Scott Carney of Wired asks a Somali pirate when they deem it advisable to ransom or kill sailors they capture off their coasts. Here are the highlights of the conversation.
- No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. …
- Often we know about a ship’s cargo, owners and port of origin before we even board it. … The financiers are the most important since they organize and plan the big shot operations and are able to pay running cost[s]. Financiers always need to forge deals with traders, land cruiser owners, translators, business people to keep the supplies flowing during operations and manage the logistics. There is a long supply chain involved in every hijacking.
- Hostages — especially Westerners — are our only assets, so we try our best to avoid killing them. It only comes to that if they refuse to contact the ship’s owners or agencies. Or if they attack us and we need to defend ourselves.
What’s really interesting in this discussion is the interplay between the valuation of life of the hostages and the likelihood the pirates will kill them. Third World citizens have lives so valueless the pirates don’t even consider them worth killing. On the other hand, the more hand-wringing a hostage situation is likely to provoke, the more valuable the hostages are. Suddenly they are worth a bullet. Of interest too is the implicit notion that the financiers, probably operating out of the capitals of the world with their faxes, databases, telephones and contacts are the masterminds of entire operation.
The argument can be made that regarding any captive taken as expended and sinking any ship taken would reduce the incentive to piracy to nearly zero. But the pirates know the West won’t do that, so the game continues. In Hollywood, the solutions are typically simple. In Speed, one of the protagonists argues that the best way to end a hostage standoff is to the shoot the hostage.
Harry: “Alright, pop quiz: The airport. Gunman with one hostage, he’s using her for cover, he’s almost to the plane. You’re a hundred feet away. (Long pause) Jack?”
Jack: “Shoot the hostage.”"
Harry: “What?”
Jack: “Take her out of the equation. Go for the good wound and he can’t get to the plane with her. Clear shot”
Harry: “You are deeply nuts, you know that? ‘Shoot the hostage’… jeez…”
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shoot through the hostage.
Actually, it seems that in Soviet times, the Russians would be willing/capable within their ROE and political system to do such a thing, and that is why they were not bothered by terrorism, domestic and foreign. That and the fact that the KGB were probably the instigators of a lot of terrorism against the West as part of the Cold War by other means.
Even in post-Soviet times, the Russians have staged some hostage rescues and shrugged off heavy hostage losses.
They’ve taken a lot of money to date. Can one presume the existence of a pirate HQ, aka Target #1?
Having said that, most of the problems arising in Africa stem from crap administration, or nil admin at all.
Can’t we go after the “financiers” and their banking system(s) the same way we went after Middle East terrorists and their banking systems? If you shut down a few bank accounts of “financiers” then it seems to me they’d find a new hobby and the lower echelon pirates would be out of a job without a Sugar Daddy.
I thought this comment was interesting: “Or if they attack us and we need to defend ourselves.” So according to this logic, the pirates who were holding the American ship captain hostage were *not* about to shoot him in the head, evidence to the contrary? Or since the Americans had already fought back, the pirates considered that their were already in the mode of “defending themselves” …?
The seat of purpose is on the land.
Destroy the ports from which pirates operate. The first time, evacuate the port before leveling it (photograph, retinal scan, and draw blood of all those evacuated). On any subsequent re-applications, don’t allow those who were previously spared (per DNA and retinal scan) to evacuate.
When the clan suffers from piracy, the clan will no longer tolerate piracy.
So now the guys have financiers
Who plot out the hijacking
Arranging everything in tiers
And see that nothing’s lacking
And hostages are graded for
Ethnicity and value
A white man can be traded for
Whatever they can cow you
Into giving them what they
Think you by george are good for
And so because you always pay
They know what you have stood for
They raise the price in many ways
And we have always paid her
We need to get back to the days
Of old Stephen Decatur
What are “pirates” really but undocumented sailors who want a path to citizens’ ship.
Chiral:
No comment
The story has been told that in the late 1970s the Svoiets in Syria had trouble with the Muslim Brotherhood who resented any infidel. When a Soviet diplomat was kidnapped, the KGB sent to Syria an operational team which identified and counter-kidnapped an important clain relative of one of the kidnappers, And thne sent a message together with the cut-off finger of the clansman and a note that if Soviets were not released immediately and unharmed, more significant bits of the Syrian hostage would follow. The Soviet diplomat was quickly freed.
