Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T03:59:40.444Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

War at sea: Nineteenth-century laws for twenty-first century wars?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2017

Steven Haines
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While most law on the conduct of hostilities has been heavily scrutinized in recent years, the law dealing with armed conflict at sea has been largely ignored. This is not surprising. There have been few naval conflicts since 1945, and those that have occurred have been limited in scale; none has involved combat between major maritime powers. Nevertheless, navies have tripled in number since then, and today there are growing tensions between significant naval powers. There is a risk of conflict at sea. Conditions have changed since 1945, but the law has not developed in that time. Elements of it, especially that regulating economic warfare at sea, seem outdated and it is not clear that the law is well placed to regulate so-called “hybrid” warfare at sea. It seems timely to review the law, to confirm that which is appropriate and to develop that which is not. Perhaps a new edition of the San Remo Manual would be timely.

Keywords

naval warfareconduct of hostilities at seasea controleconomic warfarepower projectionmaritime hybrid warfareSan Remo Manual
Type
The state of the law
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 98 , Issue 902: War and security at sea , August 2016 , pp. 419 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © icrc 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Originally drafted as a shorter contribution to a projected debate on the law governing the conduct of hostilities at sea, this paper has benefited greatly from comments provided by the editorial team of the Review and anonymous reviewers, for which the author is most grateful.

References

1 Henckaerts, Jean-Marie and Doswald-Beck, Louise (eds), Customary International Humanitarian Law, Vol. 1: Rules, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar (ICRC Customary Law Study). The ICRC Customary Law Database is kept updated at: www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/customary-law (all internet references were accessed in May 2017).

2 It would be wrong to claim that it has received no attention at all. The most significant and notable concentration of scholarship has been conducted under the auspices of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, within the Stockton Center for the Study of International Law. Its extensive “Blue Book” International Law Studies series is an essential source of scholarly and professional opinion on the subject and is now openly available online at: www.usnwc.edu/departments---/international-law.aspx.

3 It is important to clarify the terminology, not least because there is a tendency today to regard the law of armed conflict (LOAC) as synonymous with international humanitarian law (IHL). Although the debate on overlaps and distinctions between the LOAC and IHL falls outside the scope of this paper, it is important to state what the LOAC addresses and what it does not. The law that is the focus of this paper is that which regulates the conduct of hostilities at sea. Traditionally known as the “law of war and neutrality at sea”, it is now more commonly referred to as the “law of armed conflict applicable at sea”. This paper does not deal with the application of IHL at sea and will not address that subject (which derives from Geneva Convention (II) for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea, 75 UNTS 85, 12 August 1949 (entered into force 21 October 1950) (GCII), and related instruments).

4 ICRC Customary Law Study, above note 1, p. xxx. See also Doswald-Beck, Louise (ed.), San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar (San Remo Manual). It should be noted that while the IIHL is located in Sanremo (one word) in Italy, the manual is invariably referred to as being associated with “San Remo” (two words).

5 This is the way that operations have been categorized by the British Royal Navy (RN); see Council, Defence, BR 1806 British Maritime Doctrine, 2nd ed., Stationery Office, London, 1999, pp. 57–58Google Scholar. Other navies have admittedly departed slightly from this formula. See, for example, Royal Australian Navy Sea Power Centre, Australian Maritime Doctrine, Defence Publishing Service, Canberra, 2000, p. 57Google Scholar; Maritime Concepts and Doctrine Centre, Indian Maritime Doctrine, INBR 8, Ministry of Defence (Navy), Mumbai, 2009, p. 91Google Scholar. For a leading academic treatment, see Till, Geoffrey, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed., Routledge, Abingdon, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which discusses both military tasks and “maintaining good order at sea”.

6 Interestingly, the US Coastguard traces its origins to before those of the US Navy. For a discussion of different navy/coastguard arrangements, see ibid., pp. 314–319.

