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Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options to repel pirates including slippery foam, lasers, electric fences, water cannons and high-intensity sound — almost anything except guns. One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. 'It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate's ship very quickly,' says Roger Barrett James of the the Swedish company Unifire. Next is the Mobility Denial System, a slippery nontoxic foam that can be sprayed on just about any surface making it impossible to walk or climb even with the aid of a harness. The idea would be to spray the pirate's vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that's under attack. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a high-powered directional loudspeaker allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. 'Knowing that they've lost the element of surprise is half the battle,' says Robert Putnam of American Technology Corp. The LRAD has another feature — a piercing "deterrent tone" that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam that comes from the device. But Capt. John Konrad, who blogs for the Web site Gcaptain.com, says no anti-pirate device is perfect. 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'"
An M-16 with a full clip.
Brett
a firearm, worked as a defense against boarding parties hundreds of years ago, it will work just as well now.
Is it more humane to flood those little pirate boats and let the pirates drown then just shooting them in the head?
Bettery yet, why not take x number of ships, create a convoy that is protected by x number of war ships from different nations and run them through? Each nation gets it's chance to be the flag ship so that eveyone gets the credit. .
It worked good enough in WWII and would work now, unless the pirates get smart and buy a bunch of used U-Boats. But then sinking their loot would kind of defeat the purpose wouldn't it?
You start killing pirates and making it really risky to be a pirate and there won't be any more pirates willing to take the risk. Kinda like the old saying, "There are old pirates and there are bold pirates, but there are no old bold pirates".
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Now hold on just a minute, I thought the best pirate repellant was a good, old-fashioned lawsuit. Are you telling me the RIAA LIED to me? I am shocked, SHOCKED I say.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Sounds like a perfect application. No one is really concerned about the comfort of pirates.
Why don't they just use guns? Killing a bunch of pirates will not lead to "escalation". It will simply make it too dangerous for the pirates to be pirates. The very reason they're able to do it right now is that it's not dangerous to them at all because of people pussy-footing around them. If you just start killing them, a lot less of them will be willing to be pirates, because it will be too dangerous. It'd be pretty easy to staff ships with gunmen that are far better equipped and better trained than the pirates.
Does these guys not accept a parley?!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
A well trained and silent ninja.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Piracy is a crime and should be treated as such. If there's a rash of break-ins in your hometown you don't recommend that every home owner goes out and buys a gun, you track down the criminals responsible and put them to justice.
It's well known that the pirates are getting inside information on ship locations and cargoes from associates in Europe. Feed a false tip into the system and arrest the pirates that come calling. Don't try to arm civilians to fight off what could be a relatively well trained and well armed fighting force, you'll just piss of the criminals and they'll be that much more likely to start killing people.
These guys didn't watch Mythbusters last night, did they?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
How about we reinstate the time honored tradition of privateering? Every privateer gets a representative from a multi-national body of privateer regulators. Kill pirates, take their shit, take their ships. No more pirates.
Why not just hire sniper or two to make the trip with you?
Erecting the wall of separation between church and state is absolutely essential in a free society. - Thomas Jefferson
http://www.vgcats.com/super/?strip_id=25
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
I understand the liability issues involved in stocking guns on a non-military ship (especially a commercial ship), but some of these options sound just as riddled with problems as a simple gun safe that the captain alone has the combo to.
Imagine that slippery foam stuff accidentally being unleashed all over the deck.
Imagine some crew members thinking it would be fun to wake up a crew mate with that LRAD and accidentally causing permanent deafness.
That spray gun sounds pretty awesome (I'd buy two of 'em, and split the crew into two teams on a weekend and let them have at it) but it too has liability issues.
All the lengths these shipping companies go to to keep from stocking "real guns" on board seem like more of an "appearance to others" issue.
Since when do shipping companies worry about their PR?
I'm not in the business nor do I know anyone in the business so I'm sure there is more to it than I can see from here, but these problems seem simpler than they are being treated.
I thought the whole idea of not arming crews was to prevent possible death to the crews. Do these people think that only applies to GUNS, and not other forms of arms? The pirates are armed with guns, RPGs and the like, not fucking water pistols. They do not have a "stun" setting. Does anyone in their right mind think the pirates, after getting a ship flooded or tasered aren't going to actually use the weapons THEY have? Do they expect the pirates to say "Gosh, you fought fair and humanely. We'll just ignore all that extra effort, pain and discomfort."
Wrong.
How about just adding armed and trained guards to the ships? Maybe armed and trained escort ships? Q-boats? A Naval destroyer sitting in the main bay, shelling their HQ?
Or is this just the kinder, gentler pirates of the 21st century?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why the hell NOT guns?
It's what the pirates use. And it's been used for hundreds of years as the first deterrents. Even our military used cannonfire against the first pirates when they captured one of our civilian vessels back in the 1800's. Those pirates then were Muslim during 1700Barbary War, and gee, the pirates are still in Muslim lands.
What else than guns? Try RPGs.
That's what pirates, no, Peoples of Islam understand. Power.
________
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to negotiate with Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman or (Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Upon inquiring "concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury", the ambassador replied:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.
Wikipedia snippet from First Barbary War
"pirate repellents"
WTF are we talking about... TICKS???
"We're getting boarded... must not have sprayed the pirate repellent last night..."
The best pirate repellent is two squads of armed marines. Just have the ships pick them up in the port before the gulf of Aden... and drop them off in the port after, where they can board the ship going the other way.
Much cheaper than flooding the area with warships... and more effective to boot.
I would think that if the Royal Navy was abolish piracy 200 years ago with a mixture of cannon balls, musket fire, and a hangman's noose, then, the M-16 would work pretty well.
This is my sig.
The pirate repellent foam is lube. They're going to spray attacking pirates with lube.
Maybe armed and trained escort ships?
Bingo.
man the planks, you survy knaves!
I love the smell of pork in the morning. it smells like... enormous MIC profits
I think John Browning gave us all the anti-piracy solution we need back in 1921: The M2HB. Accurate to over a mile, fires 450 rounds a minute and is belt fed so you can easily have enough ammunition to sustain fire for long periods. Also one of the most reliable weapons out there, hence why it is still in current production for the US and other militaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning_machine_gun. Knock a couple of those on each side of the ship and I'm thinking the pirates will go away.
When the pirates come out you blast'em.
someone admits that DRM is not the solution to thwarting piracy...
So let me get this straight. What they're advocating is flooding/sinking a pirate's ship and/or knocking pirates overboard, providing a fairly explicit drowning hazard by making any pirate (or any friendly) who falls overboard unable to climb back onto either ship due to the slippery foam, making incapacitating electric fences on the edges of a ship at sea, and casually creating a potential for permanent hearing loss, but they're NOT considering firearms?
So it's okay to electocute, cause permanent disability to, and kill pirates (with potential for accidents causing the same to friendlies), but heaven forbid we shoot them? What?
No mention/pictures of the electric fence, is it on the ship, do they electrify the water around the ship, wtf?
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
things that can only be used in relatively close range.
100 yards? That's plenty close enough to be under fire from the pirates. Hope you have brave, or foolhardy sailors.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This immediately reminded me of Shark Repellent Bat Spray.
-William Brendel
are you serious...but with guns? it's just software... can't they just ask programmers to write a better serial-key software?
