I’m not sure why you think fourth grade arithmetic is a better cite than the US Navy, but I’ll just disagree and leave it at that.
You can’t disagree with math, it’s not a matter of opinion. Somalia has roughly 500 miles of northern coast and 900 miles of eastern coast. The Gulf of Aden is approximately 150 miles wide. Either the statement was a mis-speak or referred to piracy around the world which is a broader subject than this thread.
Did you need to do the math when Nancy Pelosi said we were losing 500 million American jobs a month?
Nope. 600 miles of northern coast and 1200 of SE coast. Just use Google Earth. The Gulf of Aden is more like 175 miles wide. And the coastline being convex means you cannot just multiply length by width.
If you add the area of all waters within a 500 mile distance from any point in the Somalian coast it adds to more than one million square miles.
Maybe it’s like the “Drug War”; you can endlessly deal with a symptom that’ll never go away as long as the root causes are there. (Though I don’t think anybody is advocating legalizing piracy.)
A larger question: when did people start adding a “gh” to the end of “Arr!” when they’re doing cliched movie pirate dialect, based on stock West Country rustic characters? I keep seeing this: “Aarrgh!” Why the Hell would anybody say that?
Carelessness while scratching with your hook?
My husband is captaining a ship from this same company, and he’s doing the West Africa route, so I have been following this for quite a few years. Luckily he’s still far from where pirates have taken ships, but I don’t know for how long. I doubt they will venture so far out of their “home ports” though.
The reasons things have been done this way so far is that it works best for everybody. The pirates do not want to kill anyone, they want money. The have a vested interest in the well-being of the crew. The crew will not like to have the responsibility and risk of defending somebody else’s property. The ship owners pay extra insurance and charge it to their customers. The insurance companies want the ship and cargo returned, they make money out of this. And the governments don’t have the capability and jurisdiction to fight this, save invading Somalia. And you know how that went last time.
The crew in most commercial ships is unarmed. They don’t even have a stun gun. They believe that arming the crew will bring many more problems than solutions. The ship owners oppose it. The crew oppose it. The authorities in most countries oppose it too. It is illegal in most cases to enter a port carrying weapons, just because your country gave you permission to arm yourself does not mean that the country you are entering will have the same view.
My husband was in the Danish navy before becoming a merchant marine. He was an expert marksman, and he still opposes arming the crews. This is not their job. He takes the ship from port A to port B and parks it there. That’s what he gets paid for. If he had wanted to shoot at things he would have stayed in the navy.
This.
There’s no government. It is pure anarchy.
Do you have any idea how impractical and costly this is. Who is going to pay for this? Where are you going to find the extra people to do this. How are you going to accommodate more people in a ship designed for a certain capacity? Denmark has a bigger merchant navy than a military navy, for example. Panama? Forget it. And even ships flying a flag might have crewmembers from other nationalities. Who protects those?
My husband will laugh at your suggestion. The crew itself will oppose this. They are hired to do their jobs, not to play Rambo.
This is possibly illegal. Will you attack these ships pre-emptively? Because if they have not attacked you then you would not know if they are pirates. And if they do then it’s too late, you resist and soon you might find your ship is sinking fast.
And how do you know they are pirates? They don’t wear a uniform?
That’s the problem. Small vessels approach large ships all the time, only rarely are they pirates. You find out when/if you see them trying to board your ship. By then they are in a good position of making a hole in your ship.
Ships broadcast their particulars at all times. It’s been like that for a while. It’s extremely easy for a pirate ship to know even how many crewmembers in a ship, and the type of cargo and tonnage before they approach. Small boats do, of course, broadcast nothing. So you know nothing about them.
If you have any question you’d like to pose my husband you can ask me and I’ll email him. It may take a day for me to reply as he might be on duty at the time he gets the email. But maybe you want to ask an actual captain, from the same company as this ship, one navigating not so far from there.
Not sure I agree. If the company that owned the ship wanted the ship back without regard to human life they could just hire a bunch of heavies to take it back. If people get harmed in the process it shouldn’t matter then, right?
I think their foremost goal is to get the crew back in one piece (AND the ship) otherwise you could never hire another crew to operate your ships again.
In the classic age of piracy the root of the problem was getting rid of the safe havens. You can attack pirate vessels on sight, you can patrol the waters constantly, but the problem is that pirates don’t come wearing distinctive costumes and flying distinctive flags like they do in the movies. And so every fishing vessel is a potential pirate ship.
