More Piracy Near Somalia

[JMA]

JMA,

A similar story appeared maybe two years ago, then claiming it was a cruise for Americans IIRC and it was soon found to be a hoax.

Could be. I remember back to the days after Victoria Falls town got mortared from Zambia when there was a increase in tourism (not massive) from yanks and Germans. Is there not a name for the people who seek out this adventure/danger?

[jmm99]

from JMA
Is there not a name for the people who seek out this adventure/danger?

... "unprotected combatants", "unprotected belligerents", "unprivileged combatants", "unprivileged belligerents". So also for the pirates.

You can look it all up and add the citations.

Regards

Mike

[huskerguy7]

If we had the political will to solve this problem, which we arguably don't at the moment, what kind of strategy do you think would be ideal? Allowing private security contractors to carry heavy weapons? Conducting a full blown peace operation? Shifting most of our diplomatic energy from Mogadishu to Puntland? Training a coast guard?

David Axe recently wrote an interesting article that discusses how the overall strategy is failing. Maj Gen Tom Wilkerson, CEO of USNI, says

We could use the same techniques that are helping us take out terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan to take out pirates in Somalia.

I found his statement to be thought-provoking. Would a "CT" strategy, similar to how we saw Gen McChrystal and Adm McRaven using in Afghanistan, work against Somalian pirates? Or, would this be inefficient as the pirates tend to be more similar to an organized crime group?

Thoughts?

[Entropy]

huskerguy7,

The problem is that the pirates currently hold over 500 hundred prisoners from a variety of nations. Any action against the pirates will put those people at risk and I think any country would be pretty pissed off if it's hostages were executed in response to a unilateral US action.

So there are any number of possible courses of action against the pirates, including the one you link to. However, one must also consider the downsides to any option and so far they've all got some pretty big downsides.

[JMA]

... "unprotected combatants", "unprotected belligerents", "unprivileged combatants", "unprivileged belligerents". So also for the pirates.

You can look it all up and add the citations.

Regards

Mike

I was thinking more along the lines of War Tourism and to a lesser extent Extreme Tourism

[carl]

Courtesy of the SWJ twitter feed thing, here is a link to a story about a compressed air cannon meant to protect merchantmen from the restless youth of the coast of the area that used to be Somalia.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/245629

This thing can launch clusters of golf balls at 450 mph. It is cool in a boys toys sort of way. It is interesting in that the world may be inching toward letting the merchantmen defend themselves, eventually maybe with lethal force.

It is also interesting in that it is reminiscent of the Holman Projector, which the British also invented.

[davidbfpo]

A lot cheaper than one of the UK's leading cruise ships on a world cruise recently, which when in the Indian Ocean danger zone banned passengers from the promenade decks, deployed protective items, travelled at high speed 24/7, reduced lighting at night and more importantly had a 100+ Ghurkhas and a smaller number of Royal Marines aboard. Unclear if the manpower was on hire or serving.(All information second hand).

[davidbfpo]

Some three weeks ago JMM asked on locating data on US shipping affected by piracy and Entropy offered some pointers. Courtesy of a story on a cruise ship disabled in the Baltic:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...r-failure.html I found a ship tracking website:http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/static/Company.html and home page:http://www.vesseltracker.com/app

For a relatively small subscription you can track vessels.

I was not aware that the internationally mandated Automatic Identification System (AIS) means all vessels over 300 tonnes report location plus, for more see:http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/stat...html#wasistais

Admittedly some ship captains turn their AIS off at times (from a Swedish observer).

[carl]

Here is an item from Information Dissemination based on a Navy Times article about the crew of a U.S. Navy helo destroying a pirate skiff and killing 4 pirates as they were attacking a merchantman.

http://www.informationdissemination....#disqus_thread

It appears the pirate's life is getting a bit more dangerous as the weeks pass.