Why bother with all the new 'tech' that is probably expensive, etc. And just use something known to work....a simple fucking gun?!?!?
Geez, if this were my ship, I know I'd be packing some serious heat. A boat starts coming towards me....>bang I do that for my home if an intruder comes in, why not on the high seas where you KNOW a threat like this is not un-common??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
SHOOT THEM.
Armed criminals who are seeking to ilegally board a ship should be SHOT. Killing them is the best deterrent of all: Those particular pirates will never pirate again.
To not arm the crews or put armed guards on these ships is utter insanity and proof that political correctness run amok is suicide.
Corporatism != Free Market
Whatever is used to protect that essential shipping, why the hell is the US paying for the US Navy to protect it? Why aren't Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and all the other filthy rich oil shipping countries paying to protect their shipping? It's bad enough the US is paying through the nose for that oil from that cartel. It's worse that the US spends $TRILLIONS in wars throughout the Mideast, from East Africa through Central Asia, to protect or meddle in the business enriching those foreign oil countries. Why aren't they at least footing the bill for the security of their products sailing through their own backyards?
--
make install -not war
I disagree with this bogus premise: " 'The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.'""
That's just lame. What they need is to go back to what merchant vessels on the high seas had forever as bog standard policy, except relatively recently with bullshit political correctness, and that is, they are armed with actual ARMS for self defense, not stupid squirt guns and big stereos.
Self defense is a human right, whether on land or sea, and playing make believe that weapons don't exist or they aren't the best tool for the job is just ludicrous. And this crap about some "legal jurisdiction" is again stupid, the old ways were the best, on the high seas, YOU have legal jurisdiction over your own safety, you are the law. someone attacks you, you have the right to use lethal self defense.
If these bozo shipping companies and their insurers can't trust their own crews with defending their own ships, cargoes and lives (the latter being a good inducement for the crews to be proactive in self defense), maybe they should pick better crews and offer a bit more training. We shouldn't be forced to use huge amounts of taxpayer money to provide expensive official navy vessels for commercial escort duty given the nature of these pirates being just fools in little boats with AKs and RPGs. The big merchant vessels can have a little stouter armament than that, and be able to protect themselves in 99%+ of the situations out there.
This weeniefication of society is just crap. When only the bad guys and the police/military have self defense arms, it is called a criminal police state, and these globalist goons seem bound and determined to turn it into a criminal police planet. Screw that.
I'll say it again, self defense is a human right. Any laws/regulations/policies to the contrary are totalitarian by nature.
Oh, wait, different "Mariners". In that case it might work.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
A three inch gun, or two, would make wonderful pirate repellent.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
No guns of course, that would be politically incorrect and might harm these poor misunderstood souls that seek to board the ships and we don't dare hurt their feelings. Playing catch and release with pirates is the politically correct thing to do nowadays. Instead we'll get the UN involved to send them a sternly worded letter saying No! Works every time, just ask the survivors in Darfur etc....
Hmpff! Never would it deter a properly trained ninja...
Soap
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
One of the most often requested phrase was "All your bases are belong to us". Followed by, "The Red zone is for loading and unloading only. The Green zone is for dropping off and picking up passengers".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They don't want evil gun objects for self-defense on land or sea. They will talk up tech that doesn't exist because gun objects are EVIL!
They will propose the same "wait for the police" attitude that is failing land lubbers, let alone solitary ships on the much vaster oceans.
It seems to me even a few weapons under lock and key on even a few boats that want it would be the way to go, but gun prohibitionists will find some reason to doubt it no matter what.
I guess they can't make the "puke saber" soon enough *bleh* :0===#
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/06/2019258
-rich
I have a feeling they're just stealing Pirate-stopping ideas from Hook. Soon they'll start recruiting Lost Boys, building Egg launchers and guns that shoot nickolodeon-style slime. I fear for Dustin Hoffman's life.
Lever back on the testosterone, pal. If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's that sheer rough-n-ready manpower is not always the answer.
Marines cost to feed and shelter. They take up space that could otherwise be used for crew and cargo. They cost to train. They want to be paid all the time they're on guard. They're not easily replicated or rapidly distributed for a high-demand world. And they're still fragile meatsacks, whatever their will to fight might be.
It makes sense to layer technological solutions onto the manpower ones.
Bad call. You don't want to tempt the monster squid like that.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I think some laser guided torpedoes would work fairly nicely.
Ship has laser guidance system that "paints" the pirate ships for a simple water torpedo to track down and destroy.
Detect pirate craft(s)
Paint target(s)
Deploy torpedo(s)
Kaboom(s)!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Newsweek just had an article on why killing pirates might be a bad idea. Basically, the pirates have a "code" that they live by which includes treating their hostages well. Their piracy is pretty much an economic transaction. Starting to shoot pirates might make them rethink how they treat their hostages.
Not that I agree with their assessment, but it's an interesting idea that escalating an economic situation to one of life or death might have adverse effects on the innocents involved.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
NPR isn't suggesting anything. They're reporting that the captains are interested in things like slippery foam.
>> NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options ... -- almost anything except guns.
Why NOT use guns? The pirates ONLY have access to firearms, so its not like one side avoiding specifically firearms but escalating other weapons is going to avoid firearms escalation by the pirates.
Just face it and put some serious armaments on the ship. IMHO the ships actually being able to defend themselves properly is the best deterrent. I mean some pirate isn't going to be mortally afraid of getting wet or having loud noises played at them, but a deck-mounted chain gun pointing straight at them is a different story.
The first time Somali pirates have ever showed signs of being destabilised wasnt when they had hoses squirted at them. It was after those Special Forces snipers took those 3 pirate hijackers out simulataneously.
I guess they can't make the "puke saber" soon enough 8~0===# *splat*
The ships do not want to carry fire arms not because they don't want to kill the pirates. Carrying fire arms is a safety issue and a legal issue. Some countries would not let a ship armed with machines into their ports. Guns and ammo are dangerous in a fire. And they would attract vandals and thieves who want to steal the guns and ammo. So it is to protect the ship and its crew, they don't want to carry a gun. If they can kill the pirates without guns, they would do so. It is not a question of trying to be humane to the pirates, just sensible precautions to protect the crew.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This works great, until a group of pirates captures the ship that has these secret anti-pirate weapons on it. Then they become anti-anti-pirate weapons and the good guys start getting flooded, falling off their boats, lasered, sonic beamed and kissing their own ass goodbye.
I shot a squirrel with one once.
The trouble with arming merchant ships is that few of the major cargo ports will let an armed ship dock. US ports certainly wouldn't.
The big fire nozzle is a good idea. Especially if it's radar-directed well enough to hit a speedboat, as Raytheon is proposing. Raytheon has a long history of making stuff that hits targets. Water cannons have been used successfully as military weapons in the past. Egypt used them in the 1973 war against Israel to slice gaps through Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal. Pirates may try attacking using larger boats, but then it's harder for them to hide from warships.
Pirates are easier to deal with than terrorists. Pirates not only don't want to die, they have to make a profit.