I have a Muscovite friend who missed the Nordost theater fiasco only because he was late for the theaater. He had no time to blame the FSB team which stormed the theater and killed a number of the hostages with incapacitating gas. He, and my other friends, blame the terrorists, and said that other soliutions could have caused even greater losses. True or not, that is their mindset. And mine. And I agree with 2. Paul Milenkovic that during the CW much terrorism was sponsored by the Soviets. The “Oxford of terrorism” is located in the village of Balashikha, now an outlying suburb SE of Moscow,
Chiral: Punny. Very punny.
Kidnap enough of the “pirates” and interrogate them (no torture and blubber, just wear them down) and you can probably get to the “root cause” of the problem, and “stop this nonsense!”, as Peter Lorie said in one of those Beach Movies from the ’60′s. You don’t need a lot of fireworks, firepower or the need to actually kill anyone.
But capture and interrogation of these pathetic third-worlders is probably double-plus ungood in the present World Order, with the sublime Barack Pasha Obama as Preezident of these United States, so the merry-go-round will continue.
I guess.
Ultimately, shooting “through” the hostage, or attempting a rescue as soon as possible, would result in fewer hostage situations and would save lives. Not PC, though.
I was an FSO when Kissinger was SecState. He made it clear from day one that the US would not pay to get hostages released. When I say he made it clear, he did so to us and to anyone who might want to kidnap us. Seemed to work as long as he was S. F
“KGB were probably the instigators of a lot of terrorism against the West as part of the Cold War by other means.”
Not probably. It is well documented.
Interesting, how back in the 60’s popular “spy” fiction had international criminal organizations, SMERSH, THRUSH, CHAOS and so forth. And today, we have just that, but on a far more distributed basis. There is no “Meeister Beeg” running a worldwide organization of evil, but a buncha little meeister beegs with their own piece of the action. But collectively, it is the same thing.
In the 60’s, dreaming about such fictional matchups was a replacement for the reality of the superpower confrontation that had school kids practicing duck and cover, and grown people looking at their watches at noon on Saturdays and nodding sagely when they heard the weekly air raid siren test.
But the won the cold War – and today there is no equivalent to the fictional spy heroes of the 60’s to fight our real international adversaries. The guys who would blow up whole islands in the Pacific and ask questions later. Oh, the capability is there, all right. But the will is not; it would take too much paperwork.
Ialso found this article a few days ago, idem ofScott Carney :
“The typical payoff today is 100 times what it was in 2005, and the number of attacks has skyrocketed”
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_somali_pirates
Looks like Piracy is becoming a big enterprise, that simple fishermen can’t manage by their own, some mafiosi “lords” hold it, and hire more and more “working” forces
At the beginning they said that it was in retaliation for having spoilt their waters and fish all their fish with huge ships.
Now, it is surely different, it’s an industry
Somalians don’t only operate on sea, but also on their territory, under the covert of AQ militias (which BTW can’t get along with each others, they are concurrent for the ransoms, that is why the 2 french military agents were separated, different gangs wanted their hostage)
Now, I don’t know if our governments really to solve the problems there, it would need a massive invasion with troops that stay long enough to “reorganise” society and sane rules, it would be like a colonisation, I don’t think that one of our countries is ready to assume this effort, but it is the only solution
In addition to the Somali warlords being on the take, one of the problems not mentioned is that piracy occurs atop other illicit maritime activities that regional authorities often wink at – smuggling people from the very poor Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, trade in khat and other drugs, weapons to terrorist camps in places like Sudan and Chad. Not much impetus to stop any of it.
There is a lot of piracy around the strait of Mallaca too, but the pirates don’t bother the Russian or Israeli ships–past experience has shown them that the ones who do tend to wash up ashore with a bullet hole through their head. Its a tactic that has worked throughout recorded history–when you encounter pirates kill them. When you do this the incidence of piracy declines dramatically.
Its a most unpolitically correct attitude to take, but governments that won’t protect their own citizens have lost all legitimate claims to govern. When this happens they, in their own way, have become pirates preying upon the people they are sworn to protect. In that case it may be necessary to implement the time honored means of dealing with pirates–with a noose.
That rescue that took place last springtime is making the rounds on the History type channels. The crew fought back and managed to force a captain for leader swap but in letting the pirates off the boat they got the bad guys got the captain back.
The pirates were pretty dense, they ended up getting cranial lead poisoning. The USN blocked and harassed them and eventually they accepted towage by a cruiser (or destroyer can not recall) and the tow line was slowly drawn in and when all three presented their skulls to Seal snipers they got lead poisoning.