7 Grotius makes reference in his “Defence of Chapter V of Mare Liberum” to Julius Caesar's involvement in countering piracy; see Armitage, David (ed.), Hugo Grotius’ The Free Sea, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 2004, p. 129Google Scholar. A notable early nineteenth-century example of naval action against pirates was that ordered by President Thomas Jefferson and conducted by the US Navy (USN) against the Barbary Pirates; see Turner, Robert, “President Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates”, in Elleman, Bruce, Forbes, Andrew and Rosenberg, David (eds), Piracy and Maritime Crime: Historical and Modern Case Studies, Naval War College Newport Papers No. 35, Newport, RI, 2011Google Scholar.

8 For a recent comprehensive treatment of this subject, see Grindal, Peter, Opposing the Slavers: The Royal Navy's Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade, I. B. Tauris & Co., London, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The USN was also employed in suppressing the slave trade, despite slavery itself remaining lawful in its own southern States until the Civil War. Congress outlawed the slave trade in 1808, and a West African USN squadron was established in 1821 to suppress it. See Symonds, Craig, The US Navy: A Concise History, Oxford University press, Oxford, 2016, pp. 37–38Google Scholar.

9 Although navies are currently doing little to suppress slavery, it is of growing concern at sea, in particular with slave crews in fishing vessels engaged in illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing. See the website of Human Rights at Sea, at: www.humanrightsatsea.org.

10 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1833 UNTS 3, 10 December 1982 (entered into force 16 November 1994).

11 This was mounted by the British navy off the Mozambique port of Beira between 1966 and 1975 to enforce economic sanctions against the white minority-ruled British colony of Rhodesia, which had illegally declared its independence from Britain. The operation was authorized by UNSC Res. 217, 20 November 1965. The author himself served on the “Beira Patrol”, but see Mobley, Richard, “The Beira Patrol: Britain's Broken Blockade against Rhodesia”, Naval War College Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2002Google Scholar. It is incorrect to describe this law enforcement operation as a “blockade”; see the discussion immediately below.

12 Kraska, James and Pedrozo, Raul, International Maritime Security Law, Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013, pp. 903–923CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 This distinction has admittedly been difficult for some to discern, but see McLaughlin, Rob, United Nations Naval Peace Operations in the Territorial Sea, Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2009, pp. 129–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For these constabulary operations on the high seas, two conventions are of some importance: the Vienna Convention on the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, 10 March 1988 (entered into force 1 March 1992), together with its Protocol of 2005; and the Vienna Convention on the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 19 December 1988 (entered into force 11 November 1990). See also J. Kraska and R. Pedrozo, above note 12, pp. 801–858, 531–540.

15 Ibid., pp. 1–5.

16 Murray, Daragh, Practitioners’ Guide to Human Rights Law in Armed Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 91Google Scholar.

17 Different analysts may produce different ways of describing and ordering these “military” operations. This categorization is the author's preferred way of doing so, born of a lengthy period employed as a naval analyst on the Naval Staff within the UK's Ministry of Defence, including the period during which he was the lead author for the RN's maritime strategic doctrine.

18 Roger, Nicholas, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815, Allen Lane, London, 2004, especially pp. 542–544Google Scholar.

19 Van Creveld, Martin, Technology and War: From 2000BC to the Present, Brasseys, London, 1991, pp. 204–216Google Scholar; Boot, Max, War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, Gotham Books, New York, 2006, pp. 241–267Google Scholar.

20 There are numerous works covering these naval wars but, for example, see Jones, James, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, Longman, London and New York, 1996Google Scholar; Baugh, Daniel, The Global Seven Years War 1754–1763, Routledge, London and New York, 2011Google Scholar; Lambert, Andrew, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812, Faber & Faber, London, 2012Google Scholar; Mahan, Alfred, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793–1812, 2 vols, Sampson Lowe, Marston & Co., London, 1892Google Scholar; Corbett, Julian, Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, 2 vols, Naval Institute Press, Newport, RI, 2015Google Scholar; Halpern, Paul, A Naval History of World War I, UCL Press, London, 1994Google Scholar; Barnett, Correlli, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, Hodder & Staughton, London, 1991CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Arguably, the age of empires (including maritime-based empires) came to an end in the middle of the twentieth century. See Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2010, especially Ch. 13, pp. 413–433Google Scholar; Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 3: Global Empires and Revolution 1890–1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012Google Scholar.