This really has to be the cheapest, most effective method - so there must be some, likely political, reason that it's not being used. Much of the issue with arming crew members seems to revolve around 1) training and 2) what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
Picking up then dropping off paid mercs or active duty soldiers would go around that problem. But it seems like paying ransom is the current preferred action.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Due to activities of privateers and pirates in the past, many nations have laws against armed merchant vessels being allowed in their harbors and/or waters. This is the reason the companies want devices that won't be considered weapons by these countries, Afterall, what good does it do to arm the vessel if it can't dock anywhere.
When I first saw the headline, I thought "why would Seattle be so concerned about Pittsburgh? They're not even in the same league!"
It is an odd headline even knowing the right context.
and simply employing something like an automated Phalanx CIWS on every ship sailing through pirate waters is not enough ?
i dont know why they dont have a simple integrated fire control radar and gatling gun mounted on every marine vessel near the bridge. simple, safe and effective at engaging small craft.
no marines required, press one button to turn on and turn off when at port.
Possibly. And how long do we intend to pay tribute and put up with the situation? How do we expect piracy to end, if not by violence? The whole "oh, those poor people are just committing piracy because they have no other way to eat -- lets help them" mentality essentially condones the piracy as a justifiable act. That leads to a very bad place.
I believe the old campaign slogan was "Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!"
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Does not make sense. Pirates aren't movie aliens and Marines(TM) are known to work quite effectively against them. Marines cost to feed and shelter anywhere you put them so you might as well assign them to ships that are likely to be boarded and let them get some work in. Two squads of Marines do not take up very much space at all (particularly in respect to the capacity of these cargo ships). Their presence would have a negligible effect on crew and cargo. They do cost to train but that money is again going to be spent anyway no matter where they are stationed. They don't get paid all the time that they are on guard (assuming we are talking about United States Marines). They draw a monthly paycheck whether they are on guard duty off the coast of Somalia or stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else. We have plenty of them, they are easily replicated to a point, and can be rapidly sent wherever they're needed. Slippery foam covered pirates wash off and come back to try again. Dead floating in the water until the sharks get there pirates are no longer a threat.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I am sort of curious why this sort of a solution is not often suggested.
It has been said that the reason crewmen are not armed is that they are not trained, and that it is illegal to have armed crewmen at many major port cities where these ships are headed.
It has also been said that stationing mercenaries or marines on board all ships all the time is prohibitively expensive, and possibly has the same legal problems.
But the area in which these problems are occurring seems to be relatively small, compared to the entire trip these ships are taking. Why wouldn't it be reasonable to drop off 10-15 marines/mercenaries at a point before they get close enough for pirates to be a threat, and pick them up on the other side. You'd think that it would be getting cheaper than just buying insurance on the cargo pretty soon.
Or, for as bad as the news makes it seem, go back to the old World War II convoy system. If the gulf is too big to have warships patrolling the entire thing, have a convoy leaving twice a day with a bunch of tankers and 1-2 warships covering it.
The fact that these steps have not been taken must mean that the chances of any one ship being taken are still small enough that most companies can afford to take the risk.
what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
Lock them up in the ship's safe and don't take them ashore? Seems like a simple solution to me. How much danger to a port can a handful of merchantmen with rifles pose anyway?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6297149.stm
After you've caused some of the pirates to break their arms and legs on a newly frictionless surface, and made yet more of them bleed from the ears, perhaps deaf for life, they finally manage to board you.
For how long do you expect to survive?
Seriously, I'd cut our your eyes and lop off your ears out of spite at that point. And I'm not even a seafaring pirate.
Reminds me of the anti-rape condom that causes the would-be rapist immense pain. Good job, now he'll definitely kill you.
All the testosterone and gung-ho aside, how about not giving them a reason to pirate? It seems that nobody here realizes that the Somali pirates are doing what they do because other nations illegal fishing (worth an estimated 300 million) in the region have depleted their fish stocks while the UN turned a blind eye. To add insult to injury, there's been some toxic waste dumping off the coast.
So while the media distraction du jour clearly has many of you foaming at the mouth, try to realize that Somali pirates, much like our own domestic media pirates, are doing what they do because they system has failed them and they see piracy as the most feasible method to force change. The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table.
Two squads of marines for every ship making the passage would be a *huge* expense. It's often the *personnel* that are the most expensive part.
The solution - cheap, mass-produced drones. These could be stationed on every ship in an inactive state. When attacked, the crew makes a call to a central drone command, and a standby pilot activates and launches a drone and attacks the pirates. This greatly reduces the personnel cost. Since the pirates are lightly armed and not very well equipped in small boats, the drone could be cheaply manufactured and even disposable.
For best effect, pack *two* on each ship. Do an attack run, and kill at least one pirate. Then have the crew inform the pirates that another one will die if they don't leave. (Or build one of those megaphones into the drone launcher.)
The drone launch system would be built into -- you guessed it -- a standard cargo container.
Gotta agree with the parent here. A soon as you start shooting your water canon or your foam gun the pirates are just going to respond with real guns. Just as someone farther up mentioned, you can't expect some scared sailor to hold his ground when he's being shot at.
So the solution is to simply add people to the crew who will stand their ground and give them the tools to do it. If the pirates have machine guns and RPGs, you arm your guards with machine guns and RPGs. I'm willing to bet you can hire a squad of former special forces types for far less than the going ransom rate.
Hmm. I just had an idea for a business...
"pirate repellents"
WTF are we talking about... TICKS???
"We're getting boarded... must not have sprayed the pirate repellent last night..."
Well, see, as you're sailing around there's always a probability that you'll have a random encounter. At low levels the pirate encounters can be a good way to gain experience points and loot - but at higher levels they're not worth the hassle, so you'll usually want to just avoid 'em. That's where pirate repellent comes in.
I hear it's made from ninja urine.
Bow-ties are cool.
"pirate repellents "WTF are we talking about... TICKS???"We're getting boarded... must not have sprayed the pirate repellent last night..."
That bit of PC speak is brought to you by the same people that banished the phrase "war on terror".
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Maybe we can get China or Russia to do so... but these pirates are mostly from Somalia...
Making them...
a) Black
b) Muslim
c) Poor
d) Exploited by past colonial sins from hundreds of years ago but is justified as an excuse to be a pirate
e) all of the above
We brought back a pirate for trial and they are debating
a) his age
b) if we have an actual right
c) if he was coerced into being a pirate (I guess he said "I didn't mean it)
d) he is an oppressed minority
e) extenuating circumstances led to a life of crime (he couldn't control it)
The US won't do it. That much is obvious. We spent how many days trying to not kill them, I think that is a great example of how the pirates will always have the upper hand.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is largely mythical, but its a myth the shipping companies use to prevent law suits from their crewmen after being taken hostage.
Care to substantiate or clarify that claim?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
You're not likely to be home when they break in, because the burglars get to choose the time (broad daylight on a weekday is best). The gun then just serves two functions:
If you want to protect your home against burglary, the most effective thing is to fortify the entry points into your house so you slow down the burglar enough to make him choose a different target. Second most effective thing is an effective home alarm system that automatically notifies responders.
Are you adequate?
