

Fill an inflatable boat with explosives. Crew it with mannequins. Send it out to sea in search of a humanitarian aid ship to destroy. Behold the desperate ingenuity of Moammar Gadhafi.

NATO ships enforcing the maritime embargo on the Libyan dictator noticed a curiosity in the Mediterranean near the rebel redoubt of Misurata early Monday morning. Two rigid-hull inflatable boats appeared to head toward the Misurata port. When NATO warships and choppers approached, one of them turned and broke away. The other bobbed on course.

What was aboard? Approximately 1 ton of explosives, according to a NATO press release, and "two human mannequins." NATO blew up the boat with small-arms fire.

The NATO war may not be enough to oust Gadhafi. But it has definitely kept his airplanes grounded and his Navy in port.

Faced with the challenge of choking off his opposition under those constraints, Gadhafi has to use unconventional solutions if he's to keep the rebels from resupplying themselves. Essentially, he has decided to turn boats into seaborne improvised explosive devices and send them off in search of humanitarian-aid vessels – or to blow up the port itself.

Gadhafi's effort appears in line with another "recent incident," NATO said, where "pro-Gadhafi forces laid sea mines in the approaches to the port of Misrata." Those, apparently, weren't floating IEDs disguised as innocuous seafarers.

The United States has long anticipated that weak maritime powers would turn to that kind of sabotage. A 2002 war game predicted that small boats packed with explosives would swarm Navy ships and detonate, especially after al-Qaida used an explosives-laden boat to blow up the USS Cole in 2000.

The Navy is working on a new tool to combat the swarm. In April, a prototype laser aboard a ship destroyed a similar inflatable craft using a 15-kilowatt blast of energy from a mile away.

But that shipboard laser won't be ready to be fielded for probably another decade. Until then, good eyesight and good sensors will have to keep ships safe from floating IEDs.

Photo: NATO/Flickr

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