Terrorists can attack tankers a number of ways. This December Government Accountability Report lays them out: Federal Efforts Needed to Address Challenges in Preventing and Responding to Terrorist Attacks on Energy Commodity Tankers .
There are suicide attacks:
...suicide attacks have been carried out using a small, explosive-laden boat or vehicle that the attacker rams into a tanker or energy facility. The intent of such an attack is maximum damage to human or physical targets without concern for the life of the attacker. Previous attack history underscores terrorist intentions and capability to use small boat attacks. Moreover, intelligence experts say that the suicide boat attack uses a proven, simple strategy that has caused significant loss of life and significant damage to commercial and military vessels.
Several suicide attacks have been carried out against tankers and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf region. They have taken place in restricted waterways where a ship’s ability to maneuver or engage the attackers is hampered or when a ship has stopped or moored.
and missile attacks
A second type of threat against tankers and attendant maritime infrastructure is a standoff missile attack using a rocket, mortar, or rocket-propelled grenade launched from a sufficient distance to evade defensive fire. Standoff missile attacks have been aimed at military ships in ports in the Persian Gulf, but these kinds of attacks also represent a serious type of threat against tankers. Terrorists launched such an attack using Katyusha rockets in 2005, narrowly missing two U.S. naval ships moored at a Jordanian port. Compared to suicide attacks, standoff attacks are easier to execute, but are less likely to be as effective, according to intelligence experts. The range, size, and accuracy of explosive projectiles used in such an attack could vary considerably.
and armed assults
Armed assaults, particularly at critical shipping chokepoints, represent a third major type of threat to tankers along the energy supply chain, according to the International Maritime Bureau. These attacks on tankers and energy infrastructure have taken place where maritime security is lacking and they have been carried out in most cases by pirates seeking to gain control of the ship for financial gain, including petty theft and kidnapping of crew for ransom. Pirate attacks against tankers and cargo ships have taken place in numerous locations, including off the coast of Somalia, in the Gulf of Guinea and Persian Gulf, and along the Strait of Malacca. According to officials at the International Maritime Bureau, oil tankers account for about one-quarter of all pirate attacks. Pirate groups armed with automatic weapons have seized tankers in the Strait of Malacca and off the coast of Somalia....
Conspiracies among crew members are not so likely:
Coast Guard intelligence reports suggest a hypothetical possibility that crew members (or persons posing as crew members) could conspire to commandeer a tanker with the intent of using the vessel as a weapon or disrupting maritime commerce. Vessel operators and industry groups do not consider this to be a serious threat, especially given the technical complexity of modern gas carriers and large oil tankers and the extensive vetting process for crew on these kinds of vessels. Crew conspiracy could also result in situations where oil tankers or gas carriers could be used to transport terrorists. Intelligence officials estimate that the number of overall stowaways on all vessels entering U.S. ports was expected to average 30 per month in 2005. There have been cases of stowaways with suspected terrorist connections on board U.S.-bound vessels since 2000.
Neither are deliberate collisions:
One scenario related to armed assaults involves pirates or terrorists hijacking a large ship and ramming it into a tanker, an energy facility, or critical infrastructure such as a bridge. Although such scenarios require gaining control of a ship, terrorists’ successful takeover of aircraft in the September 11 attacks demonstrate that such plans could be feasible. To date, there have been no known cases of terrorists intentionally using a vessel as a weapon, but there have been some close calls in pirate-prone areas. Security experts point to an example in 2003 in which a group of pirates gained control of the chemical tanker Dewi Madrim in the Strait of Malacca. Once at the tanker’s helm, the pirates altered the ship’s speed, disabled communications, and steered the ship for over 1 hour before escaping with equipment and technical documents.
A variety of factors make tanker shipping vulnerable. The fact that large volumes of oil and gas has to move through a small number of choke points, for example:
Tankers are also vulnerable entering or leaving port, and when moored.
...vessels can be vulnerable while moored at facilities where they are receiving or unloading their cargoes, and the energy-related infrastructure located in ports can also be vulnerable to attack. Vessels transiting into and out of ports and their attendant infrastructure can be vulnerable in a number of ways. During transit into and out of port, these vessels travel slowly, which increases their exposure. Tankers follow timetables that are easy to track in advance and they follow a fixed set of maritime routes. Once tankers arrive in this country, they must wait offshore for pilots to navigate the ship channels into many of the nation’s ports.
The report continually brings to mind the high costs of defending against these types of attacks, and of the low cost of launching them. We can't be strong everywhere:
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was widespread acknowledgement that numerous and substantial gaps existed in homeland security. There is also widespread acknowledgment, however, that resources for closing these gaps are limited and must compete with other national priorities. It is improbable that any security framework can successfully anticipate and thwart every type of potential terrorist threat that highly motivated, well-skilled, and adequately funded terrorist groups could perpetrate. While security efforts clearly matter, various groups like the 9/11 Commission have emphasized that total security cannot be bought no matter how much is spent on it. In short, the nation cannot afford to protect everything against all threats, even within the relatively narrow context of tanker security. Choices are clearly involved—including decisions about the relative vulnerability posed by attacks on energy commodity tankers as compared with attacks in other forms, such as air safety or security in crowded urban centers.
The consequences of an attack can be serious: loss of life, destruction of property, environmental damage, interruption of the flow of oil and gas, port closure for a period of time. Many of these impacts can ramify through an economy.
...psychological ramifications of an attack could affect prices and supply. Researchers have noted that psychological market reactions to the consequences of an event may cause individuals and firms to change their decision-making processes, potentially causing consequences to ripple outward from the incident itself. If the incident affects key facilities, indirect effects could be magnified and also include businesses that are unable to operate both in the port and elsewhere if they are dependent on goods that move through the port. There is also the potential for unemployment of indirectly affected businesses.
The movement of gasoline prices after the Exxon Valdez spill is an illustration. Although the actual disruption in supply was relatively small, the oil spill sent shock waves through oil markets, particularly those most dependent on oil from the Alaskan North Slope along the West Coast. In the first week after the oil spill, spot market prices of unleaded regular gasoline increased $0.50 from $0.68 per gallon to $1.18 per gallon, a 74 percent increase due to fears of an extended closure of oil from the Alaskan North Slope. In the following weeks, however, prices began to decrease, hitting $0.99 on April 7 (2 weeks after the spill) and $0.82 on April 14 (3 weeks after the spill). Thus as markets realized that the supply shortage would be short lived, prices dropped sharply. The Department of Energy concluded in its analysis of the incident that the temporary loss of Alaskan North Slope supplies resulted in a perception of tight oil markets rather than a significant change in fundamental supply and demand factors.
Much of this report deals with planning to cope:
Multiple attack response plans are in place to address an attack, but stakeholders face three main challenges in making them work.
- First, plans for responding to a spill and to a terrorist threat are generally separate from each other, and ports have rarely exercised these plans simultaneously to see if they work effectively together.
- Second, ports generally lack plans for dealing with economic issues, such as prioritizing the movement of vessels after a port reopens. The President’s maritime security strategy calls for such plans. T
- hird, some ports report difficulty in securing response resources to carry out planned actions. Federal port security grants have generally been directed at preventing attacks, not responding to them, but a more comprehensive risk-based approach is being developed. Decisions about the need for more response capabilities are hindered, however, by a lack of performance measures tying resource needs to effectiveness in response.
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