[lrd]

Originally Posted by Airbornelawyer

Where were we discussing shipping lanes? The globalization thread, regarding Chinese naval strategy?

Yes, as well as: http://professionalsoldiers.com/foru...hlight=law+sea

and the discussion on The Law of the Sea:

http://professionalsoldiers.com/foru...hlight=law+sea

Yemen sits astride one of the major chokepoints on shipping lanes, or SLOCs ("sea lines of communication") as we acronym-loving military types call them. Yemen is on the Arabian side of the Bab el-Mandeb (or Bab al-Mandab, "gate of tears"), one of the world's busiest passages. Soviet and Cuban interest in the 1970s in forming an alliance among the communist regimes in South Yemen and Ethiopia and the socialist regime in Somalia was based on a desire to control this strait.

In August 1973, two Egyptian destroyers and several support vessels set sail for Pakistan and India "for repairs." They stopped off in the South Yemeni port of Aden, and then stuck around for two months, paying port calls in the Sudan, North Yemen and Somalia. On October 6, 1973, they took up station in the middle of the straits, blocking all shipping bound for the Israeli port of Eilat. They stayed on station for several months, even after the IDF defeated the Egyptian invasion forces in the Sinai, and provided leverage for the negotiations that allowed Egypt to maintain control of the west side of the Suez Canal.

The vulnerabilty of the straits to terrorism has been apparent in recent years. On October 6, 2002, the French oil tanker Limburg was attacked by terrorists in the Gulf of Aden who rammed an explosives-laden boat into the tanker (in an attack similar to the attack on the USS Cole). One crewman was killed and about 90,000 barrels of oil were spilled.

An overview of oil transit chokepoints may be found here on the web site of the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration.

And if you want more than an overview, and a tie-in to the other thread, you can read Globalization and Maritime Power, a book from the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University.

Thanks for the information and link, AL. If I can figure out how to download it, I'll have something interesting to read on my next trip.