Originally Posted by Blacklight

One of my first responses would be: If a port is identified as a pirate haven and is used once for that purpose, it would be bombed.

I too support military strikes against these guys. We need to send a message of cruise missiles and bombs to these guys and reduce their speedboats to matchsticks.

We also need to get a LOT more multinational armed patrols in the area. Maybe even set up a "no trafic zone" where any vessel under a certain size will be terminated on sight.

Originally Posted by Skybird

summary:
Experts estimate the annual ransom earned by those pirates to be around 300 million dollar, which is 150% of Puntlands income. Whole villages live by supporting assault commandos. Along the coasts, whole small towns with many villas have been build where the warlords and clan-chiefs are residing and live a life in wealth and luxury. Piracy has turned into a profitable industry, and whole restaurants and their kitchens pop up to supply both assault commandos and hostages with food. Village communities are in almost complete support of pirate operations, and have made it the basis of their economic living.

I think this gives an idea of what we are talking about. This is not just some poor, poor fisherman not catching eniough fish anymore and being driven by hunger whn they chase those big ships instead - this is a profitable enterprise on large scale, run by warlords and militias chasing the big money. No reason to have romantic images of the noble but poor natives in your mind. Considering it, I would expand my intial tactic, send in a carrier, and let the bombers clean the whole coast of all those noble restaurants and villas and new townships and burn them down and flatten all the pirate nests completely. In other words: waging unlimited war on land. these pirate enterprises are as desperate and innocent as is the FARC innocent of having turned from an ideologically driven guerilla into an a usual common mafia group commiting acts of ordinary organised crime: smuggling drugs and weapons, and kidnapping for ransom, not following any ideals beyond that anymore.

the original article in full also mentions that it is deeply worrying that this tanker was hijacked: outside the dangerous waters, far away from the coats nad in open blue water, pirates having used a hijecked big trawler to get out to the open sea that far and just near the tanker boarded their small attack boats. This is a complete new quality, and a very dangerous escalation.

the article also says the EU is hammering out a deal with the german navy that would allow them to be a bit more active and eventually arrest pirates - to hand them over to the somalias (very good joke), or hand them over to german authorities if they had directly threatened german "Rechtsgüter". No word on preventing attacks by tying to strike the attacking boats. It is so much safer to send a rubber boat with commandoes to recapture the ship, or have a helo hovering over a ship that is hijecked by persons armed with missile launchers.

idiots, idiots, idiots.

Originally Posted by CaptHawkeye

What's funny is that an absurdly simple way to protect merchant shipping in the Gulf is already available. It wouldn't even require arming Tankers and Freighters. Simply bring back the Convoy System. Every major world power and their dog has SOME kind of naval presense in that region. It wouldn't be hard to just organize the container ships into groups and have them escorted by a single DDG or even a Frigate.

Originally Posted by jpm1

the FARC at the origin weren' bad guys i lived in Colombia in the 80's the governments of that era were known to be highly corrupted . the problem's that these governments were supported by drug cartels which brewed billions of dollars i mean it wasn't difficult not to do the same to fight such power . i heard that then they become a kinda mafia too to finance their weapons but for having known this group at its origin at the origin they weren't corrupted guys they just wanted to fight injustice , they have gone bad then maybe don't know but at the origin they were a group of "campesinos" fighting for justice .

Originally Posted by PeriscopeDepth

Why not just put a few squads of infantry on each vessel depending on its size? Would be a lot cheaper than some NATO FFG that was made to hunt Soviet subs.

PD

Originally Posted by sonar732

Amazing enough...the price of crude is still going down after this!

EDIT: I'm surprised that there hasn't been more security details being hired by the companies that operate in the Gulf of Aden.

Originally Posted by CaptHawkeye

This increases the danger to the tank though. Since infantry squads could repel attacks easily, they could not discourage them entirely. No one is going to want to assault a convoy of 3-4 ships when a Burkleswarm is leading the pack. That's the problem with a lot of these pirates, their are so many of them and yet so few military ships to GET them. What you want to do is make them come to you.

Originally Posted by fatty

What do you guys think about allegations that these pirates are funnelling their prizes into funding terrorism? These are huge multi-million dollar ransoms that they are collecting for themselves, but they don't have very many places to spend it.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Air power.

Little Birds, Cobras, air-based recce.

FFARs, Cannons.

You don't want to wait until they "come to you". You want to actively hunt, find and kill them before they can come to you, and destroy their infrastructure on land, and the rewards their bosses have from this lucrative business. Bomb the villas and new settlements from where they operate. that way they cannot and/or will not come to you anymore.

the business must be stopped to be rewarding for them. It must be turned to be painful for them - so make it painful for them, then. when enough pirates have been killed and enough villas have been burnt, they will not come anymore.