And like in the classic age of piracy the pirates have a safe haven on land. The pirates come home with lots of money and spread it around, and their neighbors are very happy. And so the villagers aren’t going to point out the pirates if the USMC comes knocking.
Sure, sending more ships and stepping up patrols is a good thing, and will probably prevent a lot of piracy. But they won’t do that by catching pirates and blowing their ships out of the water. Instead pirates will lay low until the navy is gone. If the naval presence is heavy enough you could possibly reduce the rewards of piracy so much that it stops being a cottage industry in Somalia.
Another possibility is to prevent shipping companies from paying ransoms. Once a ship is hijacked, the incentive for the company is to pay even though that encourages future piracy. And so perhaps we force the shippers to eat the cost of a few sunken ships and a few crews massacred. Remove the choice to pay the ransom and you’ll find fewer people lining up to demand a ransom.
Absolutely! In fact your navy will be happy to help if lives were not in danger. But what do you think will happen at home if the company allowed the crew to be harmed out of greed? The cargo and ship are insured, but my husband’s employer has at times done extraordinary things to protect their crew.
Well, sure. What the hell, it’s not like the crewmembers have any family and friends at home who care. :rolleyes:
Most of the crewmembers are from third world countries and make a pittance by western standards. There are hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that would jump at the chance for one of these jobs despite the danger. They don’t have any illusions about their value to the companies that own the ships.
Look, it’s not like the owners are complete and total bastards, but no company is going to pay a ransom to a criminal that kidnaps one of their employees. They’ll turn the matter over to the police. They don’t have any obligation to pay, nor do they have an obligation to mount a commando raid to rescue a kidnapped employee.
It’s not like there is an option where the companies could get their ships back without paying ransom at the cost of the crew’s lives. The pirates aren’t holding the crews hostage, they are holding the ships hostage. A few RPGs and the ship heads of the bottom of the Gulf of Aden.
The wikipedia article as a good run down of the naval presence in the region: Piracy off the coast of Somalia - Wikipedia
Ah. That’s OK then. Those people are not worth much.
And you are wrong, while the crew tend to be from poorer countries the navigators are not. And who do you think the pirates are going to threaten if they need to, the Philippine deck painter or the Danish captain?
The company pays because there is an implicit understanding that they will do that and more to have the crew returned safely. Otherwise no, they will not get any crew. You have no understanding of navigators unions then.
Mighty Girl,
Long, long, long time lurker (very rarely a poster) but I wanted to say wow, thank you for that explanation of what a lot of us were likely thinking (sailor for one) but could not (or just did not) articulate.
I’ve worked for years in military operations centers (as a public affairs person no less) and all I could think about in regards to some of these plans was, “wow that is going to be a brutal press conference.”
Finally I hope your husband is staying safe!
Oliveritaly
Oliveritaly, thanks. It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this, but people have to understand that smarter heads than ours are thinking about this at all times. So far the cost of letting this continue has been deemed sufficiently low that no extreme measures have been taken, even by countries who are not particularly high on the “human rights scale”. There is a reason for that.
And another thing you might not know, there might be “civilians” in these ships. Children even. I guess you didn’t know that. I have traveled with my husband, the last time I was visibly pregnant. I would have made quite the hostage. Luckily there were no pirates in Philly. 
If it were easy or cheap, or simply a matter of sending a few warships to the region then the problem would already have been solved. The US and several other nations have warships in the area…and yet these things are still happening. It would take a major fleet commitment by the US (or a combined US/EU/Indian/other fleet) working in concert to really start to impact these guys…and even that would deter them only, it’s not going to completely shut them down. Not until the deterrence is at such a level as it’s no longer profitable to continue over a long enough period of time.
-XT
Heck, if you want a perfect solution, why don’t we use our paralyzer beam to harmlessly zap everybody in Somalia, then walk in and take away their guns and machetes and whatnot. Then when they wake up, they’ll have to settle their differences with pillowfights.
And to add some actual cites:
And the crew in the merchant ships are a mixture of nationalities. There are Americans navigating in Danish-flagged ships.
Not gonna happen. It’d be like shooting down a high-jacked plane with passengers on board.
Huh…kill them all. Og will surely know her own…
waggle waggle
-XT
Hey, I have an idea. How about we make it illegal to pirate without wearing an uniform, complete with peg leg and eye patch?
It’s as easy a solution as some others I have read here. And just as stupid.