Search Results for: "AP+Moller+Maersk"
Top 100 US Defense Contractors
Relevance Score: 4.056 2009-07-08 23:16:05
1. Lockheed Martin Corp. 2. Boeing Co. 3. Northrop Grumman Corp. 4. General Dynamics Corp. 5. Raytheon Co. 6. KBR Inc. 7. L-3 Communications Holdings 8. United Technologies Corp. 9. BAE Systems 10. SAIC 11. General Electric Co. 12. Computer Sciences Corp. 13. Humana Inc. 14. Health Net Inc. 15. Triwest Healthcare Alliance Co. 16. EDS 17. Public Warehousing Co. KSC 18. ITT Industries 19. Textron Inc. 20. Honeywell Inc. 21. URS Corp. 22. Harris Corp. 23. AmerisourceBergen Corp. 24. Bechtel Group Inc. 25. FedEx Corp. 26. Alliant Techsystems Inc. 27. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. 28. BP PLC 29. DRS Technologies Inc. 30. Exxon Mobil Corp. 31. Kuwait National Petroleum Co. 32. The Alliance Contractor Team 33. Renco Corp. 34. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings 35. Environmental Chemical Corp. 36. Oshkosh Truck Corp. 37. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. 38. Stewart & Stevenson Services 39. Armor Holdings Inc. 40. General Motors Corp. 41. Grindex Pumps A B Sweden 42. Korea Agricultural Cooperative 43. CACI International Inc. 44. Johns Hopkins University 45. General Atomics Technology Corp. 46. Rockwell Collins 47. McKesson Corp. 48. Valero Energy Corp. 49. Aerospace Corp. 50. MITRE Corp. 51. Cardinal Health Inc. 52. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53. Syracuse Research Corp. 54. Chugach Alaska Corp. 55. Dell Computer Corp. 56. Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. 57. ARINC Inc. 58. Phillips and Jordan Inc. 59. Refinery Associates Inc. 60. Rolls-Royce PLC 61. United Industrial Corp. 62. IAP Worldwide Services Inc. 63. Government of Canada 64. Hatakeyama Bussan 65. AP Moller-Maersk 66. ChevronTexaco Corp. 67. Battelle Memorial Institute 68. Shaw Group Inc. 69. Parsons Corp. 70. Thales Group 71. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. 72. Bahrain National Oil Co. 73. Philip Morris Co. 74. Tetra Tech Inc. 75. Chenega Corp. 76. AshBritt Inc. 77. Hunt Building Corp. 78. Ceradyne Inc. 79. Ceres Environmental Services 80. SK Corp. 81. Veritas Capital Inc. 82. CH2M Hill Companies Ltd. 83. Aecom Technology Corp. 84. Washington Group International 85. Goodrich Corp. 86. Hensel Phelps Construction Co. 87. Procter & Gamble Co. 88. Tesoro Petroleum Corp. 89. UBS Provedores 90. Dogog Farm 91. Datapath Inc. 92. Mantech International Corp. 93. Afognak Native Corp. 94. VSE Corp. 95. Accenture 96. IBM Corp. 97. Arctic Slope Regional Corp. 98. Serco Group PLC 99. Kemyong Farm Ltd. 100. Charles Stark Draper Labs
The Ungoverned Space Moves to Sea
Relevance Score: 2.538 2009-06-01 11:25:38
At a naval strategy conference I attended back in 2007, Stephen Carmel, VP of Maersk Shipping, said that while piracy was a problem for regional coastwise trade, it didn’t really register for international shipping. There was an “unfortunate tendency,” he said, to conflate “petty thieves in bumboats, something we have been dealing with forever,” with the the threat of hijacking on the high seas. “I make a distinction between a 300,000 ton [supertanker] loaded with crude and a barge carrying a couple cups of Crisco.” Stowaways, Carmel said, concerned him more than pirates. Efforts to get an update from Carmel have so far proven unfruitful; Maersk is a bit inundated with calls these days. To be fair to Carmel, Maersk operates a fleet of some 1,000 ships across the entire world. To get a sense of why he tended to downplay piracy, and also why that particular part of the Indian Ocean that abuts Somalia has become such a happy hunting ground for pirates, go to the U.S. Coast Guard’s AMVER web site and click “Density Plots” on the left hand column. The plot shows the shipping bottleneck that forms in the Gulf of Aden as ships go to and from the Suez Canal. It also shows the extent of global shipping; it is truly global, with ships literally covering the world’s ocean surface. Now take a look at the “Live Piracy Map,” updated by the International Maritime Bureau. It illustrates just how localized the piracy problem is, most activity is concentrated in the Gulf of Aden. The real challenge is the vast ungoverned, Hobbesian space called Somalia that provides pirate gangs a conveniently located home port, says Martin Murphy, a maritime strategist with CSBA. The unique characteristic of Somali piracy, he says, is the sanctuary that allows pirates to hold hostages for ransom, without threat of capture, until shipping companies reach the pirate’s monetary demands. Once ashore in Somalia, the hostage takers are truly in the driver’s seat, which is one of the reasons the Navy was so determined to prevent Captain Phillips’ captors from reaching shore. Lately, the pirates have moved operations further out to sea, adopting their own version of the U.S. Navy’s “seabasing” strategy intended to provide large offshore operating platforms for ships and amphibs. Pirates attack much further from the Somali coast, well into shipping lanes, staging from a “mother-ship,” usually a large fishing vessel, and then running down slow moving freighters with small, fast Zodiac or Boston whaler type boats. It’s a very effective business model, akin to a whaling fleet roaming the oceans hunting prey, occasionally putting in at foreign ports to resupply, but able to remain at sea for long periods. Since ransoms run into the millions of dollars, there is a huge incentive for more parties to enter the marketplace. Piracy is becoming an established piece of the “underground” economy. Once such huge market incentives are in place, the problem becomes nearly impossible to eradicate. Sweeping up pirates won’t work either as there is an inexhaustible supply of willing freebooters in a country like Somalia where there are so few economic options. Even if you catch pirates in the act, what do you do with a bunch of teenagers who just tried to hijack a ship? Shooting hostage takers is one thing, shooting cargo hijackers is another. The enforcement at sea problems become ever more complex, Murphy says, and for the world’s navies, it’s a particularly daunting security challenge. There is a real risk that these sorts of pirate whaling fleets may begin to spread across the globe, moving up the “adaptation” chain, using better ships and technology to stay linked to each other and to track shipping, constantly refining tactics. Murphy says the recent spread of piracy along major shipping lines likely stems from Somali mother ships motoring ever further from homeport hunting vulnerable freighters. “The initiative is with the pirates,” Murphy says. “They’re evolving their tactics and their ability to shift their operating area much more quickly than we can respond.” The world’s navies simply don’t have enough ships to patrol the more than 2 million square miles of Indian Ocean, let alone the entire “global commons.” Then there is the identification challenge. “How do you tell a local fishing boat from a pirate boat? How do you tell a dhow from a pirate mother ship?” Murphy asks. While some vessel configurations may look suspicious, you have to prove it, which can require boarding the ship in question and looking under the tarpaulin, or catching them in the act. Helicopters and aerial drones flying off Navy ships greatly expand the area that can be patrolled. But the eye-in-the-sky hardly solves the positive identification challenge as the pirates swim in a sea crowded with fishing vessels.