As far as jurisdiction to try pirates is concerned, piracy falls under universal jurisdiction under customary international law, so theoretically any country that captured the pirates could try them. In fact, universal jurisdiction developed as a response to piracy. However, I couldn’t tell you the last time it was used though. Not really my area of expertise.
ETA: Of course, as the article details, this is all easier said than done. Legally and politically.
I don’t know where the million square miles of ocean comes from. The attacks occur in the Gulf of Adenwhich is 500 miles of coastline times 150 miles or 75,000 square miles. It would be many times cheaper to fly a handfull of these than operating 1 frigate and they travel 400 mph versus maybe 30 knots for a ship.
The Global Hawk is a multi-platform aircraft and was deployed for maritime testing to countries such as Australia back in 2001.
The Air Force is getting ready to pitch the idea of using it for maritime surveillancealthough I don’t think this is the same system the Navy will deploy over the next decade.
As I stated previously, going after the ocean going “mother ships” would eliminate or severely limit deep-sea piracy. Tracking a pirate boat back to these ships cannot be done with other ships. It requires aerial surveillance and UAV’s are the most economic way to go. It’s not a function of stopping a small boat, it’s a function of tracing it back to a larger ship.
Your own cite, if you scroll down, shows that they occur well out to to the east and south of the Gulf of Aden, albeit that the Gulf of Aden is where most of the attacks are.
Aside from the fact that the majority of them occur in the Gulf of Aden, how does that change the logic that it is many times cheaper to operate a Global Hawk than it is to operate a naval ship?
You go after the ocean going mother ships.
Here is how. You take a US Navy cargo / oilier and paint it so it does not look like a US Navy ship. You load it with a SEAL Team.
You sail it a 150-200 miles off the coast. You shadow it with either a 688 class attack sub or a frigate just over the horizon.
You wait for the mother ship to show up and launch the small boats to capture their prize.
When the pirates are boarding you let the SEALS do what SEALS do. At the same time you have the sub torpedo the mother ship, or have the frigate launch a anti ship missile.
Either way there is one less mother ship available for the next attack, and the bad guys have no idea why.
Wait about a week lather rinse and repeat.
Heck, all the more reason to have a carrier in the area and equip cargo ships with radios that can send out distress signals with GPS information at the beginning of the pirate attack. Some F-16s show up and sink the pirate’s vessel (or use other means to track it) and at first opportunity, obliterate them. There will be hostages lost, and that’s unfortunate, but this isn’t a situation likely to respond to diplomacy.
One could also try to encourage stabilization and economic development in Somalia to make piracy less attractive. That’s, I expect, considerably more challenging.
Why not just move a carrier group and have it sit off the coast of the major pirate port? I mean woudlnt the sheer presence of that deter pirates? Send up a jet every now and than and make sure its noticed? Is this solution to simple to work?
Sonarbuoys and satellites won’t tell you if a ship/boat is a pirate or not.
The pirates have RPGs, so when you toss a block of concrete or molotov over the side at them, one of the pirates fires his RPG and kills you all or fatally damages your ship which sinks. Or, as you lean over the side with the concrete a pirate with an AK74 takes your head clean off.
There’s a reason that Internet Tough Guy strategies don’t work in the real world.
I don’t know. All I know is you’re wasted just hanging about on this message board when you know so much more about tactics and cost than the military, and I think you should ensist and immediately tell your superiors how much more you know about this stuff than the existing hierarchy and that you should be put in charge immediately.
A million square miles came from the US Navy via the Washington Post:
*“It’s an incredibly vast area, and basically we’re seeing pirates in more than a million-square-mile operating area,” said Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain. “So while the presence of naval vessels has had an effect, we continue to say that naval presence alone will never be a total solution. It starts ashore.” *
It’s my understanding that once a ship is hijacked, it’s usually too late to do any tracking. In the Alabama, for instance, the pirates scuttled their fishing boat once they had the ship - they escaped in one of the Alabama’s lifeboat when the crew regained control. That same Washington Post article states that typically “pirates ferry their hostages to the coast and employ semiprofessional negotiators to deal with ransoms. Speer, the spokesman for Maersk, said the pirates had not contacted the company.” There’s a boat going to Eyl (which we already know about) and there are pirates on the hijacked vessel, but there’s nobody to track back to the mother ship.
This has been discussed in previous threads and the conclusion is that it will not work.
It seems we go over the same arguments in every thread about anything. Simplistic solutions to very complex problems. I have to wonder at people who know nothing about a complex topic but think they have the solution to the problem when all the experts who are actually working on the problem say it is difficult and complex. In such a case I would tend to think I was maybe just missing something but no, our armchair experts have the answers which elude the pentagon, the white house, the UN, NATO, Europe, Russia, etc. They are all incompetent fools when compared to the board of experts we have right here.
As Bender44’s link also explains, the problem is not only on the sea. You would have to intervene on land too and that is full of dangers. Trying to control Somalia would be another Afghanistan. It did not work out so well the last time it was tried. And countries like Russia or China who are in general supportive of anti-piracy operations might probably turn around and oppose an expansion of America’s area of influence which they see as too big already. Europe would probably not support it either. And right now The US has to consult with other countries because they have ships there. If America starts arragantly telling everyone what they should do, like happened in Iraq, most other countries would just withdraw and let America deal with the problem on their own terms.
But hey, don’t let reality get in the way of our Internet experts. Let them carry on with their silliness.
And all the people living there I suppose? To emphasize America’s goodwill towards all once and for all? There never used to be piracy in those waters before the whole region collapsed into total anarchy, with world politics largely to blame. This has caused serious economic distress, which has made people quite desperate. And desparate people often do desparate things. If these pirates were characters from your own frontier history, no doubt they’d be glorified in Hollywood movies by now. Get real, please. Eradicate poverty and most crime will disappear. But then, how would you tell a loser from a winner in your rather warped view of humankind? The whole idea of “America” would become pointless. But what would you expect from a country that prefers spending tax dollars on prisons rather than schools (I think I’m paraphrasing Mark Twain here, so once upon a time there was at least one sane American.)
Apart from which, I understand that the crew have managed in the meantime to retake the ship by itself, which indicates that the pirates may have been somewhat less dangerous than portrayed.
Just do the math. A million square miles is 1,000 times 1,000. The Somali pirates are operating in a much smaller arena. The Gulf of Aden piracy is 75,000 square miles and the eastern coast would be in the neighborhood of 180,000 sm.
Unless a crew is completely taken by surprise they are able to transmit their position with exact coordinates. At this point it would be easy for a Global Hawk to transition to station and remain there. any ship close to the pirated vessel is tracked. It’s only a matter of time before the launch ship is identified.
The Gulf of Aden is one of the world’s busiest waterways. You’re really planning on tracking every ship within, say, a hundred mile radius of a hijacked vessel?