22 Kyle, Keith, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, I. B. Tauris, London, 2003Google Scholar. In relation to the Gaza blockade, see Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident, September 2011 (Palmer Report), available at: www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/middle_east/Gaza_Flotilla_Panel_Report.pdf.

23 Patterson, James, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 218–219Google Scholar.

24 Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History, Guild Publishing, London, 1983, pp. 366–373, 687Google Scholar.

25 Goldrick, James, No Easy Answers: The Development of the Navies of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka 1945–1996, Papers in Australian Maritime Affairs No. 2, Royal Australian Navy Maritime Studies Programme, Lancer Publishers, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 68–103Google Scholar.

26 See Haines, Steven, “Northern Ireland 1968–1998”, in Wilmshurst, Elizabeth (ed.), International Law and the Classification of Conflicts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, p. 126Google Scholar.

27 See Yoshihara, Toshi, “The 1974 Paracels Sea Battle: A Campaign Appraisal”, Naval War College Review, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2016Google Scholar.

28 See O'Rourke, Ronald, “The Tanker War”, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 114, No. 5, 1988Google Scholar, available at: www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1988-05/tanker-war.

29 Sir Freedman, Lawrence, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, 2 vols, Routledge, London, 2005Google Scholar.

30 Justin Smith, Maritime Interdiction in Counterinsurgency: The Role of the Sri Lankan Navy in the Defeat of the Tamil Tigers, unpublished Masters Thesis, US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, June 2010, available at: calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/5346/10Jun_Smith_Justin.pdf?sequence=1.

31 Silj, Alessandro, “The Gulf of Sidra Incident: March–April 1986”, in The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See Ballantyne, Iain, Strike from the Sea: The Royal Navy and the US Navy at War in the Middle East 1949–2003, Pen and Sword Maritime, Barnsley, 2004Google Scholar.

33 The author was serving in the UK Ministry of Defence at the time and was consulted by the director of naval operations. He suggested blockade as an option, in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution allowing for the possibility of a UN maritime embargo operation – caused by a likely Russian veto in the Council.

34 The “operational level” is the level of command at which campaigns are planned in order to achieve strategic objectives. In many instances, the maritime element of a campaign will be manifestly subordinate to the land or air element – as were the naval operations during the two Gulf Wars. In other cases, the principal focus at the operational level will be maritime, as it was during the British campaign to recover the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982. Since 1945, the vast majority of naval/maritime contributions to military campaigns have been subordinate to other, principally land-based elements.

35 Mention of the 1982 conflict in the South Atlantic must not pass without some comment on exclusion zones declared by the British, in one instance seemingly establishing what one distinguished international lawyer has described as an unlawful “free-fire zone” (a description with which this author agrees), although this did not result in any unlawful action. See von Heinegg, Wolff Heintschel, “How to Update the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflict at Sea”, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Vol. 36, 2006, pp. 144–145Google Scholar.

36 See Palmer Report, above note 22.

37 One shift that did occur was in relation to the encryption of communication employed by hospital ships, which is prohibited under Article 34(2) of GC II but which proved problematic during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War. As a consequence of that, Rule 171 of the San Remo Manual permits the use of encryption for the purpose of effecting the humanitarian mission of such vessels but asserts a ban on their use of encrypted communications to pass intelligence or to gain any other military advantage.

38 The principal reference book on the world's navies listed fifty-six navies in 1950; see Blackman, Raymond, Jane's Fighting Ships 1949–50, McGraw Hill, New York, 1949Google Scholar. The volume covering the period 2016–17 lists just over 160; see Saunders, Stephen and Philpott, Tom (eds), Jane's Fighting Ships 2016–17, 116th ed., Jane's Information Group, London, 2016Google Scholar.