I'm with you. I'm sick and tird of the US being a bunch of spineless pussies because we don't want the rest of the world to think bad things about us. Pirates should die. End of story. If a boat is approaching my cargo ship, and they don't identify, expect to be shot in the ocean, no chance to explain yourself. If we don't make pirating risky for them, then everyone's going to become a pirate. We've made it look so safe to be a pirate, save the 3 on the Mersk ship. Oh, and I so feel for the one they caught. I feel he should be taken out to somolian seas, and thrown in the ocean handcuffed, with a lifevest on and 20lbs of chum stuffed in his pants. Video that. Put it on youtube. email the link to pirates@somolia.sm.
If the boats start shooting on site, and the WORLD GOVERMENTS start acting like these are pirates, not poor innocent people trying to make a living, then this 'problem' will be short lived.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No.
If Aliens taught us anything it's that we should nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. ;)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Equip the ship with unlimited highspeed satellite internet access and top of the line computers, crew the ship with geeks, and rip out the showerheads.
Well, actually that last one was redundant.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
WTF! These are not kids downloading the latest movie or Brittany Spears CD. These are true pirates in the original sense of the term.
The best defence would be a big ass weapon that blows the ship out of the water - case closed.
Has the concept of no right to self defence fallen so far that cases of true piracy is to be treated by water cannon and harsh language, while hoping that a military vessel gets there before they kill your crew?
Our international sense of justice is insane. Imprison or excessively fine kids, thus destroying their lives, but let the poor criminal pirates do what they want - we can't be seen to be violating their right to board, kill, ransom and steal.
I say let's avoid the problem and nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure. . .
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All we need to do is dust off the remaining Iowa class battleships, the Iowa and Missuouri. Just the sight of them should do the trick...
Why in heaven's name play patty-cake with pirates? You're going to piss them off with loud sounds and a water hose, and they have GUNS? Someone really thought this was a good idea?
If you're not going to repel them decisively, raise your hands and give them what they want. You'll be treated better. Hopefully your family can afford the ransom.
Spraying a water hose at pirates with guns. I want to see that when it goes up on youtube. They must think we're morons. They might even be right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I dunno - I think you need to look at the incentives involved. These pirates are businessmen - not crusaders. They do it to make money. If they know they aren't going to make money they'll stop doing it.
I once heard somebody argue that when a plane is hijacked that the military should just shoot it down with hostages and terrorists alike perishing. Of course that sounds dumb, until you realize that you've eliminated any negotiating power the terrorists might obtain from holding hostages. A saner approach would be to simply not sincerely negotiate at all and always mount military responses if the terrorists don't surrender after a reasonable period of time.
Yes lets debate between lethal and non lethal firearms instead of addressing the actual causes of the problem. Like an ineffective government and global inequality
Oh give me a fucking break. "Global inequality" doesn't give you the right to start holding human beings hostage for ransom money.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Until Somalia is stable, civil war and militia fighting has ended the piracy will continue. All that they are proposing is a temporary cure to a permanent problem. Unless Somalia becomes stable enough for a ruling government to take over and start running the country, establish civil services, fight piracy etc... shit ain't happening folks. For some of these people it is the only way to make money. Yes we can arm the crew's yes we can try to pressure the international community to send more warships and escorts but in the end we are just throwing time and money to the wind.
Rough translation:
One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 8 cm nozzle that can send 5300 litres a minute 100 metres in any direction.
Alright for one thing. I understand that various ports of call will not allow armed vessels to enter their ports. However, why not find some entrepreneurial company who would supply armed escorts over the Open Sea in international waters to escort these vessels? I would think you could easily find ports where you COULD dock those ships for re-fueling and re-fitting and then simply have them escort those vessels right up to the vessels destination without having to enter their territorial waters.
For another thing, it's bad enough that America has been inundated with Somali immigrants who are un-willing to follow in the footsteps of other immigrants to this country and at least conform to our LANGUAGE at the least, but now, we need to cope with the fact that their nation has deteriorated into anarchy and is allowing their "citizens" to attack international shipping with no fear of concern or reprisal? What ever happened to how we used to deal with Piracy. You used to have to "fly the flag" of your nation, and any ship not representing would be considered hostile until their intent could be determined. Also, any attack on British shipping was met with an initial defense of the ship, followed by the British Navy dispatching warships to the region to hunt the pirates. Now we have to sit back and watch our shipping be decimated by SOMALI PIRATES!!! these people can't even run their own country, so what are we worried about? They attack our ship, we bombard their coastline for a week or two and then......NOTHING no more pirates, and no reprisal from Somalia because what "army" or "navy" could they even put in the field? None.
People need to stop being sooooooo frickin PC and start defending their interests, especially in INTERNATIONAL waters.
GOSH!
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's listen to the frakin' people who've been there and done the job and not some wet-behind-the-ears LT too afraid of looking stupid to tell his people he's an idiot, and No, you can't use frag grenades or explosive-tipped-caseless ammo near the giant and fragile nuclear reactor.
That's what Aliens taught me. And never forget about the ceiling ducts.
You know, cops also are paid no matter where they are stationed, so why not put a trained cop in every car on the road?
Do you see any problem with your idea now?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate's code to apply and you're not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules Mr. SoupGuru.
Robin: [sees a pirate attached to Batman's leg] Holy sardine!
Batman: Hand down the pirate repellent Batspray!
Reference: Batman TV Movie, 1966
Did I just say that??
huzzah, huzzah. Followed closely by "eject the dropship out the bay, just in case some creepy-crawlies hitched a ride".
You often dont know they are they there until they are knocking at the captain's door. And they can easily become more stealthly like the drug-runners who are even using submarines now.
Am I the only one that thought about baseball as soon as they read this? I don't think I should be allowed on this web site anymore.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
All the testosterone and gung-ho aside, how about not giving them a reason to pirate? It seems that nobody here realizes that the Somali pirates are doing what they do because other nations illegal fishing (worth an estimated 300 million) in the region have depleted [freerepublic.com] their fish stocks while the UN turned a blind eye. To add insult to injury, there's been some toxic waste dumping off the coast.
That little bit of rationalization only goes so far. The fishing issue is why some people (fisherman who lost their livelihoods) turned to piracy but it's largely driven by a profit motive now. They've realized that they can extort money out of shipowners and have no reason to stop doing so as long as the reward is greater than the risk.
are doing what they do because they system has failed them and they see piracy as the most feasible method to force change.
How is piracy going to force charge in Solomia when the warlords that have ruined that country are the ones sheltering the pirates and taking a cut of the money they steal?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I wouldn't root for the pirates, they're just armed thieves, not liberation heroes.
But what is causing piracy is extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia. Before reaching for the gun think how this situation can be changed.
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its causes. You can get all the sophisticated guns you want, if there's extreme poverty you'll never be safe. And I'm not only talking about Somalia. Look at your neighborhood.
Just have motion activated flamethrowers around the edges of the boat.
If they were only doing it to put food on their table, then when they hijack ships carrying food, such as the Maersk Alabama was, then they would have taken the food.
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Oh spare us the BS. The pirates aren't hijacking fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters. They're hijacking cargo ships and ransoming them. They're doing it 100% for greed, which is motivated by a lack of consequences (little rule of law there) and lack of alternatives (crap economy there).
When they stop taking tankers and start taking fishing boats and garbage barges, you can speak in their defense. Until then, STFU.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's starting to sound like Takeshi's Castle ("Most Extreme Elimination Challenge") or Wipeout. Haha. Pirates are funny.
There is a lot of issues.
