Jamaican Coast Guard reportedly fired into a Honduran fishing vessel with the intention of disabling it, killing the captain. Needless to say the Hondurans are upset. A report by ABCNews is here. What I found strange in the report was that the Honduran fishing vessel reportedly had 100 people on board, quite a few for a fishing vessel.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 
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Chuck,
Since they were targeting Conch and Lobster, the 100 people makes sense. Those are diver fisheries and there is a huge black market for them coming from that part of the Caribbean. I would suppose that we are talking about an fishing vessel upwards of 75′, not mom and pop size. A lot of vessels that engage in IUU fishing on reefs or for these types of species use a similar set up.
As for the use of force, I think the Coast Guard is lucky that we haven’t had to use disabling fire on a foreign fishing vessel illegally in the U.S. EEZ. We have the policy on the books, but we’ve never used it. Same with the warp cutters that used to be on the Alaska MECs. I’ve never really understood what we would aim for to disable. I can’t find the link, but our actions would probably be better than the Russian Border Guard, who consider a 76mm shell to the pilot house to be “disabling fire”.
Brad Soule
I was aboard STEADFAST in the early 80’s when we put “disabling” fire into a 300 foot freighter we later found drugs on. The GM on the .50 cal was ordered to target the rudder, which he did with about 50 rounds. It as pretty effective.
This is the kind of history we are not good at remebering and passing down…I had never heard this before, and there is very little available information about use of force in the Coast Guard. We should remeber these incidents, and learn from them…What went well, what didn’t, build that institutional knowledge. Instead, they dissapear. I think its a combination of the Coast Guard not wanting the image of an organization that sometimes hurts people and breaks things, and the fact that we are so busy and stretched too thin so that there just isn’t time to focus on recording what just happened…you have to get right on to the next thing that is happening now.
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Wow, I can’t wait to see how this plays out. I don’t know, if an unarmed person rushes at you in your home, intending to knock you down, I think you’re allowed to shoot them in self-defense. I understand that international politics and laws are much more complicated, but surely the principal is the same, especially if multiple requests to stop and a warning shot were issued. Thanks for the news!