39 In descending order, they are: major global force-projection navies; medium global force-projection navies; medium regional force-projection navies; adjacent force-projection navies; offshore territorial defence navies; inshore territorial defence navies; constabulary navies; and token navies. See Haines, Steven, “New Navies and Maritime Powers”, in Roger, Nicholas, The Sea in History, Vol. 4: The Modern World, Boydell and Brewer, Martlesham, 2016, pp. 88–89Google Scholar.

40 For a recent study of British naval dominance, see Gough, Barry, Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 The combined British Empire navies were the Royal Navy (by far the largest), the navies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India, and the South African Naval Forces.

42 Figures from the website Naval History, available at: www.naval-history.net/WW2aBritishLosses10tables.htm.

43 None of these reasons are the subject of this paper, and the nuclear dimension will undoubtedly be contested by those who regard nuclear weapons as a threat rather than a guarantor of security. The value of nuclear weapons in this respect is, of course, controversial. The author takes the view that nuclear weapons have been beneficial in deterring great-power war, but certainly acknowledges that others will disagree profoundly. Importantly, the legality of the actual use of such weapons, many of which are sea-launched (the ultimate in power projection terms), is not the subject of this paper.

44 See the chapter on “Basic Principles of the Law of Armed Conflict”, in UK Ministry of Defence, The Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004 (UK Manual), pp. 21–26Google Scholar.

45 “Article 36” being a reference to the provision in Protocol Additional (I) to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, 1125 UNTS 3, 8 June 1977 (entered into force 7 December 1978) (AP I), Art. 36, requiring such reviews. Although not all States are party to AP I, the requirement for legal reviews is more than simply a requirement of treaty law. Indeed, the United States, which is not party, has long conducted such reviews to ensure the legality of weapons being procured.

46 Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, Paris, 16 April 1856.

47 Procès-verbal relating to the Rules of Submarine Warfare set forth in Part IV of the Treaty of London of 22 April 1930, London, 6 November 1936.

48 Hague Convention (VI) relative to the Legal Status of Enemy Merchant Ships at the Outbreak of Hostilities has fallen into desuetude; Hague Convention X is now covered by GC II, and Hague Convention (XII) relative to the Establishment of an International Prize Court did not enter into force – see Roberts, Adam and Guelff, Richard, Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, p. 67Google Scholar.

49 Hague Convention (VII) relating to the Conversion of Merchant Ships into War-Ships, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (entered into force 26 January 1910).

50 Hague Convention (VIII) relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (entered into force 26 January 1910).

51 Hague Convention (IX) Concerning Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (entered into force 26 January 1910) (Hague Convention IX).

52 Hague Convention (XI) relative to Certain Restrictions with regard to the Exercise of the Right to Capture in Naval War, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (entered into force 26 January 1910).

53 Hague Convention (XIII) Concerning the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (entered into force 26 January 1910).

54 The diplomatic conference that negotiated AP I did not have the purpose of reforming the law regulating naval operations and was careful to avoid becoming seized of naval issues (see AP I, Art. 49(3)), although it admittedly did have some influence on naval conduct in hostilities. There have also been no protocols added to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, 1342 UNTS 137, 10 October 1980 (entered into force 2 December 1983), to do with specifically naval weapons – its Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices, 10 October 1980 (and the 1996 Amendment to it), did not deal with sea mines.

55 Ronzitti, Natalino, “The Crisis in the Law of Naval Warfare”, in Ronzitti, Natalino (ed.), The Law of Naval Warfare: A Collection of Agreements and Documents with Commentaries, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London, 1988Google Scholar, especially the section on “The Theatre of Naval Operations”, pp. 13–41 (which includes some comment on the effects of AP I).

56 See San Remo Manual, above note 4.

57 US Navy, The Commander's Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, July 2007 (USN Handbook), available at: www.jag.navy.mil/documents/NWP_1-14M_Commanders_Handbook.pdf; UK Manual, above note 44.

