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...simply makes the Somali pirates more effective at what they do.  Look forward to these gangs acquiring more capable assets, hiring expertise to improve their ability to find and board faster-moving, larger, and more potentially lucrative targets, and maintain better and better operational security.

 

To what extent has consideration been given to maintaining better surveillance of the "battlespace" in which these pirates operate?

 

Given that they either masquerade as fishing boats or exploit the Somali-based fishing fleet as surveillance and coordination assets, it would seem that persistent aerial or subsurface surveillance of these sea lanes would serve as a "force multiplier" to optimize not only deployment of surface escort units but also routing (time, place, speed) of commercial vessels so as "eyes in the night," warning of potential threats and facilitating evasion and/or deterrence measures.

 

Older remotely-piloted airial surveillance vehicles (rendered obsolete for the purposes of front-line deployment in active theaters of operation) and attack submarines might be optimally suited to such persistent surveillance. 

 

It may not be necessary to track and kill these pirates if tracking alone serves to starve them out of the maritime sea lanes and oblige them to return to purely coastal small-return predation upon regional and local fishing boats and such - which is where they'd begun.

 

Somali piracy is a profit-seeking enterprise.  Cut them off from the big profits and you pre-empt their exploitation of those funds as means by which they become an even greater - and potentially intolerable - problem in the future.

 

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Problem solved.

 

Herald

I realize the reason many ships do not arm themselves is because they have dangerous cargoes (like natural gas) which might explode in a firefight.  There are also some maritime regulations that forbid it.

 

How about a wolf in sheep's clothes?

 

This was a tactic used against U-boats.  A merchant ship would be give conealed arms and sent into harm's way.  So for example: an old merchant ship could be leased, loaded up with inert dummy cargo, and add a squad of Marines.  Once those pirates set foot on deck, they're dead meat.

 

In truth, however, there is no substitute for (ugh!) nation-building.  The pirates thrive because there is no government to stop them.  The Somalis won't stop because they're making a living off it and have no alternative.

 

Another, cheaper, more effective option, is to arm the merchant ships, with small arms, and a cadre of fighters.

 

It's almost laughable. The world navies seem almost powerless to stop RPG & AK-47 toting pirates.

 

An AC-130 on a night flight along the Somali coast, could put a enough of holes in a few boats to send a message. Followed by a leaflet drop to explain event escalations, should ye ol'pirate activities persist.

In my opinion, this is all about $. Hardly anybody has gotten killed, in all the incidents that have taken place.  In fact, when the ransom is paid promptly there is usually no injuries or deaths involved.

Therefore, the response must be almost purely a financial question, similar in some ways to questions in US liability law (e.g., whether the gov't should make it mandatory for trucks to have crash guards installed on the rear to prevent cars from sliding under in a collision, which almost always results in death or serious injury.  In fact, the law does not make it mandatory because the estimated cost of such installation on all trucks trumps the potential death/serious injury in potential accidents, using financial estimators valuing the loss of life against such installation).

Therefore, I feel that most of these offered methods (subs, UAVs, etc...) are way too costly, especially on a semi-permanent basis, to be implemented in an attempt to, in essence, keep the cost of doing business down.  Not to mention, the potential political/public opinion catastrophe that has been mentioned if an armed mission goes awry (I don't think the US public would accept dead soldiers trying to rescue the crew of a Saudi oil tanker, while many would not accept dead civilians from such a mission either).

While I do not want top pay more for anything than the next guy, if that is the cost of doing business, so be it.  We pay more for many goods and services that involve hazard costs (e.g., coal and other minerals take into account the hazards of mining, etc?).  Why should the military get involved at a cost of billions (using even 1 torpedo against a speedboat may not be cost effective). Let the shipping companies hire their own security at their cost of billions.  The ROE for a military mission will always be stacked against the military anyway?

 

 

Anybody remember this incident involving a DPRK cargo ship not too long ago?

"The Williams dispatched a helicopter and ordered the pirates to give up their weapons via a bridge-to-bridge radio. The North Korean crew, which had retained control of the steering and engineering spaces, then confronted the pirates and gained back control of the bridge, according to a Navy news release.

