Dealing with Somali Piracy

As I write, one the major news story of today centers around the taking of the Greek owned Maran Centaurus, which was sailing from Kuwait to the Gulf of Mexico with a crew of 28 and a full load of crude when it was seized early Sunday near the Seychelles by Semolina pirates.This year the vessel joins a long line of 90 commercial ships that have been taken off the coast of Somalia near the Gulf Of Aden and held for ransom. In each case the pattern is pretty much the same. A group of pirates, usually the size of a squad, armed with automatic weapons and RPG's; use small boats launched from a mother ship to overtake and board the targeted vessel using intelligence supplied by allies located in and around the region. Once seized, the vessels are then sailed to a friendly port where they are impounded and kept until the ransom demand is met.Currently, several military vessels are engaged in anti piracy activities, but because the size of the area in question they cannot be everywhere at one time and this represents the pirates trump card because not only do they have intelligence about their intended target, but chances are they know where any potential threat may be and can plan accordingly.So now comes the question: What to do about it?The answer lies in history. Specifically, the history of German commerce raiders that plied the Atlantic and Mediterranean during the early stages of World War II. Innocent looking ships that were armed to the teeth and crewed by men who were hell bent on sinking allied merchantmen. The key to winning the contest with these pirates today is to give anyone considering that line of work a moment of pause. You do it by first gathering a collection of merchant vessels, which you arm to the teeth with the latest in weaponry. You do this in a way where it’s invisible to the casual observer until the moment when it’s unmasked and all hell breaks loose. Then you crew them with Para military types whom you pay a nice bounty for every pirate they kill, or capture and every pirate ship they sink. Then you rotate these ships continually, changing their outside appearance, names and flags to keep the pirates off balanced. Next, you start feeding false intelligence to the pirate’s operatives so that they begin sending bogus information to the pirates themselves. The pirates will come to you, which beats running around wasting time looking for them. You then highly publize each successful battle or capture so that the pirates will see what happened and will begin to realize that you could be any ship out there on the open water. When the risk to them grows exponentially to a point where it’s no longer worth it to commit piracy then the problem will subside.