Re: US unveils plan to tackle piracy

[Guest guest]

The first three points are good.

Freezing the assets and going after the brokers who are handling the pirates' loot and ransoms would be a good start.

More ships will help, but only if they have looser rules of engagement to shoot pirate vessels and more authority to board suspected pirate boats. This will lead to shootouts and such, so it would have to be taken very seriously.

Allowing merchant ships to carry personal weapons for the crew, training them in their use and possibly having nations and shipping companies pool their money to hire mercenaries to help protect cargo ships in the area would also be a good idea. Nation's like the US that have a Merchant Marine could easily train up their crews to repel boarders. Since they are effectively a branch of the military, why they aren't anyway is a good question. Other nations would have a greater problem, since ships flagged out of convenience nations have more diverse crews for many nations, so it might not work as well. A few mercenaries, carefully vetted, licensed and trained, could get on a ship at one end of the danger zone, remain on it through the area and leave it to board another ship at the other end, one that is coming back through the threatened area. Each team would make a passage or two then stand down for a while, rest, train, etc., then make another few passages. Doing this would take some strain off of the navies.

Now, stabilizing the situation in Somalia will effectively be impossible. This is so because it would be an extremely long term project, meaning several generations at the least, and the US doesn't have the resources or the patience for that. In 1993, we had an effect when the Marines and other very heavily patrolled the streets of Mogadishu and other cities. All wasn't perfect. The locals quickly learned our rules of engagement and then went about their business of killing and brutalizing each other while running rings around us. Then Operation Ranger happen, Americans died and we pulled out.

Now, the Somalis look at a longer timeline. They still remember having kicked us out after killing a mere handful of our troops. We killed maybe 1,000 of them in Operation Ranger vs. 19 Americans dead. Still, that didn't phase them, but it made us run away. Their leaders are also savvy. They know how stretched we are and that military action won't be popular. Somali is now also home to a more militant groups of factions that wouldn't just tolerate us like in 1993, but they would actively seek to kill Americans, or other Europeans, now.

The British and Italians controlled parts of Somali for generations. The British learned to distrust the Somalis, but also respect them as warriors. They had a saying something like "If you see a Somali, shoot him. You can only be sure to trust him if you shoot the body again." We would have to control Somalia for many generations to try to change their culture. That would mean controlling everything from schools, police, entertainment, everything, to try to reprogram them. My guess is that it wouldn't work.

Be we will probably try ground operations and they will go badly. Maybe not militarily, if the pirates are dumb enough to stand up and make fine targets of themselves, but it would be a public relations disaster. That would hurt us far more than anything else.

In a message dated 4/15/2009 4:15:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, no_reply writes:

She said an expanded international effort was needed, as well as freezing pirates' assets, and plugging gaps in the shipping industry's own defences. Improving the situation in Somalia itself was also key, she said. Great deals on Dell’s most popular laptops – Starting at $479