The author of Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans had direct personal experience trying to protect ships from Somali pirates.
The author states that the world’s awesome navy ships turned out to be irrelevant. The key was putting a handful of guys armed with rifles on each commercial ship (1/100th the cost of patrolling via Navy destroyer?):
What ultimately changed the dynamic altogether and has largely resulted in the dramatic reduction of piracy on the east coast of Africa was the decision by the shipping companies to put security teams on board. … This has led to the embarkation of two to six personnel from private contractors, normally well armed and reasonably well trained (at least in the use of the firearms). The host of problems raised by this include how to provide weapons and ammunition, where to base such groups, how they are trained and certified, and what the rules of engagement are for them. Because their activities occur largely on the high seas beyond the jurisdiction of any one nation, this has become a complicated branch of international law. There is a sort of Mad Max quality to these forces, despite the efforts of the contractors to train and certify them. While they are not exactly rogue warriors, their presence can make more traditional military sailors nervous, much as police in a city don’t like to see armed bodyguards or armed mall guards for that matter. Nonetheless, the results have been striking: no ship embarking an armed security detail has ever been successfully hijacked. This is because the defending team has such a huge advantage in the height of the big tankers and also because the pirates are very lightly armed, untrained themselves, and quite vulnerable during the actual act of boarding.
As the human population on Earth expands and fish become harder to catch we might expect more piracy:
When young, unemployed men find a relatively lucrative (although very dangerous) way to make a living, they are easily recruited. Second, the traditional source of income for many who turned to piracy had been fishing. Due to overfishing and ecological damage in the immediate waters, the ability to make a living fishing had diminished in the latter part of the twentieth century. … Third, the local water conditions are conducive to pirate activity. Before the real ramp-up in pirate activity, the normal shipping route was quite close to the coast of Somalia as well-laden commercial ships sailed to and from the Suez Canal. The water conditions are calm enough to permit small-boat assaults on the vastly larger commercial ships.
A pirate in a $500 open boat might be facing $20 billion in military hardware:
Over my four years as NATO commander we typically had three to five NATO vessels on station, matched with a similar number for the European Union. Given that the rest of the informal coalition against international piracy also had three to five ships, this became a substantial force. However, despite the presence of those warships, we were often a step behind the pirates. This was because of the sheer size of the operational area off the coast of Northeast Africa, a space roughly the size of Europe. When people would question why we couldn’t catch all the pirates, I would point out that even fifteen warships would be like fifteen police cars trying to cover all of western Europe. We also supplemented the ships with long-range maritime patrol aircraft. These heavy, wide-bodied, four-engine aircraft lumbered over vast amounts of territory and could remain airborne for eight to twelve hours, operating from bases in Oman, on islands in the Indian Ocean, or from the Horn of Africa. Used throughout the cold war for antisubmarine patrols, these airplanes have the ability to swoop down to the very surface of the ocean, use radar from higher altitude to scan the ocean surface, and provide command and control to helicopters or ships engaged in searching for the pirates. The United States operated P-3 Orion aircraft and the British the comparable Nimrods, and several other allies had similarly equipped planes. Additionally, for overall command of the operation from the air, NATO had available the massive Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) E-3 plane, a flying village with extensive radar, communication, and well-trained personnel.
Catching a pirate turns out to be pointless due to a lack of paperwork:
The hardest part of the operation was actually what occurred after we caught a pirate, which we did with increasing frequency. These were young men, ethnically Somalis, … They have no papers, don’t self-identify with a particular functioning government, and thus we had no one to whom we could turn them over for prosecution. Naturally the minute we closed in on them, they would also throw overboard their scaling ladder and guns, so when we boarded their small vessels we would find “innocent fishermen” and have little evidence of their wrongdoing in many cases … The pirates were lucky that we couldn’t fall back on the centuries-old punishment for such crimes and string them up from a yardarm. While several of the nations in the coalition might have been actually willing to do so, we followed normal mores of Western judicial process throughout the time I was engaged in the exercise.
The author says that we can look forward to more piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, even as the waters off the coast of Somalia have become safer.
More: read Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans.
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