58 The current author was one of the joint authors of that chapter, together with Professor Vaughan Lowe QC (then the Chichele Chair of Public International Law at the University of Oxford), Miss Elizabeth Wilmshurst (then the deputy legal adviser in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and Commodore Jeff Blackett (then the chief naval judge advocate).

59 See, for example, www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2914517.htm, quoting Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev in an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in which he cites the San Remo Manual, on 31 May 2010. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also relied on both the USN Handbook and the UK Manual as containing authoritative statements on blockade; see: www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/state/law/pages/gaza_flotilla_maritime_blockade_gaza-legal_background_31-may-2010.aspx.

60 See, for example, Palmer Report, above note 22.

61 Murray, Daragh et al. (eds), Practitioners’ Guide to Human Rights Law in Armed Conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, pp. 289–303Google Scholar. The editorial team that produced this guide consists of a distinguished group of leading UK-based experts on both international human rights law and the LOAC/IHL; their reliance on the San Remo Manual is indicative of its status as a reference on the extant LOAC applicable at sea.

62 San Remo Manual, above note 4, p. ix (emphasis added).

63 The present author has previously provided a full account of the differences between the San Remo Manual and the UK Manual and the reasoning behind them, in Haines, Steven, “The United Kingdom's Manual on the Law of Armed Conflict and the San Remo Manual: Maritime Rules Compared”, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Vol. 36, 2006Google Scholar.

64 ICRC Customary Law Study, above note 1, p. xxx.

65 Petrie, Donald, The Prize Game: Lawful Looting on the High Seas in the Days of Fighting Sail, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1999Google Scholar. See also Roscoe, Edward, A History of the English Prize Court, Lloyd's, London, 1924Google Scholar; Holland, Thomas, A Manual of Naval Prize Law, HMSO, London, 1888Google Scholar; Hill, Richard, The Prizes of War: The Naval Prize System in the Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815, Sutton, Stroud, 1998Google Scholar.

66 See the text and commentary in A. Roberts and R. Guelff, above note 48, pp. 47–52; N. Ronzitti, above note 55; Fujita, H., “Commentary”, in Ronzitti, Natalino (ed.), The Law of Naval Warfare: A Collection of Agreements and Documents with Commentaries, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London, 1988, pp. 66–75Google Scholar.

67 See the discussion of debates within The Naval Review (the professional journal of RN officers) on the subject in Haines, Steven, “Law, War and the Conduct of Naval Operations”, in Hore, Peter (ed.), Dreadnought to Daring: 100 Years of Comment, Controversy and Debate in The Naval Review, Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, 2012, pp. 299–315Google Scholar; the recent excellent study of the consequences of the 1856 Paris Declaration in Jan Lemnitzer, Power, Law and the End of Privateering, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014; and the revisionist account of British naval planning in Lambert, Nicholas, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012Google Scholar.

68 The author, himself a seagoing naval officer during the last twenty years of the Cold War, spent time on exercise in warships playing the role of convoy escort. Many of the RN's frigates and destroyers that were in service at that time were originally procured specifically for convoy escort duties. NATO chartered merchant vessels to play the role of the convoys.

69 Directorate of Naval Staff Duties, BR 1806: The Fundamentals of British Maritime Doctrine, HMSO, London, 1995, p. 95Google Scholar.

70 Defence Council, above note 5. The draft was subjected to comprehensive scrutiny by the range of relevant naval directorates in the Ministry of Defence and by the staff of the Commander-in-Chief Fleet. While it would have been perfectly understandable for naval traditionalists to criticize the deliberate omission of economic warfare, none did so.

71 Council, Defence, BR 1806: British Maritime Doctrine, 3rd ed., TSO, London, 2004Google Scholar.

72 Formal ship registrations did not emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century following the example of Britain, which established its registry in law in 1823. For this reason, there is a dearth of reliable data on the size of States’ merchant fleets and the nationality of merchant ships. Nevertheless, the navies of the major maritime powers traditionally had a significant role to play in protecting their own trade, with the neutrality or belligerency of merchant vessels having become recognized in the laws of naval warfare by the eighteenth century. By the Second World War, the two largest merchant fleets were those of the United States and Britain, neither of which are now ranked in even the top ten of merchant flags. See Mansell, John, Flag State Responsibility: Historical Developments and Contemporary Issues, Springer, Berlin, 2009, pp. 13–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 The leading open registries, in descending order of size, are Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Malta, Bahamas, Cyprus, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent, the Cayman Islands and Vanuatu. See Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (Bremen), Shipping Statistics and Market Review, Vol. 56, No. 7, 2012Google Scholar.

