Recent attacks by Somali pirates have led to calls for the navies of the world to do more to neutralize the threat of piracy. Setting modern Jack Aubreys loose on the fiends is a capital idea, but the first thing needed is more Tom Lingards. Tom Ligard is a figure who appeared in Joseph Conrad’s first two novels, which I haven’t read, and is the main character in The Rescue. The seafaring in Conrad’s stories is for commercial purpose, not military, and yet is not lacking in romance and devotion to duty. In many ways, the devotion is purer toiling to create value from the raw earth than serving the king for pay and prize.
When I read of these pirate hijackings, I am astonished at the owners putting a ship and cargo worth $100 million out in the open without any reasonable defense against some group that could want to steal it. Last week, the crew of a Chinese cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden successfully warded off pirates for four hours by using beer bottles and homemade bombs. Homemade bombs? Why weren’t they armed with real weapons? Because it isn’t worth it to the owners, though they somehow think it is worth it for the navies of nations whose flags their ships don’t carry to fight their battles for them. A very larger crude carrier (VLCC) like the Sirius Star hijacked last month costs over $50,000 a day to charter and is worth about $100 million. As huge and expensive as they are, though, within thirty years each will be exhausted and scrapped. A good refrigerator may last longer. So, the owners don’t see enough reason to equip their crews against the marauders that an unlucky ship will encounter. But, by all means, please send someone else’s navy to protect their capital investments.
John, I used to be in the Merchant Marine. What you’re saying would make sense as long as the pirates only have small arms. In other words, arming the ships would work for about a month.
Traditionally, an official Navy is the way to protect merchant ships. But moreover, once you start arming commercial shipping against pirates who are using small arms, then the pirates upgrade to Stingers, bazookas, mortars, rocket launchers, rocket-propelled grenades, and bigger stuff.
Another reason is that arming a ship, is tantamount to telling the crew that they will likely need to fight for their lives. And civilian crews don’t want to fight for the owner’s vessel or cargo. It’s just not worth it to the crew, and that’s not their job, it’s not what they signed on to do.
The owners would have to hire mercenaries to do the fighting, and keep them on board in addition to the crew. And the crew would still get caught in the crossfire, and get shot at by the pirates as they board. The pirates would not be able to distinguish between a merc and a crewman.
As it stands, the pirates _currently_ only want the goods. They don’t want to kill the crew. They don’t even want the ship either, just a ransom. However, if the crew fights back, then the pirates will have to up the ante and escalate the force, and try to kill the people who are shooting at them.
So the real answer is convoys with naval escorts. That way the naval ships engage the enemy and take the fire, and can use “full” military force by professional warriors, and not require civilian crews to learn double-duty as temporary trigger-pullers.
It’s not like the Somali pirates want to keep the ship and make the crew walk the plank. The pirates want a pay-off so they can let the ship and crew go on their way.
If I was sailing my own boat and it was attacked, I’d fight. But if I’m a “hireling”, why should I risk my life for someone else’s cargo? That’s not part of the job description.
Book, I heard a story that I found interesting. Apparently one of the ships attacked by the pirates had a “safe room” below decks and a way of disabling the navigation system so it could only be used if you knew the password. So, the pirates attacked and the crew turned off the engines and the navigation system and ALL retreated to the safe room, where they barricaded themselves in. The pirates had no way to pilot the ship and couldn’t get at the potential hostages. The cargo could only be offloaded on dock. So, the pirates gave up and went to go find another target.
This strategy sounds risky to me because the frustrated pirates could in theory scuttle the ship and let it sink.
Anyway, this tactic kind of sounds like some of the tactics used by the Nephites in the BoM.
Or the pirates could bring a couple tug boats next time.
You can also bet that the frustrated and angry pirates will despoil as much of the ship as possible, taking or spoiling the food from the galley, sabotaging whatever equipment they can on the bridge or engine room, peeing on the crews bunks, etc.
Attacking (and kidnapping) a commercial ship is an act of war. It justifies a military response. The main problem nowadays is that the flag that the vessel flies is most often a flag of convenience, Panamanian or Liberian, etc. And the ship owners are of another country, and the crew of various countries, and the cargo owners are of another country. Panama and Liberia are not going to get involved, so the owners (of ship and cargo) go to their government and cry, and the government says “uh, you’re not flying our flag, so this is dicey and we’ll have to go through the U.N. to get international approval, etc.)
If it was American-owned ships flying the American flag, you could bet that there would have been a US military response by now. Same thing with Britain or France or Russia. I doubt the pirates would attack Russian flagged and Russian owned ships, as they’d get no mercy.
One of the general theories I believe is that if you reward something, you get more of it. Caving in to the ransom is bad. The pirates will just use part of that money to upgrade their arsenals, and get bigger and faster attack ships and bigger guns.
I believe that the navies of the countries representing the vessels (ship owners and cargo owners) that are currently being held (over 20 ships at least) need to attack the ports where those ships are, and teach the pirates that it won’t be tolerated.
If the pirates are using Somalia as home port, and the Somalian gov’t is doing nothing to stop them, basically, as I understand it then according to international maritime law, the countries representing the _flags_ of the ships can righteously and legally declare war on Somalia. Other countries (countries other than the flag of the ship) don’t have standing in international law to go after them, so other authorization (like the UN) or other justification (the U.S. having to play international cop again) needs to be worked out.
