My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that the fear of liability prevents the arming of merchant ships. That can be incurred in several ways. One is where a jumpy merchant crew opens fire on an innocent small boat, or what is later alleged to be an innocent small boat, for which they may be sued. Alternatively, one of the crew may be hurt in repelling boarders and he may later allege that whatever he may have contractually agreed to, he is entitled to more damages.

If your crew is largely Bangladeshi, Filipino, or such, then it is probably cheaper to let them be kidnapped and ransom them. If any should die in captivity, a few tens of thousands of dollars are typically enough to buy the silence of their destitute families. Human rights lawyers are expensive to pay off. Filipino widows are comparatively cheaper to mollify.

One way to mitigate the first problem is to create an armed cadre of merchant seamen, who can be properly trained and embarked on the ships along threatened routes; they can shift licensed M2s or 25 mm deck mounted guns from vessel to vessel. The deck mountings can be standardized and ships along the route can be required to have them. As to liability, that’s where Fred Ikle’s suggestion that the UN forbid the payment of ransom may be a good way to go. This would put a crimp in the liability argument of the human rights people because if resistance is mandated by the UN, then that’s the final word in their world. Things don’t have to make sense to the politically correct ambulance chasers, but the right bit of paper can make all the difference.