How To Grow Your Own Pirates
The Europeans have provided an example of a thoroughly stupid anti-piracy policy off the Horn of Africa. You can read about it in the linked article below.
The region of Somalia has been a lawless wasteland for decades now; in fact, it's startling that there's anybody left alive in Somalia, famines following on bloodbaths, following on civil wars, genocides, HIV epidemics, Islamists and warlords being the standard condition there. The US sent troops and free food in the 1990s, but the Somalis turned on us utterly in the Battle of Mogadishu and we decided if they didn't want our help, they wouldn't get it. Recently, pirates have by rising up off this chaos like flies off a dead dog, and attacking anything that floats off the Horn - yachts, cruise ships, fishing boats.
Now here's the thing. International law prohibits civilian ships from carrying firearms, as if the crew of a Spanish fishing trawler are going to break out their small arms and conquer New Jersey. This dipshit convention makes any civilian ship a big fat target for pirates, who observe no such restriction. So half a dozen pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades can chase you down in their twenty-five foot open-topped boat and do whatever they want to you, because you're abiding by the international laws which protect us all.
A word about RPGs, by the way; the media talks about them like they're the finger of God, but what they really are is a dumb fire bomb on the end of a rocket, just big enough to kill a Chevrolet. You surely don't want to be shot in the face with one, but they aren't the Strangelove bomb.
One or two riflemen with M1 .308 Winchesters could keep a cruise ship quite safe from any Somali pirates by moving and shooting from one window or another, to keep the enemy from knowing where to shoot back, and the first bullets go through the outboard. But this is illegal. So recently the French, and then the Spanish, have hit on the policy of handing out million dollar plus ransoms to pirates who capture yachts and fishing boats. This is fucking idiotic, because all it does is encourage every jerk with an automatic rifle and and a raft to take to the seas looking for a paycheck. The French and Spanish might as well paint dollar signs on the sides of their ships. Notice in the linked story that the French paid a ransom on April 11th, demonstrating that the ultimate retirement payoff floated by the Horn every day - then on the 20th, pirates seized a Spanish tuna boat. That's not what I would call your common coincidence.
Another legal method of battling pirates (besides giving in to their extortions), is to send warships to sink them, which the US does. Unfortunately this is massively inefficient. Millions of dollars are expended hunting down one pirate in twenty. Maybe, someday, we'll start arming the victims.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/04/27/pirates.spain.ap/index.html
The region of Somalia has been a lawless wasteland for decades now; in fact, it's startling that there's anybody left alive in Somalia, famines following on bloodbaths, following on civil wars, genocides, HIV epidemics, Islamists and warlords being the standard condition there. The US sent troops and free food in the 1990s, but the Somalis turned on us utterly in the Battle of Mogadishu and we decided if they didn't want our help, they wouldn't get it. Recently, pirates have by rising up off this chaos like flies off a dead dog, and attacking anything that floats off the Horn - yachts, cruise ships, fishing boats.
Now here's the thing. International law prohibits civilian ships from carrying firearms, as if the crew of a Spanish fishing trawler are going to break out their small arms and conquer New Jersey. This dipshit convention makes any civilian ship a big fat target for pirates, who observe no such restriction. So half a dozen pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades can chase you down in their twenty-five foot open-topped boat and do whatever they want to you, because you're abiding by the international laws which protect us all.
A word about RPGs, by the way; the media talks about them like they're the finger of God, but what they really are is a dumb fire bomb on the end of a rocket, just big enough to kill a Chevrolet. You surely don't want to be shot in the face with one, but they aren't the Strangelove bomb.
One or two riflemen with M1 .308 Winchesters could keep a cruise ship quite safe from any Somali pirates by moving and shooting from one window or another, to keep the enemy from knowing where to shoot back, and the first bullets go through the outboard. But this is illegal. So recently the French, and then the Spanish, have hit on the policy of handing out million dollar plus ransoms to pirates who capture yachts and fishing boats. This is fucking idiotic, because all it does is encourage every jerk with an automatic rifle and and a raft to take to the seas looking for a paycheck. The French and Spanish might as well paint dollar signs on the sides of their ships. Notice in the linked story that the French paid a ransom on April 11th, demonstrating that the ultimate retirement payoff floated by the Horn every day - then on the 20th, pirates seized a Spanish tuna boat. That's not what I would call your common coincidence.
Another legal method of battling pirates (besides giving in to their extortions), is to send warships to sink them, which the US does. Unfortunately this is massively inefficient. Millions of dollars are expended hunting down one pirate in twenty. Maybe, someday, we'll start arming the victims.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/04/27/pirates.spain.ap/index.html