Some political some practical. non military vessel is not allowed to be armed, for one.
Second is people without training will be trying to shot someone . Trained personal under fire have a very low rate of hits. This would be worse.
Then there is the very real matter that if you just start killing them you will get escalation.
Sure, it would be great to drop a seal team onto every boat, but that's not really practical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That is an extremely good point, however it may unfortunately be too late to stop the piracy by just improving economic/environmental conditions alone. From my limited understanding of the issue, there are many organized groups of pirates now, most with a hierarchal leadership structure. Those at the top are probably doing considerably better for themselves than what they did as fishermen (or whatever they did before). And if it's like most other organized crime, the leaders will go to great lengths to ensure they remain in power. So even if other ways to make a living become viable again, the pirates may still be forced to remain pirates for fear of repercussions from the leadership.
I think the best approach may be to do both...use the gung ho approach to take out the leadership and collapse the organization, and rejuvenate the economic conditions so that pirates may return to other occupations, and thereby prevent the whole mess from happening again.
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How about a gattling gun worked by high presure air that fires 500 gm hard wood slugs. It not only could deliver a world of hurt but is also eco-friendly.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Well, yes, these are the gentler pirates of the 21st century. So far they've been incredibly adept at finding exactly the right level of operation so that they're seen as a minor economic nuisance that can be dealt with readily by insurance companies -- but without stepping the bounds that would make them be seen as a major threat to life that has to be dealt with.
That's why the world hasn't really dealt with them much.
Nothing will happen until they cause a real drastic financial impact. (and it's no big impact to lose $1m ransom on a ship that's worth more carrying cargo that's worth a lot more). Or until they cause a significant number of deaths. They've been avoiding both.
And the problem won't be solved until the fundamental economic and governance problems in Somalia are addressed.
Do you think the pirates doing the pirating have anything worth taking?
Pirate organs for sale! Eyes, livers, hearts . . . you want it, we'll harvest it!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That could have worked a couple of years ago, when pirates were simply preying on easy targets at choke points. Now they're ranging quite far afield -- numerous incidents have taken place off the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania, and even in the Seychelles. You'd have to have a lot of Marines stationed in a lot of ports to cover everyone.
Granted, I would take a ship through that area without a contingent of Blackwater mercenaries on my payroll, but a technological solution would also help safeguard ships in other pirate-prone areas. It's not just a Somalian problem; ships also get hijacked in areas like the Strait of Malacca, Nigeria, and Brazil.
Well, the problem is many ports do not allow an armed ship to dock - so no weapons may be carried.... so how about this for a business opportunity: Stage some "Weapons rental ships" on each side of that straight... kinda like a Video rental place, but with bullets. Then, ships can take weapons out on loan after they leave the dock, and then return them at another ship before they enter the port. Then, they can defend themselves against the Pirates, RIAA, /and/ Jack Thompson if needed.
Sounds like the bases covered to me.
There is no stable government in Somalia either. The lack of social system, education and so forth has in fact failed not only the pirates by their society as a whole. This is not the reason for the rampant piracy, especially when dealing with ships that are brining in food supplies.
This is good old fashioned greed, until recently it has been pretty much a win-win for the pirates. They were seldom if ever confronted and the return on investment was massive. With those conditions in place it created an environment similar to what we had with Privateering.
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
If they were there as social activists, they would be boarding vessels that actually created their problems and keeping them on their shores as a political statement. Not claiming million dollar bounties and going after the next ripe and defenceless target.
That's why they are so vocal about recent warship involvement. Their goose is cooked if world navies crack down.
No I don't but that's probably because I understand the problems of scaling something like that up to encompass every car in the world and I understand how Marines are deployed.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
also, they threaten to kill people and have hundreds of hostages, most of whom probably haven't dumped toxic waste or over fished, but hey, they deserve it because they are rich(er).
Don't care if you are wronged, or are struggling the feed your family. Start waving AK-47's at innocent people and don't be surprised if you get killed.
captcha = coffins. nice
But what is causing piracy is extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia. Before reaching for the gun think how this situation can be changed.
The last time we tried to intervene in that situation it didn't end so well. If the Somalis want change I'd say that it's up to them to provide it. You can't impose freedom or change on a population that isn't willing to accept it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...the Ninja!!! True ultimate power and all that jazz.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Have they tried Fairplay or Windows Media DRM? That seems to be effective with some pirates.
This is very true. Before people swoop in on their humanitarian choppers, understand that these are people whom have lost any sight of doing anything other than lining their pockets with cash. And who exactly does all the cash go towards?
I don't advocate fatalities involved, but you can't just allow piracy to continue. Nonlethal methods are very good for this reason.
That being said, I would love to be on the first ship equipped with anti-piracy non-lethal technologies. I'll even dress up as Data from Goonies, as I feel like his inventions inspired most of these upgrades. =D
Maybe merchantmen need to be armed again.
And there can only be a finite number of pirates. Shoot them and sink their boats, and they won't be replaced, at least not in this generation.
And yeah, maybe it wasn't nice or fair that Somalia's waters got fished out by other countries, but this isn't a problem unique to Somalia, and we don't see the other coastal/fishing countries engaging in piracy. Maybe the real lesson is a warning against a monoculture economy.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yeeeeah homeslice, Theres a difference between putting marines on every ship going through a relatively narrow stretch of sea, and putting a cop in every one of the 241,000,000 [registered, in 2005] cars in the united states.
Also, I didnt know that swashbuckling pirates taking people hostage were that much of a problem on americas road network.
And how much would you pay for that gun?
1 million dollars?
2 million dollars?
Please include the cost of insurance and other legal hoops that have to be bought besides the physical gun and ammunition?
Also the open ocean is NOT your backyard. A more realistic scenario would be firing a few shots at the person approaching your car who you think is a pirate.
Among other suggestions, a near-ship defense which most ships can make: Gravity-powered anti-pirate missile Best to have guns on board too. They might get a little mad.
I doubt the USA would allow Chinese container ships with cannons, and sailors well-armed with lethal weapons to enter US ports.
Same goes for combinations of other countries (e.g. China -> Japan, USA -> China).
As for soldiers/marines - there's no problem if it was US waters and the US marines got onto US ships to help get them into US ports safely.
But these aren't US waters. So there's a lot more political maneuvering, face saving, negotiating etc that needs to be done before something like that can happen.
Meanwhile, it seems countries are less likely to object to merchant ships with "pirate repellents".
One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction.
Oh yeah, They must feel pretty safe bringing a water cannon to a gun fight. Do they get Super Soakers in case the pirates manage to get on the ship?
100 yards. Hmm, let me see here. The effective range of an AK-47 is rated at 400m, though it can kill you out to about a kilometer on a lucky shot. Then we have the RPG-7, which has an effective range out to about 500m for stationary targets and 300m for moving targets. I'm not really sure what a container ship counts as in this context. Either a "mostly stationary" or "barely moving" target, I suppose. Call it 400m, then.
For comparison, the M-2 Browning machine gun has a rated effective range of 1800m.
Hudson: "How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?"
Just lift the entire NPR story for the summary, why don't you?
At least this way nobody has to RTFA...
Yeah, the pirates with Land Rovers and Swiss bank accounts are really doing it to put food on their table.
