over 60,000 tonnes oil spilled) and the August 7 Mumbai collision between two ships resulting in a 900-tonne oil spill and 200 containers falling overboard, which raised fears of oil shortage due to Mumbai port closing.
Even the recent case of China refusing a visa to an Indian Army general heading the Northern Command is also indirectly linked to oil and sea. Specifically to the presence of 11,000 Chinese troops in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to build railways, 22 tunnels and an oil pipeline linking Pakistan’s Gwadar port to China’s Xinjiang province via Karakoram, so that Chinese ship tankers can offload their West Asia oil at Gwadar (only 360 miles from the Strait of Hormuz) for “quick and safe transportation” to China, by avoiding the longer 6,000-mile sea route through the vulnerable choke points of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok straits.
However, a few other maritime incidents need to be noted to remind India of the continuing need to secure our vulnerable maritime flanks.
On October 12, 2000, the 9,000-tonne American warship USS Cole was attacked in Port Aden by an explosive-laden suicide rubber boat, killing 17 and injuring 36 crew members. On October 6, 2002, the French oil tanker ship Limberg, laden with 397,000 barrels of oil, was attacked in the Gulf of Aden by an Al Qaeda suicide boat — 90,000 barrels of oil were spilled into the sea. Now in 2010, the al-Shabaab terror group, an offshoot of the Al Qaeda, has taken over most of south and central Somalia, adding a terrorist dimension to the piracy-prone Gulf of Aden.
Recently, on July 28, 2010, the Japanese oil super tanker ship M Star (with 270,000 tonnes of oil) was attacked by an explosive-laden Al Qaeda suicide boat when transiting near the Strait of Hormuz in international waters. Fortunately, no oil spill occurred, but the Al Qaeda claimed that its “Abdullah Azzam Brigades” had carried out the attack and named the pilot of the suicide boat as “martyr Ayyub al-Taishan”.
Clearly, maritime terrorism has arrived and its impact will be more disastrous than the Gulf of Aden piracy since shipping insurance rates will go up further, impacting global oil prices. Merchant ships may have to be escorted by warships and may also need to carry special “anti-suicide boat sensors and weapons” along with trained “sea marshals”, thus adding to the rising cost of seaborne trade which accounts for 90 per cent of the global requirements of commerce and energy. Can the Indian Navy, already burdened with India’s coastal security and anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden and periodic patrols off Seychelles, Mauritius and Maldives, spare additional ships for anti-terror patrols in the Strait of Hormuz? The Indian Navy urgently needs to induct more ships.
All attacks at or from the sea are not by “stateless terrorists”, as India experienced during the Mumbai attacks of 2008. In 1999 and 2002, North and South Korean warships exchanged fire, cla­iming that the other had intruded to its side of the “disputed maritime boundary” in the Yellow Sea. Later, in 2009, a North Korean patrol boat apparently entered the rich fishing South Korean waters (in the Yellow Sea), and in the ensuing firefight it was set ablaze by the South Korean warships. The North Korean retribution for the 2009 incident was not long in coming.
On March 26 this year, the South Korean Navy’s 1,200-tonne warship CheonAn was sunk in the Yellow Sea by a torpedo allegedly fired either by a North Korean mini 370-tonne submarine of the “Sang-O” class or a North Korean 1,600-tonne “Ming” class submarine. I have been onboard the South Korean 1,200-tonne CheonAn class of warships, and consider them to be compact, heavily armed, with some capability to detect and destroy enemy ships, submarines and aircraft, though in a submarine versus ship encounter the submarine invariably has the upper hand due to the element of surprise. The South Koreans salvaged both the sunken parts of the CheonAn, and parts of an alleged North Korean torpedo which had sunk the ship.
Television images of the North Korean torpedo parts indicated to me a typical 533 mm Cold War era heavyweight anti-ship torpedo, whose 200 to 400 kg warhead had apparently exploded (by proximity fuze) three to five metres below the keel of CheonAn, and the resulting “water hammer” had broken the warship into two, killing 46 sailors and sinking the ship almost instantly. As per my estimates the 34-metre-long and four-metre-wide “Sang-O” class mini-submarines are ideally suited for short-range coastal warfare, and each can carry either two heavyweight anti-ship torpedoes, or anti-ship mines and frogmen saboteurs. North Korea has 32 indigenously-built “Sang-O” class mini-subs and
22 of the larger (76-metre-long, and 1,600 tonne) ocean-going Chinese-designed but indigenously-built “Ming” class subs.
Here too there are lessons for India whose rapidly declining submarine force levels (presently 15 vintage units and declining) have been well documented by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s reports of August 2008 and January 2010. There is an urgent need for our Navy to induct modern conventional and nuclear attack subs.
So, given all the evidence, why did South Korea not retaliate, despite the two Koreas still being technically at war, though the Korean War ended in 1953? The reasons appear to be:
w South Korean capital, Seoul, is within artillery range of the North;
w The possession of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles by North Korea and its unpredictable leadership is a nuclear deterrent for a “weaker” state;
w The very large conventional submarine force of North Korea would be capable of substantial damage to international seaborne trade in the seas around the Korean peninsula;
l China was backing “impoverished” North Korea, its “ally and nuclear armed proxy” in East Asia.

Similarities can be drawn between North Korea and Pakistan. Pakistan is negotiating for modern Chinese “Yuan” class subs. In South Asia, “impoverished” Pakistan is China’s “ally and nuclear armed proxy”, and America’s “strategic ally” for the war on terror.
In the long term, India and the international maritime community need to act together to counter the growing threats posed by pollution, pirates, maritime terrorists and “rogue” states as all of these will adversely impact seaborne commerce. In the short term, India needs to have contingency plans, in case it has to act alone.

Vice-Admiral Arun Kumar Singh retired as Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval
Command, Visakhapatnam