They need to publicize that in Somalia and repeat.
So the target aquisition begins sometime around the ink going dry on the insurance contracts?
Jeez, a several hundred percent rate rise around the horn, for only a fraction of added statistical piracy risk? i don’t have the actual numbers but skook (iirc) had some of ‘em, in a discussion @ maggie’s farm, not too long ago. They weren’t too ‘synched’ –risk premiums were outsized, it seemed, by rough analysis.
Long John Lloyd’s, arrrrr.
or maybe Government Sacks has gone down to the sea in ships, hey.
It takes a jolt of the brain to see the pirate incidents not as random attacks on the high seas but as incidents of some large organization driving home the need for its extra-sovereign off-the-tax-books “protection” service.
My first reaction to Somalia is to give it back to Italy, only I like Italy.
Legally every person held in Gitmo is an unlawful combatant and that makes them Pirates. Remember when airplane hijackers were properly referred to as “Air Pirates?” A couple of days ago I was driving a car of young people for work, some college students and a law student or two. One of them was describing how his professor had assigned a book on the crimes of the Bush administration, listing all sorts of violations of international and constitutional law, especially with regard to internment. I got excited since clearly most of them believed in this and no one would dream of challenging it. My point of view was grudgingly allowed to be aired but only as an indulgence to the old guy. After all what could I know? Their oh so cool Professor said differently and I was only well better educated then him in all likelihood, with experience in things like the military including Intelligence and Interrogation as well as Law Enforcement.
I have said before the cold but true best way for the US or Israel to deflate the value of a hostage or prisoner captured by the likes of Hamas, the Taliban or AQ is to hold a state funeral for them.
Buddy: As of this time last year, it was about 15% of the insured value of the hull for each day in Somali waters.
This is cribbed from wikipedia’s entry on the Seven Rules of Highly Effective Pirates, which are, in turn contained in the Schlock Mercenary comic strip. Like the five books of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “Trilogy”, the number of items in the list doesn’t match the title.
1. Pillage, then burn.
4. Close air support covereth a multitude of sins.
6. If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
8. Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it’s on the far side of the airlock.
9. Never turn your back on an enemy.
10. Sometimes the only way out is through.
11. Everything is air-droppable at least once.
12. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.
13. Do unto others.
16. Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth.
21. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Take his fish away and tell him he’s lucky just to be alive, and he’ll figure out how to catch another one for you to take tomorrow.
27. Don’t be afraid to be the first to resort to violence.
29. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.
30. A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.
31. Only cheaters prosper.
34. If you’re leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun.
35. That which does not kill you has made a tactical error.
36. When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support.
37. There is no ‘overkill.’ There is only ‘open fire’ and ‘time to reload.’
38. Just because it’s easy for you doesn’t mean it can’t be hard on your clients.
I trust the the Somali’s do not generally follow the BC, so no harm done in sharing them.
Q ships.
Register them as carrying gold and computer parts and Stinger missiles, put a couple of Little Birds in container-looking hangars on board, some swing-out 25mm Bushmasters and a couple of platoons of Marines on board, along with some comm jamming equipment. Trail an oil slick, make 5 knots and mess with the ballast so you have a 5-degree list.
A seaborne roach motel, pirates go in and never come out. Pretty soon, they’ll look at the sea with such nameless dread that piracy will dry up on its own.
This would be such a good job for Executive Outcomes if they were still operational. I’m sure Blackwater (or whatever its new name is) or DynCorp would be happy to oblige if the price was right, and it’s probably less than paying 7x insurance rates. Plus, the sharks in the Gulf of Aden will be that much healthier, so there’s an ecological benefit as well.
Italians never really care of Somalia, it is a hot stones desert. During the french mendate in djibouti, Somalians were known for being the looters and the agressive people.
Italians preferred Lybia, and Ethipia, who benefit of a better climate
and dreamt of Zanzibar
35. That which does not kill you has made a tactical error.
I LOVE that saying, I really do.
Darren: Yup. You might want to change the position of the dummy funnel and give it a different coat of paint every once in a while… answer the radio in a few different languages… have 20 different national ensigns in the flag locker.
The BBC gave a bit of info as to who is doing this escort stuff: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7752813.stm
erc/23; propose #39, “why bother with marriage –just find a woman who hates you and buy her a house”
***
skook, man alive –how many days can a shipper pay that? not many. very volatile.
