You may be right. I haven’t been in the service for decades, and then I was in the Army, not the Navy. I do have quite a lot of experience with boats and the sea, but not connected with the Navy.
But it strikes me as remiss that the commander in that region would send out the Bainbridge without Seals already on board. Since the mission was supposed to be protecting ships against pirates, how on earth could they do that unless they were properly prepared to deal with pirates? Small boats, irregulars, hostages, the whole scenario was well known, the only difference being that this time the hostage was American. And they weren’t ready for it? Why were they there, then?
I don’t KNOW anything about current SOP, of course. It just seems odd to me that they wouldn’t be ready to deal with the kind of situation they encountered.
Although I understand that SNAFU can be an ancient problem in the military. Courage, heroism, and screwups.
Don't get me going. It's probably not logistically feasible to have SEALS on every ship in the Indian ocean. They are an extremely limited and valuable commodity. But, there was once a time when US Marines were stationed aboard virtually every Navy ship. In a effort to scale back the cost of our national defense (the only thing in the Constitution that the government is to provide), the Marines were removed. Now, we have no one on board that has any worthwhile training in close combat tactics, small arms implementation or ship boarding.
If this were to happen again, the Navy would probably once again have to wait for someone else, either Marine, Delta or SEAL to arrive on station. Welcome to the post-Cold War military.