They're fucking criminals and you're just echoing a ludicrous excuse for piracy.
The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table.
No, the main difference is that they have guns that they use to kill innocent people.
Oh spare us the BS. The pirates aren't hijacking fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters.
Spare us the BS. That's not even close to what he said. If that's really what you heard in your head when you read the GP's post you've got some seriously out of whack filters.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And how long do we intend to pay tribute and put up with the situation?
"We"? It's the shipowners who are paying, not me, not you, and not our government. It's the actions of private individuals.
Honestly, I can understand it to a certain extent. If someone walks up to me, points a gun at me, and demands my wallet, I will give it to him. If, for whatever reason, I happen to be armed, I'm still giving my wallet because the risks inherent in a firefight aren't really worth a few dollars and the aggravation of having to replace a few credit cards and ID cards.
The shipowners have decided it's worth it to just pay off the pirates. Note that even after paying off the pirates, they still send their ships through the same shipping channels. That should tell you that economically, paying off the pirates may be justified.
It seems to me the Somali government should be doing something about the pirates. Yet their government spokesperson said the other day: "Give us some extra cash and we can take care of that pirate problem for you." That sounds a lot like extortion to me. It's like a protection racket. Ridiculous. Maybe we should stop food aid shipments? I suppose that would just make things worse.
you don't bring a super-soaker to a gun fight.
When they get close to the boat, just throw assloads of money at them. Hey, it works for my company.
The original post should have said: "The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a US or French Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation."
As we have recently learned, if you get help from any other country such as Canada or the Netherlands, they are "powerless" to do anything other than disarm the pirates, reprimand them for being bad, and send them on their way to return home, re-arm, and attack again. And who'd have thought that everybody else in NATO would be such wimps that France would look like Chuck Norris in comparison?
You know, cops also are paid no matter where they are stationed, so why not put a trained cop in every car on the road?
I'm pretty sure if one freeway accoutns for most of the crime in their jurisdiction, the police will figure out a way to assign their forces there. There are only so many merchant vessels going around the East coast of Africa at any given time. I think the limitations probably have more to do with our forces being so heavily committed on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I doubt the USA would allow Chinese container ships with cannons, and sailors well-armed with lethal weapons to enter US ports.
They don't need cannons. Rifles and pistols would probably suffice. And why would the USA care if Chinese container ships had small arms aboard ship, as long as those small arms didn't come ashore? A rifle in a weapons locker aboard ship isn't a threat to anyone.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Do the Mariners really need all that fire power against a team that hasn't had a winning season since 1992?
The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table.
Well that and the pirates I know are downloading music, and these guys are pointing guns to people's heads and demanding money.
But, yeah, I would say they're still morally equivalent.
What they want is cheaper insurance, without danger to the ship, cargo, or crew. Marines don't really give that, but deterrents might.
Personally I am rooting for the pirates maybe they can drive up the cost of the goods being transported making more local or regional options viable in areas of commerce and energy supply.
Forget your anti retard pills today? If you're rooting for them, you have to realize that most of the shipping there goes INTO Africa. They would be raising the price of aid to areas where local and regional options are insufficient. The pirates are shooting their own region in the foot for their own profit... it helps no-one. I say nothing works better against pirates than hot lead.
That being said, I would love to be on the first ship equipped with anti-piracy non-lethal technologies.
I wouldn't want to be near such a ship. The pirates aren't limiting themselves to 'non-lethal technologies'. What are you going to do when they respond to your water cannon with an RPG? Sending people armed with 'non-lethal weapons' up against those armed with lethal ones seems pretty stupid to me.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Did you read this part?
"the Somali pirates are doing what they do because other nations illegal fishing (worth an estimated 300 million) in the region have depleted [freerepublic.com] their fish stocks while the UN turned a blind eye. To add insult to injury, there's been some toxic waste dumping off the coast."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
So once they get their huge ransoms and can feed their family, why do they still pirate? I have no doubt these people have been screwed, and that should stop. But there is still more to it than just what you are saying. Pirating is more profitable than fishing. Why would they go back?
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LRADs are cool. I have seen them when I was on a cruise ship in the area. 200+ Db concentrated on a single area. They put 4 of them on the ship stem, stern, port, starboard. Simple. No one will be able to get near you with a multiple mile effectiveness rating, and as they get closer, they go deaf. They get turned off when you are in pirate infested waters, and move along then.
They claim to care about the over-fishing, the illegal dumping and so forth, but it boils down to greed. Especially when you see that it is not fishing vessels that are hit, but supply tankers with big fat cargos worth millions.
Why do you think that responding to running out of fish means people must only attack fishing vessels? If the water is over-fished and poisoned why would there even be any fishing vessels around anymore to attack?
Your argument is akin to saying that if a man was really starving, he would only steal groceries and not steal money to spend on groceries. Its a really blatant mental short-circuit. It suggests that you can't rebutt the GP's original point, but you are so emotionally vested in your current perspective that you have to make up a bogus argument that you can easily knock down in order to avoid considering a broader perspective. I believe that's a form of cognitive dissonance.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
NINJAS!
If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's that sheer rough-n-ready manpower is not always the answer.
Remind us of the lessons from a work of FICTION next time you get taken hostage and half your traveling companions (including friends and possibly family) get killed.
Lever back on the testosterone, pal.
You carry a squirt gun, I'll take a fully-armed crew carrying M-16s.
I have to second the GP, I really can't believe anyone even wants to consider non-lethal means ("Anything but guns?" What sort of bleeding heart came up with that line of feelgood BS?) to deal with armed killers on the high seas. These people board mostly-defenseless ships and kill people, loot the cargo, and take the "important" people for ransom. Just fucking kill them. No "alternatives" necessary.
When container barges start carrying half a dozen 150mm guns, you'll watch this crap vanish overnight. Somehow I don't think various Three-Stooges-esque slapstick "solutions" will accomplish more than pissing the pirates off.
As an aside, these clowns only get away with this because they attack highly-multinational ships, crews, and cargos, so no particular country feels a need to respond. When they do go after, say, a mostly-American (or even mostly-French, recently) ship, we end up with living crew and a few less pirates. Good riddance.
That'd be great, but the Mariners and Pirates are in different leagues and there is no danger of them meeting in the World Series.
It's pretty slim something like 300 in 50000 but each time they take a crew and get paid, you're dealing with more and better equiped pirates.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
That ineffective government you mention, is the result of a bunch of inbred tribals who refuse to submit to governance. The very same inbred tribals who are on the high seas assaulting merchant ships.
Let's kill off the inbreds, and the government will prosper, and piracy will end.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Look at how well dealing with terrorists in a hands-off, pacifistic manner worked. Someday some Islamo-terrorist is going to take a ship loaded with propane or natural gas or some such volatile chemical INTO the Suez and blow it up.
Best to kill them straight off, none of this namby-pamby pussyfooting. M16s, and 600 volts @ 100 amps off the ships generators straight to the hull-plating.
You CAN'T DO THAT.
Many nations have internationally-binding agreements or understandings that doing such a thing could cause the ship to be placed under arrest (yes, a ship can be arrested), the crew detained or held pending a trial, and the ship owners sent an extraordinarly expensive bill for being held fast (secured, or for you landluppers, "tied up" or "docked") to a pier, taking up space pending judicial proceedings.