Any real attempt by the shipping companies to have armed security aboard ships would thwart all but the most trained and best equipped pirates.  Obviously, you want to avoid every out of work guy in Somalia from making this his business (similar to the Internet scams out of Africa).  Having trained security teams aboard would accomplish that.

 

Also, I am wondering why ships don't charge ahead at 40+ knots, claimed to be too fast for just about all pirates to catch.  Again, my guess is that shipping companies don't want to pay for the extra fuel, but would rather pass off the responsibility to the military.

 

Seems to me to be strictly a financial question and nothing about real conflict or danger that would mandate military action...

Surely it is cheaper for the shipping companies to pay money to the PMCs for some private armed escort rather than paying $500k+ for every ship that is ransomed from the pirates?

 

In a word -- NO.

Less than 1% of the ships are attacked, but all would have to be protected.  So using your numbers the avoided cost is less than $5000/ship.  That cost would have to cover not just the personnel (for say 6 to 10 men for 10 days) but their overheads as well, including vetting and insurance for the armed guards to insure that you are not just inviting the pirates on board, which is going to be pretty likely if you can only actually pay them $25/day to $50/day, or less.

For the simple reason that very few (if any) bulk cargo vessels are designed to able to exceed 20 knots.

 

It's a simple matter of hydrodynamics and installed horsepower.  Once you exceed a certain critical speed the HP requirement goes up as the 4th power of velocity to be achieved, so to go from 20 knots to 40 knots you have to install 16x the horsepower and fuel.  Maintenance costs (even if you operate at lower speeds most of the time) will also increase by a like amount.

 

To give you a real world example lets compare the designs of the 1912 British battleship and battle cruiser classes (I am using these because I have the numbers handy and because they were designed together making comparison both easier and more relevant).  The battleship had a maximum speed of 21.6 knots at 32,000 HP.  The equivalent battle cruiser had a maximum speed of 29 knots using using 105,000 HP.  That is a 34% increase in speed from a 230% increase in power.

Most cargo ships travel at max speeds of 12-16 knots. Containerships can sometimes do 18-20+ knots. In a netshell navy ships can achieve much higher speeds  since they have better hull forms, lots of horsepower, and the fact they are not carrying 200,000 tons of cargo.

 

Putting armed men on the ships presents cetain issues. For one these are not militay vessels, they are civilian. They must be able to trade and conduct business and arming ships changes that. Imagine a Saudi tanker that tries to dock at a Texas oil refinery and it has 10 armed undocumented Pakistani commandos aboard. We would not allow it in this country and I doubt other countreis would allow armed merchant vessels in either.

 

The navies of the world have a responsibility to keep the sealanes open. Fighting pirates has been a significant role of navies for centuries, we have just lost sight of that in the last 50 odd years of Pax Americana. If navies do nothing, the owners of ships will have no recourse except to negotiate and pay ransoms, which feeds the problem, allowing the pirates to become more sophisticated. 

 

A convoy system would be the most cost effective way to utilize assets and give legal cover to participating navies. 

 

Criminals will continue their activity until the odds of their loosing their life or freedom out weigh the odds of success. The only solution to this piracy is to make the activity so prohibitively expensive to the participants that they decide to pursue other opportunities. That probably means you have to go back to the bad old days of killing pirates on sight. Probably killing quite a few innocent by standers as well (are there any innocent fishing craft left in these waters?). 

At present with the allied navies providing protection within known areas, merchant fleets will just have to steer clear of the troubled waters. The insurance costs will either prevent them from operating outside of 'safe' areas or eventually the problem will get bad enough that the western nations will pay Barbary tributes again to some pasha to keep the pirates home.

 

It is not a new problem by any stretch. Personally, I'd have mercenaries burn every craft on the Somali shore until the problem goes away. The price for this would be funded by the insurance carriers. I know that sounds brutal but piracy is unacceptable and any society that uses piracy as a means of gaining GDP has forfeited it's right to go out beyond wading depth. If you use baited ships (ships sent in to draw out pirates for engagement) you might see a sudden up tick in violent deaths on ships that are seized. The U-Boats went from boarding and allowing the crew to abandon ship to just torpedoing them as they went by to save their crews the extra exposure and I am sure this would happen again.

 

The direct approach always works with criminals. They understand that perfectly in my experience.

 

Check Six

 

Rocky