During the World Wars, there were always some ships traveling alone, outside of the convoy system, even though that greatly increased the danger to them. Again, I’m not sure exactly why.
I’m not so sure the pirates can “wait them out.” Such a strategy would involve being aware of the naval presence and lying low; but the navies could simply suddenly move into the area without publicity. Since the pirates lack aircraft carriers and satellite reconnaissance, their first indication of a naval ship’s presence would be via eyeball, wouldn’t it? At which point, the Navy can do what it does best.
This can be repeated in an irregular pattern indefinitely – all navies are already paying for training runs, right? – and the pirates will be unable to operate without frequently running afoul of serious ship-killing hardware. That’ll take the “low risk” part of the piracy equation away.
The Indian Navy has shown us the way.
Dear God, I hope pretty much everything out there is considered higher-threat than the Soviets.
Your cite is for passage of a foreign ship in the territorial waters of a coastal state. You’ll note that it prohibits all kinds of things, including fishing and research. With respect to weapons, it prohibits “exercise or practice with weapons” but does not specifically prohibit the carrying of weapons for self-defense. Paragraph (f) prohibits “launching, landing or taking on board of any military device,” but again, does not appear to prohibit simply transiting through with weapons for self-defense.
However, this ignores the larger point, which is that your cite only applies to passage through territorial waters. Do you have a cite that prohibits weapons for self-defense in international waters?
It is easy to find a convoy (relatively speaking). But, once located, it is likely that another ship will be sunk before the destroyers drive off the attacker. Convoying makes sense in a cost/benefit analysis.
It is difficult to find a single ship in the ocean. However, it is almost a certainty that once located by a belligerent your ship will be sunk. The trade-off between low probability of discovery and almost certain destruction once discovered makes sense to some shippers.
Also, the fast passenger ships that were pressed into service for transports (like the Queen Elizabeth) were much faster than their escorts and it was deemed safer to let them race alone rather than plod along with the merchantmen.
Perhaps a little off topic, but this convoy stuff is interesting.
I might argue it’s the other way around-in atlantic ocean terms, a convoy isn’t much bigger than a single ship. But you might have 80 single ship sailings or one convoy.
So even if you have a quarter the chance of discovering a single ship as a convoy, you’re still going to find 20 single ships or one 80-ship convoy.
Presumably, you’ll lose more ships in a convoy-target rich environment and all that. But not twenty times as many.
Also (as seen in WWII), there was some dispute over where to put our destroyers-in “hunter groups” trying to find submarines, or escorting convoys. We pretty quickly figured out that it was way better to put them around the convoys-it guarantees any sub trying to attack has to go where the destroyers are. Far better to do that than hoping to have the double coincidence of having a sub and a DD in the same place at the same time.
And the numbers seem pretty terrible for shipowners-all I can find easily is WWI statistics, but the loss rate for independent sailing is 5-10%, when the loss rate in a convoy is almost always less than half a percent.
Not true. John Keegan has shown (and doubtless the idea is not original with him) in The Price of Admiralty that convoy decreased the chances of location by searching submarines. The ships in a convoy appear to make a large target, but in reality the ocean is very freaking large indeed and, by clumping a lot of ships into one (relatively tiny) area, the convoy system dramatically decreased the number of ships exposed to detection. Instead of 50 chances to see a single ship at a time, you have one (only very slightly larger) chance to see 50 ships at once – followed by 49 chances to waste your time seeing nothing.
The Germans overcame this in WWII to a degree by using long lines on U-Boats as barriers to detect a convoy and then using radio to coordinate a massed attack. Although they had quite a few successes with this tactic, a large number of convoys slipped through unsighted and unmolested.
Incidentally, convoy is essentially an offensive practice – it doesn’t guarantee protection of the merchant ships, but it does guarantee there will always be a sub-hunting force near any sinking, thus exposing the subs to a lot more attacks than would otherwise be the case.
There’s a lot more detail in the book; I recommend it.
edit: didn’t see **whorfin’s **post as I composed this.
So, not just a strategy for the board game Battleships then?
I wonder if any of the pirates might try a protection racket or dob in their erstwhile colleagues on a rival ship for a bit of money from the shipping companies.
Note that cruise ships routinely have skeet/trap shooting off the stern.
I thought that pirates were starting to make a comeback, but it appears that a suspected pirate “mother ship” has just been sunk.
Have the pirates actually shot up any ships? It would seem that sinking a tanker would not only cost them the tanker but the oil spill would result is a public outcry and possibly them being hunted down. It would surely be bad business.
More Somali pirate news:
Somali pirates transform villages into boomtowns
Although I think the writer may have meant seamy. Neither humidity nor eroticism are generally associated with coastal villages in Somalia.
Smugglers?
This isn’t done due to the catastrophic effects it would have on global warming, as shown by this chart.
Trolling.
Send a single ship out. If it is not attacked send the convoy to follow. If it is attacked divert the convoy.
I’ve never heard that explanation. Plus, we had a far better way to know where the attackers were-their own reports (and some traffic analysis, long-range air search, and the like)