The in-jurisdiction discovery of a shooting or killing anyone, even pirates or people not part of said nation's waters, puts that ship in the jeopardy. It's why learned, experienced and astute non-military/non-police vessel sailors (civilian yacht and merchant ships) do not carry weapons, or at least secure them and discharge them only in waters in which there is no question of legal risk.
Now, as for the foam that makes the ladders (inclined ladders, etc) nearly impossible to climb, well, they better hope the pirates don't haul sandbags up the ship and use some sort of modified spray applicators to make the foam useless. Or, they better hope the pirates don't have backers who fund them well enough to wear cleated or magnetic shoes that avert the issue of slipping.
As for rifles, the M-16 may be ubiquitous and the darling of movies and numerous police agencies and even the basis of modified K-1 & K-2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daewoo_K2
and of other nations, but Belgians and others have rifles to offer. Besides, the best RIFLE to use would be a well-camouflaged sniper rifle, some of which can be seen here:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/3864/sniper.htm
ifff... iffff the use of them can be applied to snipers outside of their own protected waters. If the international laws can be changed to allow carrying of contracted/hired guns (privateers) to defend them against pirates and piratical activities, then you can really, responsibly, seriously talk about using deadly force outward from and aboard the merchant and passenger ships at risk of piracy.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Nope, you thought wrong. It is about countries not letting armed men dock at their ports. But don't worry, it seems like most the posters today are spouting off about that without actually knowing the reasons they can't have guns. I'm not new here so this is not surprising to me.
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The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table.
There is another important difference. The "it" that they do involves murder, physical property distruction and theft, and sometimes rape/kidnapping. The "it" that we do involves duplicating some digital data.
Give each ex-Marine an AR-15 and 500 rounds
Give each ex-Marine an m92 and 100 rounds
Give each ex-Marine full battle dress
Put 5 each on each ship
Pay them 50k per year
Pay extra 100k in insurance
350k per year per ship
Safety and dead pirates, priceless.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Oh fuck that, you pathetic naive moron. There's NO friggen excuse for resorting to piracy. PERIOD.
Well, I can vouch that a handful of drunk unarmed Sailors can cause some problems :-]
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
This really has to be the cheapest, most effective method - so there must be some, likely political, reason that it's not being used. Much of the issue with arming crew members seems to revolve around 1) training and 2) what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
International Maritime treaties forbid merchant ships from army themselves during peacetime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_passage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea
If ships armed themselves, then they waive the "right of innocent passage" and when they are out of international waters, then they might run into problem with the local authorities.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Cut the hippie-bullshit. The UN is nothing more than a country club for Anti-semetic, bannana-republic dictators. That assembly has NO power and never will. Their proclamations don't mean shit because, no counting the Yanks and us Brit's, there is no army to back up what they say. So on to more realistic things...
I don't give a damn what their situation is, by turning to Piracy, holding men captive and demanding ransom, they lose all rights to sleep safely in their beds. The Americans had it right, splatter their brains on the bulkhead. India had it even better... blow the bloody mothers out of the water.
Welcome to the ways of the real world, peace and love don't mean squat. Its how big your gun is and how much damage you are willing to take before backing down. Why do you think they left the Yank's alone for so long?
You are correct. Having armed crews on a commercial vessel violates international law.
Training and storage are simple: adequate training takes a few days, and the weapons can be stored in a ship's magazine (most of these ships have solid steel walls and doors, which are quite secure), which only the senior officers have access to.
Two words.
Horse and SHIT
Inbred tribals who have refused to support any government are responsible for their own poverty. If you can manage to teach those inbreds how to do anything more complicated than squeezing a trigger and pursuing a slow moving ship in a speedboat, then they can get together, elect the least incompetent of the inbreds to represent them, then get the government to look after thier needs.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Because there's plenty of people willing to replace them.
http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part2.htm
You may wonder how armed Naval ships can have and use weapons, but that is because they are not merchant ships and are ruled by other naval treaties in respect to international law.
If this law was changed, you have to keep in mind that would allow Chinese and Russian merchant vessels to be armed while in US ports so it is a very sticky situation.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Woopie! Surprise!
At this point the best thing we do is stop making things worse.
http://reason.com/news/show/132942.html
We didn't create their situation, but we've definitely exacerbated it.
should be issued to each crew by the British. That way they will cease to be Pirates and become far more respectable privateers and will only attack French or Spanish boats.
Nullius in verba
Honestly, I can understand it to a certain extent. If someone walks up to me, points a gun at me, and demands my wallet, I will give it to him. If, for whatever reason, I happen to be armed, I'm still giving my wallet because the risks inherent in a firefight aren't really worth a few dollars and the aggravation of having to replace a few credit cards and ID cards.
What makes you think he isn't going to kill you anyway once he has your wallet? By pointing that gun at you, he has placed your life in mortal danger. I'd shoot the SOB as soon as I had an opening to do so.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The problem, as I understand it, is that there are so few Navy ships in such a big ocean. So why not put a couple aircraft carriers there? A fighter wing could reach a ship in trouble way faster than a battleship could.
You know a 50 cal machine gun ripping a pirate in half with a single shot is a pretty good anti-pirate solution. I know very few pirates that would stick around after seeking their friend tore in half.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
"Pirate has responded with a scornful remark."
"Approach pirate, and repeat ultimatum in an even firmer tone of voice. Add the words, "or else"."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Did you read this part?
"The only difference between us and them is that they do it to put food on their table."
In what language does "put food on their table" mean "hijack fishing vessels or garbage barges to police their waters?"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
dude, how much do you think a CIWS costs? and the associate radar and fire control systems? what about the operator training?
even supposing those work, how do you propose to detect these raiders? they're in small craft that easily get lost in the sea-clutter on a radar screen.
the fact of the matter is most ships find out they've been the target of a pirate attack when the guy with the AK walks onto the bridge.
Next thing we know, all these merchies will be (for a few years to come at least, until piracy is suppressed) have armed Marines (Korean, Japanese, British, Chinese, etc...) onboard. Next, for matters of convenience, nations will abrogate various insurance and ship classification society rules and contract ship owners and operators to carry illicit cargoes under the protection of armed personnel who might make it inconvenient or even dangerous for shipboard personnel to carry out damage control, routine inspections, and maintenance activities in the presence of armed supervisors.
It could end up like "When asked if there are certain military cargoes onboard the S.S. whatever, the ONLY proper response is 'I can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of (category of item) aboard the S.S. whatever', and then you head directly to the ship's master to report the person who asked the questions....", harkening back to the cold war era...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Arguments claiming that the area involved is too large to patrol with ships have been proffered. If that's the case, have a few AWACS planes orbit the area to vector planes armed with torpedoes from a centrally-placed carrier. Cheap (relatively), easy, effective. Great training exercise, too.
AWACS have look-down radar, so they can see maritime traffic.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So by that same logic you'd be fine with the poor guys down the street break into your house and start stealing your stuff at gun point?
There will always be inequality and even if there wasn't there will always be people who don't want to be "equal" but want more than others and are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Just look at how many "rich" people steal, maybe not at gun point but white collar theft is still theft.