MC:
In Djibouti last year, must of the staff I met in restaurants and hotels was Ethiopian, not Somali. The French and US bases are side by side. Every morning at 8AM, right after they played the Djiboutian national anthem, they would play the “Star Spangled Banner.” At about the 2nd stanza, two or three Mirage 2000s took off on “plein dispositif de post-combustion” or full afterburner. Excuse the French speak from my poor memory and enhanced just now with Babelfish
We got along quite well with the sons of Marianne, also the Legionnaires. I didn’t know how little the Legion is paid. We would buy them beers. Things went pretty well.
Buddy: When you are outside Somali waters it goes down, but not by a whole heck of a lot.
MA #18:
I’ve seen the doc you refer too. Kudos to the crew, the USN and the SEALS. Excellent op.
What I found particularly amazing was the perfectly synchronized shots of the 3 SEALS. Once 2 of the targets were acquired, all three snipers waited patiently for the 3rd pirate to present his melon. And when he did it ended badly for the bad guys.
All this from the fantail of the Navy ship to the bobbing hijacked lifeboat.
Gotta love the SEALS! Takin’ out the garbage!
The French seem to do good work. They have a class of navy ships rather like some of our smaller USCG cutters – named after the months of the French Revolutionary calendar. They spend most of their time in French overseas possessions. Floréal has taken part in a number of successful ops, as has Nivôse. Low tech solutions to a low tech problem.
Marie Claude: “…and dreamt of Zanzibar” –That’s a line worthy of the best of post-War novels. I’m not Italian and have dreamt of Zanzibar. Nice, long duree viewpoint on this. Still, this all does show that unsecured real estate will be someone’s colony since it cannot be a state, it will be the fief of non-state actors subject to their volatilities and tribal pathologies. But it will be colonized one way or t’other.
Skookumchuk,
yet, yes they re not paid as much as they deserve it, I guess it’s a vocation to serve in the “Legion” thoughcuz they get more and more candidatures from abroad, especially China, Korea, and Japon
yep, I know that the Marines also have trainings with the Legionnaires there.
Mick, if you’re dreaming of this place you should try to find Henri de Monfreid’s books, he was an adventurer, and wrote on the traffics, on piracy, on Zanzibar, on Ethiopa… travels in exotic and dangerous adventures
http://www.henrydemonfreid.com/Passions/Photo/SlideShowj.html
Skookumchuk,
First, thanks for your service.
Second, I wish some unnamed service had dropped a couple-three GPS-guided concrete bombs from 40,000 feet and sunk the Sirius Star right off the coast. The feedbacks are all wrong in this situation, crime IS paying, and far too well. The proper feedback in this case IS to shoot the hostage — nothing like several tens or hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude washing ashore on Somalia to bugger the ecosystem and provide a serious negative feedback.
Call it ‘Operation Hazelwood’.
It’s late, and I don’t feel like going back up this thread. However . . .
There enough good ideas on this thread that, if put into practice, would end the problem of piracy.
So, if piracy continues to be a problem, we can safely say that the powers-that-be don’t want to end it. The problem of piracy is kind of a no-brainer.
What does it say about us when a few lunatics armed with box cutters can do hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to our country. Are we a great nation when we speak of international criminality or piracy on the high seas to describe three bafoons in a dingy?
“The problem of piracy is kind of a no-brainer.”
Of course it is, because the pirates themselves are no-brainers.
Anyone want to hazard a guess at what the ultimate disposition of the captured teenaged pirate currently in American custody will be? I’m thinking that Obama will apologize to him for America’s arrogance and aggression, he’ll be offered citizenship, a free Havard education with Dr. Harold Gates as his advisor in Black Victimhood, and the ability to bring his swarm of family across the ocean to join him here in the land of plenty where the bunch of them will go on welfare and live off the American taxpayer while breeding like Somali bunny rabbits.
I’m so sorry — this is totally OT. Just don’t know how else to get the word out on this. Someone has read the first 498 pages of the health care bill. You may not be able to get through the whole post without something liquid by your side:
http://www.theospark.net/2009/07/obamacare-reading-of-bill-so-far-just.html
Thank you.
Norm
In the Olden Days, in Europe, we used to separate adversaries heads from their bodies and put the head on a pole somewhere where everyone can see it. It was an early form of advertising.
