Link

Be sure to click on the Title Link first, as that will give you Neo’s comment section that started my post and the context for it.

If you analyze my positions I’ve covered here and the position I wrote 2 years ago, you won’t see much difference in the generalities. You will see a huge difference in the specifics.

When I talk about Pax Americana or the American Empire, I am talking about political will and specific political structures present in the past that is not present in today’s world (like universal jurisdiction to try and execute pirates in any parts of the seas, whether it belongs to one nation or another). At the time, I had not covered international piracy much. By now, it is not news to me any more.

“Best efforts”? I wouldn’t call telling the US Navy to back off a pirate ship once it entered Somalian waters “best efforts”. Half efforts, perhaps, but not best efforts.

With the general situation having deteriorated so quickly

I hope only idiots believed that by paying 30 million ransom the “problem would go away”. Cause if it wasn’t only idiots…

increasingly dangerous route will be under pressure and will need to be reassessed.

This means that eventually, if the US Navy doesn’t take care of business, the private corporations and businessmen will start paying ransom and tribute directly to pirates. Depending on how many pirate factions there are and what parts of the water they control, the increase cost in shipping will likely cause economic recession or even starvation in some parts of the globe.

This is what it means to live in a world free of the “oppressive” United States, but even then they won’t feel the full effect.

As for Booze and women, a correction should be made that they don’t spend all their money on them.

The threat level of piracy here will depend on whether pirates fought that Indian warship or ran for it. If it is the former, big troubles for global economy. If the latter, there is still time to fix the problem.

When the Indian vessel tried to halt the ship, he said, “the vessel’s threatening response was that she would blow up the naval warship if it” came closer.

Guess they didn’t realize that they were dealing with somebody like me, except that somebody had the firepower at their hands to make good on trumping the pathetic threats of pirates.

The ship chased the first boat which was later found abandoned. The other boat made good its escape into darkness,” he said.

Need submarines. Blast a full spread of torpedoes into a ship and watch if those “speedboats” come out with somebody alive at the helm.

Nice experience for the sub commanders.

“It is the first attack of its kind in which such a big vessel has been hijacked so far away from the coast,” said Cyrus Mody, of the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors global piracy. “It shows that the pirates now have the capability and capacity to sustain themselves in deep sea until the vessel actually comes by.”

What it shows is that piracy has become profitable enough that people are able to increase their logistical capacities to this degree and that they are recruiting new members.

What do you think the pirates spend their profits on? Booze and women? No. They spend it on upgrades and buying bigger, faster, more well armed ships, including better small arms weapons.

THe Navy of a nation is the first and natural defense against pirates. But notice I didn’t include them as one of the Top Three. Why? Because navies can suppress pirates, but not end their operations.

The reason why that isn’t part of the historic solutions to piracy (Q-ships are not civilian ships simply manned by US Marines, they are military ships first and foremost) is due to the fact that civilian agents simply cannot afford weapons or the training to use them and still make a profit. It is easier, oftentimes, for them to simply pay “tribute” to pirates. And that is what they have done.

In all of naval warfare history, the amount of times you see civilian traders buying weapons for their ships to fend off pirates is like almost zero. The money isn’t there, Book. Others mentioned something about insurance here, but even if it wasn’t insurance, it would be something.

The government could “subsidize” those civilian merchants but what then does a government have a Navy for then?

Indian Navy sinks pirate ship
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/19/asia/20pirate.php

Correction: when the supply of fat targets starts to decrease and the demand for better equipped, trained, and armed pirate ships start to increase, the profit for pirates start to decrease.

There are 3 types of responses to piracy: all are well known to be effective in human history.

Q-ships

Punitive expeditions on pirate strongholds and bases (including villages with little Somali children and women)

Execution of All Captured Pirates

Let us start off with Q-ships. Q-ships are military upgraded merchants with weapons, both ship to ship and onboard personal arms, complete with an armed boarding party, that will go around the sea lanes hoping to be jacked by pirates. Since pirates operate on economic principles like supply and demand, when the supply of defenseless merchants decrease and the demand for more financial risk and bodily harm increases, the business of pirating others starts to lose its popularity and rewards. You get less pirates, although those pirates may make more per ship but they also incur more losses per ship as well, eventually.

