Hey, don’t tell me, tell the Pentagon. They are the one who can use your expertise and advice, not me. Tell them they are doing it all wrong. I am sure they will be thrilled to share your wisdom.
How often does that happen?
Welllll…a couple of things. First off, you may be inclined to trust pirates with your life, but myself I’m thinking I’d take my chances in a gun fight, even if they have RPG’s. Secondly, I’m not really all that keen to spend weeks or months cooling my heals (under gun point) waiting for the situation to be resolved so that I can go home. Third…while you may trust the pirates to do no harm do you really trust the company to ransom you? What if they have ‘fallen on tough economic time’? Especially if you are on some Liberian flagged rattle trap of a ship transporting cheap French wine a bad Hong Kong porn?
Myself, assume the ship was armed, I’m thinking I’d take my chances. YMMV of course.
-XT
The pirates are highly motivated to keep some or all of the crew alive. The presence of hostages prevent military boarding parties from taking back the ship.
You may be a badass gunslinger, eager to face off against any pirates who dare set peg leg upon your deck, but I think that a lot of ships’ crews are less well-prepared.
[quote=“mswa*
*s, post:71, topic:492397”]
Eh, you should just give the bridge crew sidearms and put shotguns in a lockbox. You don’t need the extra expense of hiring military crews. Just allow the crew to fight back.
[/QUOTE]
In the first place, if you arm the crew (or the ship, like with mounted .50s as someone suggested above), you would not be allowed to enter any ports in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina or Chile, just off the top of my head. I suppose a lot of other countries have similar laws. A few years ago I had to help the local consul rescue an unfortunate American who, not knowing the law, had brought a single shot Olympic target pistol on his yacht; he lost his boat and was sentenced to ten years in prison. (The Mexican government didn´t want to feed him for ten years and encouraged him to escape while out on bail). Countries in Latin America are serious about weapons being imported.
Perhaps…but you are trusting that you would be among the ‘some’, and that no military types would get a wild hair up their ass and try to ‘rescue’ you…and ultimately you are trusting the pirates to be smart and play nice.
Myself, I trust people to be stupid and to do stupid things…and I trust that the demon god Murphy to always be waiting in the wings.
Perhaps they would, perhaps not. Myself, I think that most of the crews aren’t given the choice…which makes it a singular solution, ehe? From what I’ve seen, crews that actually COULD fight back have…and mostly, as with any criminal, if the prey fights back at all it’s easier to go somewhere else where the pickings are better.
Ultimately your strategy boils down to trust though…trust in a bunch of Somalia pirates to do the right thing, to remain calm, to play nice, and to not shoot you…trust that some Naval unit from East Mongolia won’t decide that they will try and rescue you…and trust that your company will pay off the pirates to get you home.
And ultimately even if that works out you are going to be a prisoner in some Somalia village somewhere for days, weeks or months…which is bound to suck even if someone doesn’t decide to shoot you and feed you to the fish.
-XT
What part of “the political will doesn’t exist” did you miss? Bush didn’t attack Iraq without the UN resolutions and Congressional approval to back it up.
You are quite mistaken. My strategy is to not crew merchant vessels off the coast of Somalia, but this isn’t about me… or you. My thought is that, even if they had some small arms, the crews would likely not be as motivated to fight as the average tough-as-nails message board warrior.
You do know it’s a major trade route? Or would you put space alien tree rats on board as crew instead? Simply close up shop and have your transport company go into flower arrangement instead?
And you base that on…?
-XT
Offshore buoys with GPS trackers on them. 
Pack the guns up in them when you enter the port.
Not a problem. Toss the guns overboard on the way in to port or stow them in “bait tanks” like drug dealers do and dump them as needed.
xtisme,
I’m just gonna let you contemplate this further. Try parsing “to crew” as “to serve on.”
No one would win in this case, and if the pirates sink a boat full of unarmed civilians, it’d sure round up the motivation to put an end to everything.
…
scout, you’ve been to the Internet, right?
But we don’t need a UN resolution for the US navy to hunt down pirates, it is a well establish part of maritime law that navies are allowed to act against pirates. The problem is that you can’t just shoot up every boat you see around the horn of Africa. Yes, the speedboats are launched from motherships, but the motherships are just fishing boats. You can board and inspect every fishing boat but how do you tell which crew of fishermen plan on turning pirate after you leave?
As for the notion that the crews should be fighting back, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma problem. Sure, if every crew always fought back, piracy would be too risky. But it’s a lot less risky for an individual crew to surrender, because the pirates currently have a very good track record of not harming crew members. And they have very good reason for not harming crew members because the pirates want the crews to surrender. If they kill the crews then future crews will fight, and that’s the last thing the pirates want.
And the shipping companies pay the ransoms not for the expendable crewmembers, but for the multimillion dollar ships. If the pirates just held the Bangladeshi crews for ransom the shippers would tell them to pound sand. But the shippers want the ship back. The crew wants to live. The pirates want money. And so paying ransom suits everybody, except the next guy who gets attacked by pirates.
Ok…I’ve parsed your meaning, though it wasn’t clear in your wording. So, your solution is basically you won’t be in the crew…problem solved! Well, I won’t be either, so you are right…it’s not about either of us.
Now…try parsing ‘And you base that on…?’…
-XT
Well, the snarky response might be that no one in history has ever been so motivated as the average tough-as-nails message board warrior, but that wouldn’t be helpful.
For a much more useful presentation of what I’ve been thinking, refer to the second paragraph of Lemur866’s post.
I don’t know the statistics, but from what I understand not all kidnap victims are returned, or treated fairly while held captive.
Fair enough, but these are not ordinary kidnappings, if there is such a thing. It seems that a large number of the crewmen, who are kidnapped incidentally to that capture of the ships, survive.
Given that, I think the typical crewman, who’s bound by neither wealth nor honor to the ship’s cargo, is likely to calculate that he’ll face better odds complying with the pirates than not.
The fate of the ship’s captain will be interesting to watch.
Well, it seems a lot of crews in the past have gone with your notion and did not oppose the hijacking.
The current one the crew did. So, YMMV.
Dunno if it is just an American thing, a leadership thing (captain was able to motivate the crew) or what.