Boiled Cabbage
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now God knows
Anything goes
- Cole Porter
Read it all, Anything Goes. It applies better now then it did five years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5wcLl13a8s
Speaking of pirates, the founder of ACORN is “training groups of community organizers” in…Sicily.
What, hiring Murder, Incorporated to help with the upcoming census?
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Although this blog is a little dry here is what Eagle1 recommends:
[EagleSpeak]:
A cheap way to fight pirates.
Take a Marine Corps 70 ton Abrams tank.
Or a Bradley fighting vehicle.
Put it on a 25 knot aluminum crew boat (shown is the M/V Miss Danielle) which has a deck cargo capacity of 200 tons.
Go fight pirates.
No charge to the Navy/Marine Corps for the concept.
[picture of tank on ship]
Note: Yes, I know it’s not to scale.
http://www.eaglespeak.us/2008/10/anti-piracy-vessel.html
Although this blog is a little dry and here is what Eagle1 recommends:
[EagleSpeak]
A cheap way to fight pirates.
Take a Marine Corps 70 ton Abrams tank.
Or a Bradley fighting vehicle.
Put it on a 25 knot aluminum crew boat (shown is the M/V Miss Danielle) which has a deck cargo capacity of 200 tons.
Go fight pirates.
No charge to the Navy/Marine Corps for the concept.
Note: Yes, I know it’s not to scale.
[picture of tank on ship]
http://www.eaglespeak.us/2008/10/anti-piracy-vessel.html
After the new up-date from MS my computer can’t edit the second comment. Please delete the dup comment.
Here is an example of what happens when pirates are captured (they are let-go).
Eagle1:
The Turkish navy frigate TCG Gediz has launched an operation against Somali pirates, who were feared to be preparing to seize another ship off the coast of Somalia, capturing five of the pirates…
[Comment]
These pirates were later handed over to NATO officials. As NATO cannot prosecute the pirates, they were eventually released. But never the less a potential attack on a merchant ship was thwarted.
http://www.eaglespeak.us/2009/07/somali-pirates-turkish-frigate-bags.html
The interviewee says: “Don’t call us pirates. We are protectors.”
He says he just wants to be left alone to be a fisherman.
He will be a lucky man. By now Lutheran World Relief has identified him as a victim. He is signed up to join his brethren and sustren in Minneapolis, where he can join in the great American melting pot experience of receiving generous relocation support and counseling in how to launch a rewarding career in jihad. If he develops some writing skills, perhaps he can start reporting on the injustices he encounters in living amidst the infidels on “IKhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s only official English web site.” His kids can attend tax-payer supported Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) charter school. He can really aim for the skies, so to speak, and enroll in a flight training class. Yes, things are going to be looking up for this young entrepreneur. I hear there’s good fishing in Minnesota too!
I dont see the complexities of this situation. Maybe Im hampered by too much education or experience or something, but it seems to me that if you want to lower the demand for something you raise the price. Want less piracy? Raise the price. Add 5 or 10 heavily armed people to enough ships going thru the area with fairly simple ROE (Assume an aggressive posture on ship. Somebody approaches or shoots, destroy them and their vessel. Resume aggressive posture)
This happens 25 or 30 times and people begin to wonder whatever happened to Achmed. These people may be lawless islams but they are not completely stupid.
sorry Omar, but I will not submit.
Shoot the pirate “BEFORE” the pirate takes a hostage.
Pre-Emptthis bullshit.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s we dealt with this very issue with a bunch of lip chewing, hand wringing and “tribute” paying. Piracy, became a major drain on the budget of the newly formed USA…limited us to the point that many argued that we could not afford to form and outfit a Navy. I for one am damn glad we never fail to learn hard lessons from our past. How many times do we have to learn them?
We are all hostages now! Please shoot me first, preferably before “health care reform” passes. The way some of yall obviously must drink I doubt I can rely on true aim or steady trigger finger to save me from the wounded care of Pelosi.
Zanzibar is a nice place. I suggest you land in Dar (which is only good for leaving) & take the Ferry to Zanzibar rather than flying. Go when your nose is clear, you get off of the ferry and the smell of cloves, other spices mixed with the smell of the nearby sea fills your nose.
I spent a couple of days on Zanzibar not doing a whole lot, walking around the old stone town, drinking Castle beers & eating lobster. It was much nicer than that 50 some odd mile hike up a mountain we had taken earlier on that trip.