Bookslinger, it is always great to have someone who knows something show up. I am not convinced about the escalation problem. Some professional criminals would do what you say and buy missiles and such, but I doubt most of these groups have any capability to upgrade. My sense from the reports is that most of the pirates are low-grade opportunists who can be fought off with beer bottles and water hoses as often as not. And it appears that some crews are fighting, maybe only when they have a reasonable advantage. Even if the best answer is separate combat vessels protecting trouble spots, it seems like it should be the problem of the Liberian-flagged ship owners to outfit their own fighting ships.
Would there be complications entering ports if a cargo ship were well-armed?
Escalation among African Pirates? Umm, African thugs have been killing each other wholesale with US-made and Russian/Soviet-made arms for at least 50 years now. Russia and the US have been arming the current and onging conflicts in the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia (plus more) for years now. I’m sure there are plenty of arms dealers who would be willing to sell more arms to the Somali pirates, who already have a few tens of millions of dollars from ransoms that have been paid for by now. Plus, the pirates could buy them from other Africans, a couple times removed from the outside arms dealers.
Yes, I read about that Chinese ship fending off a boarding party of pirates. Let’s see how long or how often that works. It’s a gang/thug mentality. If you throw a rock at a gang member, what do you think he and the rest of his gang are going to do? No, you don’t want to start something in international waters with no cops around unless you can play it several steps ahead.
If bottles and water hoses work, fine. But small arms? No, at least don’t _plan_ on shooting unless you’re prepared and capable of sinking the boat attacking you.
Also, you have to assume that the pirates have _at least_ AK-47′s. That’s going to be the minimum you have to plan for. So if you want to defend without a big risk of getting shot up yourself, the ships need something bigger to sink an attack boat that works beyond the effective range of an AK-47.
I know enough from personal armed self-defense classes, that you don’t use _deadly_ force unless you are prepared and willing to kill the attacker. You can’t shoot and claim you only wanted to warn them off. Shooting at all tells the other side you’re willing to use deadly force, so they will also act accordingly to “defend” themselves.
Once your weapon is brought to bear, you have to plan on the _likelihood_ of blood (preferrably the other guy’s) and someone dieing. You _hope_ the bad guys call it off, and if they do, you stop shooting. But once the threshhold of deadly force is crossed, you have to be willing to see it all the way through, or don’t go there, because the bad guys might call your bluff.
When I was in the Merchant Marine 30 years ago, there were no inspections by the local port authorities of the ships. The port’s country only looks at the cargo, and that’s after it is put ashore. So as long as any armaments are hidden, I would imagine they could go undetected. So you could keep them behind hard cover, closed doors and portholes, not just tarps where the outlines could show.
But word gets around. If a commercial ship is armed, that shipping company (owners) is then known as having done that. You couldn’t keep it a secret.
Commercial container ships, and especially oil tankers, can be pretty big. You’d have to have defensive positions all along the perimeter, both sides. You can’t let the enemy board, because you don’t want to shoot at targets standing on your own deck, because then you’d be shooting holes in your own ship. You’d have to cover all sides of the ship at the same time.
Many automated ships have a skeleton crew of about 10 or 12. Even an average container ship might have a crew of 15. That’s not enough to defend a ship that is 600 feet long, no matter how well-armed it is.
Even if you do ‘well arm’ the ship with laser guided weapons and automated robotic machine guns, there’s maintenence and practice and training that needs to be done. You’re still talking about a weapons maintenance crew in addition to mercenaries to man it all. You’d be talking a capital investment of a few million dollars to “well arm” the ship, and ongoing maintenance of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and additional manpower (mercenaries and maintenance mechanics) of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Then you have to figure that the pirates already have 10 to 20 million in seed money to outfit several attack boats. So you’d have to prepare to defend against, I’d guess, 4 boats, each trying to put boarders on your ship. I can’t see that happening with 16 civilians who had only a couple days on the firing range as practice.
Personal small arms among civilians is for when you don’t plan on a fight. Guns in the hands of civilians (which I’m all for, yay 2nd amendment) are an emergency-use-only thing when your life is on the line. If you _plan_ or _know_ there’s going to be a fight, you either A) make sure your firepower is bigger than the bad guy’s firepower, or B) don’t go there in the first place.
You know, Kadafi (Libyan dictator) all of a sudden turned into Mr. Nice Guy after the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled the Taliban, and took out Saddam Hussein. Deterrance is what you want. The US, Britain, France, China, and whoever else’s ships are being attacked need to teach the Somalians a lesson, and it will work for a while, and then they’ll just need an occasional reminder or follow-up lesson after individual war-lords forget.
The reason this is going on, is that the governments of the world have let it go on. From what I’ve read, our Navy is still figuring things out, about what to do with the bad guys once they’re caught on land. Who are they turned over to? As for the bad guys in international waters, I hope they don’t arrest them, just sink them.
But they do have to go after the “capos” or war-lords or sponsors on the land. The guys on the attack boats are just low-level soldiers who can be easily replaced. Somebody is high enough to have an international bank account that the ransoms are being wired to, and politically powerful enough not to have it confiscated by other crooks and corrupt politicians in his home country.
These are simply stoned samoli punks and these punks could be easily defeated with small arms…and it would be quite fun doing so. The world must stop catering to the weak and worshiping its tragedies…period.