74 For trade figures, see Stopford, Martin, Maritime Economics, 3rd ed., Routledge, London and New York, 2009, pp. 38–39Google Scholar. For naval statistics over time, see Jane's Fighting Ships, Jane's Information Group, London, various editions.

75 For a fascinating account of the history of the shipping container and its impact on global trade, see Levinson, Marc, The Box: How the Shipping Container made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2006Google Scholar.

76 Clearly, these comments would not apply to other types of vessels carrying bulk or liquid cargoes. However, these have also become much larger since the Second World War. The deliberate and systematic sinking of very large container ships, tankers and other bulk carriers would be profoundly controversial and economically disastrous for shipping and insurance companies. For a comprehensive treatment of the post-war development of merchant ships and the merchant shipping industry, see Couper, Alastair (ed.), The Shipping Revolution: The Merchant Ship, Conway Maritime Press, London, 1992Google Scholar; Branch, Alan, Elements of Shipping, 8th ed., Routledge, Abingdon, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 For an interesting collection on the characteristics of contemporary armed conflict, see Strachan, Hew and Scheipers, Sibylle (eds), The Changing Character of War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, however, this otherwise comprehensive volume has nothing to say about war at sea.

78 John Sullivan and Adam Elkus, “Plazas for Profit: Mexico's Criminal Insurgency”, Small Wars Journal, 26 April 2009, available at: www.smallwarsjournal.com.

79 Palmer, Andrew, The New Pirates: Modern Global Piracy from Somalia to the South China Sea, I. B. Taurus, London and New York, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in particular the chapter on “Pirate Operations”, pp. 163–204.

80 Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, above note 46.

81 See Council on Foreign Relations. “Iran's Revolutionary Guards”, 14 June 2013, available at: www.cfr.org/iran/irans-revolutionary-guards/p14324.

82 See, for example, Steven Stashwick, “Crying Wolf? Contrary to Reports, No Dredges at Scarborough Shoal Yet”, The Diplomat, 8 September 2016, available at: http://thediplomat.com/2016/09/crying-wolf-contrary-to-reports-no-dredges-at-scarborough-shoal-yet/.

83 The author has engaged in talks on maritime security cooperation with authorities in China and Japan, and his PLAN interlocutors have always been very clear in the distinction they make between China's warships and the vessels deployed by the Chinese coastguard.

84 For an interesting and well-informed analysis of hybrid warfare at sea from a US Navy perspective by a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, see Adm. J. Stavridis, “Maritime Hybrid Warfare is Coming”, available at: navalinstitute.com.au/maritime-hybrid-warfare-is-coming/.

85 Hague Convention IX clearly deals with naval power projection, but its provisions are not included in the San Remo Manual. The Convention has not been a success and was not complied with during the two subsequent World Wars. AP I has a bearing on this subject today, especially Articles 35, 40, 41 and 59, dealing with basic rules, quarter, enemy combatants hors de combat, and non-defended localities respectively.

86 For a summary table of SRM rules and their treatment in the UK Manual, see S. Haines, above note 63, p. 98. The present author's choice of this comparison with the San Remo Manual, and his position on the rules quoted, is no mere coincidence, given his role in the production of the UK Manual. For further suggestions, see also W. H. von Heinegg, above note 35.

87 Despite its other reservations, the UK accepted the bulk of the economic warfare rules within the San Remo Manual. It is the author's view that it was mistaken in doing so but had to accept that they be included in the UK Manual (for which the author chaired the Editorial Board) as a matter of UK policy.