As far as the piracy goes, both around Africa and in SE Asia goes it is simply a matter of doing something to make the anticipated costs greater than the anticipated rewards. Whether than means putting a security crews on each ship (at least in the hot spots), setting up a convoy system through those areas, or refusing payouts. Each approach has its problems, put a security crew on a boat and the first pirates that get whacked will be magically transform into innocent fisherman, of course what nation will want a convoy escorted by foreign ships in & around its waters? Refusing ransom payouts means the crew is probably killed and the ship’s cargo is fenced off (the ship, I’ld imagine it would be hard to fence at least ships on the bigger side). There is always a downside, isn’t there?
Of course, probably better would be to go after the mid to high level managers of such operations — make them pay the dear cost as opposed to some schmuck looking for something to do.
One interesting story I had heard re Somalia was when the Islamic Courts held sway, piracy in the area had dropped significantly, but when Ethiopia & our guys put the Courts down piracy resurged. Don’t know about teh truth of that, but it is one report I’ve heard. Others in similar discussion seem to indicate the piracy is driven by the radical Islamists.
Where’s Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus when you need him?
OT
Arrests in Terror Case Bewilder Associates
Agents kept track of Daniel Patrick Boyd as he stockpiled weapons and trained accomplices, then moved in when their activities intensified.
Text of the Indictment
—
Israel stopped NC jihad suspect’s family in 2007
“Where’s Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus when you need him?”
Performing some routine somewhere, waiting for the Senate to give him his sailing orders.
In August of 2007 Smithsonian published an article on piracy noting that Julius Caeser was kidnapped & ransomed (for 50 talents) by pirates. JC then organized an expedition, caught the pirates, and had them crucified.
The article notes that in 2006 239 major pirate attacks occurred, 188 crewman take hostage with 15 of those getting killed. 9 in Asia, 4 in Africa, and 1 each in the Middle East & South America.
The article relies heavily on an agency entitled The Piracy Reporting Center headquartered in Kuala Lumpur.
The article does not talk a lot about prevention. Noting a cruise ship used a sonic weapon to deter attackers and telling the tale of a USN Cruiser pursuing and capturing pirates (and turning them over to Kenya for trial).
From the John Varley novel “Demon”.
I know it lacks that so essential Kerryesque now Obamaesque nuance.
o/t but a good ‘save’ as it points toward answers to a question that we continually ask — “Where’s the American Right?”
http://mises.org/store/product.aspx?ProductID=434
I really wonder if there’s anyone of either the Dems or Republicans that believes Obama actually made a decision and gave an order to shoot the pirates.
Most commenters slid right past it.
“There is a long supply chain involved in every hijacking”.
#5 outlaw_wizard said it best. For each hijacking take out the nearest port. Everything within 200 yards of the water. All infrastructure and local marine facilities. Leave it as rubble, or dust, or mud. After the first two or three ports were gone the other cities would interrupt the flow of men and supplies on their own. All of a sudden it would no longer be fun and profitable.
“Where’s Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus when you need him?”
“Performing some routine somewhere, waiting for the Senate to give him his sailing orders.”
Waiting for the Senate? That’ll take forever! Where’s Aulus Gabinius when you need him?
…recently saw a History Channel show on the Battle of Actium. Those ships were BIG! They’ve found a bronze ram fairly recently and extrapolated to iirc 160′ long and broad-beamed too. Rowers, sailors and marines aboard in the several hundreds.
aaron/52; include me out, too. i like being able to think freely.
Buddy: They built them plenty big. It is difficult to say how big, since “tonnage” can be calculated several ways, but there were very large Roman grain ships, about the size of a mid-sized 18th century European ship of the line. They used to haul other things too, like pozzolana ash for cement. Some were so large they could only call at a few ports. And large Chinese junks of the 15th Century were at least as large as HMS Victory at 3,500 displacement tons.
Everyone knows, and few are saying, which religion the current crop of pirates follow.
This is undoubtedly very simplistic, but my answer to the current hostage problem; when a hostage is taken, hold a public (very) memorial service. Once it is ascertained where the hostage is, give him an honour guard – by converting him, and the ~10 square miles around him and anyone present in that area, into a rapidly expanding cloud of highly ionised plasma.
I suspect that the taking of hostages would rapidly become an unpopular hobby.
HMS Victory, afloat this minute (in Plymouth?), is an astounding machine. No really –we could NOT build a copy today, period, no qualifiers.