Q-ships, however, do not work if you have a catch and release policy for pirates. Most pirates will surrender if they realize they just came upon 200 Marines in a tanker armed with grenade launchers, torpedoes, missiles, gatling deck guns, 50 caliber MGs, and snipers. And now we come to the next solution to pirates.

Punitive expeditions are very effective given that once you have the intel to locate pirate bases, villages, and support centers, you can launch your conventional navy there and kill everybody. That eliminates the problem, for a time. As I said before, pirates operate on economic principles and if it is a choice between starving and pirating goods, guess which one people will chose. This will be true even if the penalty is death for them and their families (they can always hide their families, that hope sustains them). In this day and age, of course, you will almost never see punitive expeditions. THe ones you do see, from Russians, for example, are mostly terrorist activities or designed as them: whether they work or not depends on whether there is a softer target for pirates to go after (like the US). The Vietcong used punitive expeditions as part of their terrorist campaign against the South as well.

Execution of all captured pirates is really effective. How effective it is depends wholly on how soon someone dies after they are captured. There is no question of guilt for he was captured on a pirate ship operating against commercial traffick. Video taping executions, putting them on youtube (or whitehouse.gov), will serve as a barrier to pirates recruitment and the economic benefits of piracy but even though it is more effective in stopping pirates, it also provides legal methods for them to oppose you. Last option in this field is executing all of them and putting on the record that “they died trying to escape”. Nobody will know on the high seas, unless they have a ship or satellite near or on ya.

The problem with this is how to “capture pirates”. You can’t capture pirates in a destroyer because pirates won’t come near one. You have to capture them with either punitive expeditions (when you see a pirate ship dock with a village, get off, go home, sleep, and come back; this wasn’t possible back in the day, however) You can also capture them with Q-ships or by having armed merchantmen give you pirates they have successfully captured (the former is more effective than the latter).

Here is what I would do. Capture as many pirates with Q-ships as you can: Number 1 priority. Make a deal with merchantmen and insurance companies, giving them a specific route where Q-ships will operate, and then rely on the merchants to subsidize your Q-ship operations with (ships, local intel, some money, maintenance parts, etc). Preferably you want your Marines and Navy guys to be living with the merchantment, in order to soak up local behavior and not make a mistake that will turn the pirates on to you.

Once you have captured many many pirates, now is the time to put into place immediate execution of them. Hold them in Iraq, preferably. Don’t hold them anywhere the media can easily get access to. Which means don’t hold them at Gitmo, in the US, in Gulf States, or in safe places like Kurdistan. Place them amongst your strongest supporters, like Sunni Al Anbar, and also place them in the most violent sectors, historically at least. Just get the media away from them and cut down on their chances to escape. Get the military tribunals up, try the pirates, execute the pirates, then repeat until finished.

If you get some good intel on where pirates are based, get up a naval expedition, go there, destroy all the houses, burn all the crops, kill all the animals, take all the men and take out one of their eyes if they have two good ones, and then leave. Whether you do this or the executions of captured pirates first, depends.

Piracy will disappear after a few of these incidents. Either that or they will pick on weaker targets, like each other or ships that aren’t from our allies (good enough). Alternatively, if you don’t want to end piracy but to use piracy or just to protect yourself against piracy, after you have conducted a few punitive missions, make it known to the Somalis that you will offer good money for pirates that will hunt ships that the US wants to be hunted (Iran). Any pirates captured by US patrols that have agreed to this exchange of services will be released, unharmed. Those pirates will be subsidized by US money, though not weapons (traceable). Everybody benefits. We benefit by having Somalians jacking up Iran and our enemies, and we get deniability. THey get our help and subsidies in order t otake on bigge rand better prey. THey also get to not to be killed and executed: a strong motivator I believe.

