Ok, this is a small enclosed lifeboat. It’s not like a SEAL team can sneak on and pick off the pirates. Secondly, if you recall the French vessel that was taken, here’s a quote:
[Quote=news]
San Fran Chronicle
French forces moved to retake a yacht that had been hijacked last weekend, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said in a statement. The operation left one hostage and two of the pirates dead. Four other hostages, including a child, survived, and three pirates were captured.
[/Quote]
Here’s the situation:
The lifeboat isn’t going anywhere that the DD can’t follow. No outsiders are going to get past a DD to help the pirates. The situation is under control, and the danger level to the hostage is low. Negotiations are underway.
So, your plan involves SEAL sniper teams and assault elements waiting submerged in the water to kill a bunch of pirates and rescue the hostage, both of whom are in a tiny enclosed space. They are “surrounding” a more or less drifting raft, and somehow staying in the water ready to go despite being based on a moving destroyer at an unknown but probably large distance from the raft and remaining completely unobserved by the pirates?
We have some sort of realism failure here. On one hand, we have soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because our military is supposedly incompetent and badly led, and we were “defeated” by the Somalis in the battle of Mogadishu. The presumably-GIGN (French and world-class) team just this week lost 20% of the hostages in their assault against pirates.
On the other side, we have our magical snipers and SEAL teams that we learned about from Charlie Sheen and the Punisher, who are shooting from an unknown distance (or while invisibly treading water), and are in the water for hours at a time.
I think your ideas about what the tactical situation is are a little bit off. 200 yards at sea is likely way too close – the most the Navy will say is “within visual distance” (up to 10km or so); and to ease the pirates’ nerves, I am betting they don’t want the ship to loom menacingly. There’s also no easy way to “sneak up”. If you’ve got some knowledge about hostage situations, then you would know that the general approach in the U.S. is to talk them down. SWAT doesn’t bust in unless things to shit. They talk. And talk. And talk more. Sure they might be ready to go, but generally SWAT teams can be right outside the building instead of being in the water, presumably submerged, breathing canned air.
If this were Call of Duty, then yes, we could snipe out the pirates (and incidentally make the next batch much less willing to negotiate). But this is real life, and it’s a huge ocean, and we don’t have magic commandos, and we have expert negotiators from the FBI doing their best (and apparently succeeding) to resolve the situation peacefully.
It’s problematic that we believe our military should be so incredibly capable and effective and safe, because we expect surgical bomb strikes that always hit their targets and snipers that can shoot the gun out of a bad guy’s hand, when reality is always more messy. So when the SEALS go in and mess up and the hostage dies “Military fuckup”. Of course, if they bow to the rules of the real world, they are incompetent.
