World's Largest Water Park?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/somalia/5130003/US-warship-arrives-at-site-of-pirate-kidnap.html

This on-going story has just up-ended my apple cart, or maybe dumped my canoe upside down in the river. Nuts.

For some time, now, I have been planning to write about our mis-use of “frames of reference”. That is, I was have been thinking about how we tend to plan and organize our current and future actions, based upon how we see our current situation through our visions of the past, or the “frames of reference” we commonly use to interpret where we have been and what we need to do now. This has most particularly with our military resources.

My biggest and best (I thought) example of using the wrong frame of reference was the DOD and the huge amounts of money they spend on the Navy. Consider this:

Civilizations have had navies as far back as we have had history chronologists to report them. Early on, the battling folks of Mesopotamia used the Mediterranean and the likes of the Nile as water parks to move troops around to conquer and bloody one another. This great tradition carried on most prominently with the Brits (Rule Brittania, and all that rot) , the French and the Spaniards…even the mostly landlocked Germans had grand battleships and U-boats, and today even Iran has a Navy (though I’m not sure why…will they use it to wipe Israel off the map?).
All this time, I have been thinking that we don’t really need a navy: we have aircraft to move themselves and personnel and now the drone wars are even delivering hellfire bombs without pilots. And these robots don’t even need an aircraft carrier in the neighborhood for support (aircraft carriers, to some, are just huge, floating, monstrously expensive floating city/airports that are gigantic sitting duck/missile targets on the ocean). We no longer need to float huge compliments of men and materiel from London to the Falklands, or from Madrid to Mexico, or Paris to Patagonia…well, wherever… to conquer and plunder and subdue undiscovered countries, battles at sea are no longer needed to gain territorial supremacy, the big boats (sorry, “ships”) cost unfathomable amounts of money, and their immediate value is no longer commensurate with what we spend on them. Just exactly who needs a “navy” anymore, anyway? (My apologies to Jimmy Carter).

But then comes this latest ‘water park” story: a merchant ship of the high seas is assaulted and nearly captured by an old “frame of reference”: pirates. Now I know that this is nothing new and that this has been going on for some time now, and I have been using the failure of anyone to do anything to stop these antique antics as another justification for “Why navies?”: they have not been able to help at all. But this story has a new twist. In the apparent spirit of American independence and defiance, the largely American crew overcame the pirates and took back the ship…almost. It seems like they lost the captain to a couple of pirates who made off with him in a life boat (I almost loved it: I thought for sure we maybe had made-for-TV movie in the works). And thence comes the Navy! The USS Bainbridge steams onto the scene and casts an entirely new pall on the situation. John Wayne has arrived.

For a short time I thought my entire premise about the irrelevance of the navy was ruined by the appearance of this destroyer. Perhaps suddenly a frame of reference has suddenly come back into vogue and was providing an overlooked and forgotten usefulness.

Well, almost. Maybe.

It turns out that as I write this, the escaped life boat is adrift off the hull of the merchant ship and out of fuel. Literally dead in the water. And the US Navy ship is a highly sophisticated “missile” ship. What? Something smells like overkill, here.

Perhaps the Bainbridge has a small boat or two it can put in the water to attempt to overtake, over-power and capture the life boat and its occupants, free the Captain. But at the moment, the only offensive capabilities the ship seems to have are highly sophisticated, (presumably) laser guided missiles, designed to obliterate much larger military targets and kill people many hundreds of miles away. Methinks the lifeboat is hopelessly over-matched and outgunned. Even assuming that one of the missiles from the ship could be trained and fired upon the lifeboat, the end result would not even be splinters.

It remains to be seen what might happen next. In recent Iranian or Chinese speedboat fashion, perhaps the occupants of both the lifeboat and the Bainbridge could moon one another in an act of sophomoric defiance. Or perhaps the members of the little vessel and the big vessel can have a literal pissing contest: that would seem like an American thing to do: we are good at polluting oceans.

Meanwhile, I am back to my original question: what good is a navy today, anyway, out on this giant water park, and why do we insist of upon using a frame of reference that says we need to spend so much money on one?

My dad was in the Navy. He used to repeat, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Somehow that makes more sense to me, today.