As for today’s world, jacked up and weak spined as it is, well, let’s just say that if you had Q-ships today and captured a few pirates, you could trade their heads for the hostages and the ship. Execute 1 pirate a day until the pirates that are holding the Ukrainians or whatever hostage release their hostages.

If that doesn’t work, start cutting up body parts to make the bodies last longer. Instead of cutting off the head and dumping the body into the water near the captured merchantmen, cut off an arm, some fingers, maybe a leg, and dump them. Wait for the sharks to come and then throw in the rest. Make sure this is in sight of the people on the merchantmen.

If you don’t know “where” the merchant ship is…. you have problems and you need to go back to basics.

They could always to put Ymarsaker on-board. What do you think, YM. It could be quite lucrative.

A merchantship will need far more than me. This isn’t simply asocial violence, although the principles are the same. People are going to need armed boarding parties (to crew captured pirate prizes) and they are going to need to be able to shoot from the deck of a tanker or transport ship. This requires weapons training, small unit tactics, and so forth. Blackwater has this in spades but they cost more than it takes to run a tanker, so it is not very economic. Besides, Blackwater simply does not have the weapons required to blow up ships. Some of those the US Navy and gov won’t let private orgs have. And it is too expensive, anyways, for a private company to afford.

So long as the President, that compassionate conservative who people like to call a brutal thug, refuses to authorize full weapons fire on any pirate ships or pirate captured ships in international or national waters, then if you adopt Q-ships and instant pirate execution, you will still get rid of piracy. Just not as fast.

Capturing pirate ships, Danny, may be profitable but I doubt it. If pirates had naval warships and navy caliber weapons, then probably, but the Somali pirates use shit for attacks on super tanks and merchantships (who sometimes don’t even have a crew numbering more than 10). Somali pirates turn a profit this way only because people like me aren’t the ones giving orders concerning how to deal with anti-piracy and international law problems.

This has nothing to do with what I know. Anyone even half way familiar with the history of piracy can do the same job, if not better, as me. The difference is desire, ruthlessness, will, and hate of pirates.

I have the desire, the ruthlessness, the will, and the requisite hate of pirates to get the job done. I just don’t have the power. Others have the power but they don’t hate pirates, they don’t have the ruthlessness, sometimes they don’t even have the desire nor the will.

Btw, if Somalis think that they can make someone like me back off because they are cutting the fingers off the captured crew and raping the women, they do not want to know what I will come up as a form of counter. My ingenuity for pain and torture far exceeds the dirt poor fools in Somalia, I assure you.

A few years ago some luxury cars came on the market with finger print scanners instead of keys, the idea being that only the owner could start the car, not just his/her key. AAAAAAAAAAAN!! Wrong. At least one car theft ring simply cut off an owners thumb, used it to start the car, and drove off with it, and the thumb. I don’t recall the fate of the owner. Now, I could well be wrong, but I don’t believe they’re selling those anymore. Even if they are, I think a ruthless car theft ring could figure out a way to convince the owner to start his car.

I don’t think our next president will have the stomach for a truly effective military response, so we will cook up some massive Save Somali Children humanitarian aid package which will actually be simply a nice, steady stream of money to the pirates like the Oil for Food scam.

Remember when Butch and Sundance were being relentlessly chased by a small army of Pinkerton men? One of the two — remarking on how much such an undertking must be costing the railroad — said “Hell, if they’d pay us that much to stop robbing them, we’d stop robbing them!”

The railroads didn’t, but the Industrial World may. Then the Western failing governments will probably start borrowing money from the pirates to stay afloat.

Ugh

Hong Kong grain ship seized as Somali pirates hold world to ransom

Washington was instrumental in the ousting of the Islamic Courts, backing Ethiopian troops to throw them out for fear that they would make Somalia a haven for extremists. Since then piracy has soared and, should it worsen – and the violence in Somalia increase – pressure will grow on the international community to reconsider its support for the corrupt and ineffective regime, even if it means the return of the Islamist Courts.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5183710.ece