Who Needs NATO to Fight Pirates?

How EUNAVFOR came into being. 

Who Needs NATO to Fight Pirates? Why Europe launched EU Counter-Piracy Mission Atalanta

By Marianne Riddervold, ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo

When the European Union (EU) launched EU NAVFOR Somalia (Atalanta) in 2008, it became the third multilateral anti-piracy operation established in the waters outside Somalia – all with military contributions from many of the same European states. The United States of America (the US) was establishing a ‘coalition of the willing’ anti-piracy force, the Combined Maritime Task Force (CTF-151). And in October 2008, followinga direct request from the UN Secretary-General, NATO launched humanitarian operation ‘Allied Provider’ to protect World Food Program (WFP) aid shipments to Somalia. So why then did the EU member states just one month later agree to launch an additional, and compared to the NATO mission, more long-term and clearly bigger naval military mission in the same theater? Why not instead strengthen and prolong the already established NATO mission? This puzzle is addressed in a recent article in European Security. After all, there is only a limited amount of military resources that can be deployed by the European states at any time, the EU had no previous experience in conducting maritime operations, and NATO has traditionally been the preferred security provider for many European states. Nevertheless it is the EU, and not NATO, who together with the US has taken the lead in the international political, military and diplomatic efforts to solve the situation both at sea and at land.

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Source: piracy-studies.org