That's pretty ironic given your choice of username ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Now you're making me look for my Goonies DVD
Selachimorpha mounted light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation beam units Not only effective, as proven many times over, a completely green solution, as the Selachimorpha will process the pirates effeciently with minimal emission of greenhouse gasses
You catch more flies with honey. So: bring out a honey pot. Send a bunch of "easy targets" filled with trained marines, and catch the pirates in the act. Then collect ransom from the pirates for the safe release of their pirate friends.
I was pretty sure the moral of Aliens was that you have to nuke em from space, it's the only way to be sure.
But that's not an entirely accurate argument, either: If this were a starving man, it would be akin to him kidnapping someone worth a lot of money (not just another starving man), and holding that person hostage until a ransom was paid, all because he "needed money to eat." If he was really hungry, he would ask for food. Asking for money involves extra steps to actually consuming food, but it allows you to get a lot more than just food.
... Weapons and small watercraft, for instance. Gotta watch that "pot calling the kettle" thing.
If the pirates were really starving, they'd hold these ships hostage and ask for UN attention, or supplies dropped, or they'd just take as much cargo as they could and leave. Because really, you can't eat paper money. You still need to exchange it for food, and again, the thing with money is you can trade it for a lot more than just food.
Roger that. And the first way to promote change in productive directions is to stop them from thinking that "taking a ship's crew hostage for millions of dollars in ransom" will result in a change in anything but their body temperature.
These people aren't pirates because the see any "global inequality", they are pirates because they think they can make millions of dollars easily and face no consequences. It's no different than any criminal activity, white collar or blue.
Um, aren't most of these devices or techniques capable of being appropriated by the pirates themselves from ships that maybe didn't use them quite effectively enough? Seems like they'd be very useful for disorienting the crew on a ship you're trying to board...
=/
I always get angry when I see someone attempting to justify another's illegal actions. First of all, I don't give any credence to Amy Goodman's interview of a pirate sympathizer that the facts of the issue are accurately reported. I dismiss the argument made in the Democracy Now article quoted in the Free Republic piece cited in the parent as naively absurd. Second, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right. You cannot equivocate lawful means of redress with international piracy, even if they had a legitimate gripe.
The bottom line is that I'm not concerned about "not giving them a reason to pirate". I'm interested in giving them a reason not to pirate - that is, sure and certain punishment for illegal actions in international waters against lawful commerce. Neither am I interested in non-lethal deterrents as means of possibly controlling their bad behavior. They're bringing AK-47s and RPGs to the game. This isn't a paintball fight. They're threatening human lives and millions of dollars of cargo with their actions. This simply has to be deterred with harsh, even lethal, measures. Anything short of this level of response will be viewed as a sign of weakness and will have no significant deterrent capability.
The passage you quoted does not prevent seaman from having weapons, merely from doing anything with them within territorial waters. So just keep them locked up when in territorial waters. Once you're outside territorial waters (or in the territorial waters of a state which doesn't respect innocent passage anyway), break 'em out.
There's probably other treaties getting in the way, but that isn't one of them.
So what you really need to be asking yourself is whether its worse to have your television stolen or to be locked up in a state-run nursing home in the waning years of your life.
Actually, my son would probably so bitterly resent me for letting the TV get stolen when I could have had a gun and shot the guy doing it, that he would lock me in a state run nursing home.
Besides, there will be no nursing home for me. When my end comes, I may as well wire myself for glory and head over to the Democratic HQ. All that misuse of power breeds terrorists, you know...
This is my sig.
Actually, until the latest incident, Somali pirates have universally treated captured hostages with the utmost care, including those who unsuccessfully resisted with LRAD and other non-lethal devices. They feed their captives and treat them nicely. The pirates have no incentive to kill or harm their hostages, as doing so would cause every future sailor under attack to fight to the death. The status quo had been something akin to a bank robber; you walk in with a note demanding money, and the teller gives it to you even if you don't show a weapon because the company doesn't want anyone killed.
Now that pirates have been killed, it is an open question whether or not they will continue acting in this manner.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I wonder how many pirate attacks we never hear about, because the pirates are never heard from again? I wouldn't be surprised if at least one cargo ship crew had managed to get the best of pirates attacking them, sent them to the bottom, and decided it was in their best interest to keep quiet about it.
The only problem I see with his idea now is that it has been burdened by the weight of your useless carcass of a post.
Simply put, this is why marines exist. They were created, trained, and specialize in this field of battle. No regular force on earth is as skilled at ship to ship engagement and capture as a marine is.
While some say the rest of the world should respect Somalia's territory, they don't patrol it. They can't even control the land they own, let alone the 2,000 miles of coast line or 1.1 million square miles of AOP that the pirates work in. Now, around 20,000 ships travel through this area each year. break that down to seasonal and monthly repeaters and you get a very manageable number that you can populate with a squad of marines (two or three for large tankers and transports).
In 6 months of work I bet pirates decide that it isn't worth messing with a ship that has soldiers willing to not only kill you, but counter-board your ship and capture or kill anyone that DIDN'T attempt to board and proceed ot sink/capture the attacking vessel.
Uuuraaah.
USMC. '93-'97.
"...to the shores of Tripoli".
One Brigand...One Bullet.
Before reaching for the gun think...
okay, let's look at my neighborhood (or the immediate surrounding areas). a lot of people have it really rough and there is a lot of poverty. but if you kick down my door i am not stopping to think about how rough you have it or how hungry your kids are. if you threaten someone with violence expect a reaction in kind. i won't shoot first, but i will if you threaten me. it's called self-defense and if you don't like it, don't go around attacking people on the high seas or in my front room.
"So Konrad is a big fan of having ships travel in convoys. That means there are more eyes looking for trouble and that pirates will have a harder time attacking any single ship."
The ships could then deploy/rig piano wire-like cabling (or, ship-safe electrical wires) between them and crank up the juice to near-switchboard-blowing-levels of voltage and current when the pirates get between the hulls. Or, rig non-scalable pontons beween the ships. When the pirates get between, have a sideswiping operation to grind them up.
Seriously, tho, the LRAD is promising, but well-stabilized speed boats afford an opportunity for sniper-trained pirates (or, highly-skilled boarders) to disable the LRAD so they can avoid using ear protection that might otherwise impede team communication devices...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Lets see: Victims use water cannon - 100 meters max range - WEEEEE! Pirates lately been using grenade launchers as their introductory volley - EFFECTIVE range 300 meters, max range 400-900 meters (depends on the model - your results may vary). Seems obvious why pirates are ahead in this equation. Get armed or be a victim - funny that axiom applies on so many levels.
If they were only doing it to put food on their table, then when they hijack ships carrying food, such as the Maersk Alabama was, then they would have taken the food.
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Do you actually believe the BS that you type?
Each group of pirates have a couple of small speedboats - in the case of the Maersk Alabama they had a single skiff. How much food do you think is going to fit on that one boat versus how much food can you buy with a ransom of half a million dollars?
Clearly the pirates are not angels, but so far all of the flaming responses to the GP's point that desperate conditions breed desperate men seem to be rooted in knee-jerk ideology built on ridiculously one-sided analyses like yours.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Creative Loafing's Andisheh Nouraee has a list of better ways to stop Somali pirates:
How can America stop Somalia's sea pirates?
Coming soon, to an office party near you. Filled with colored sugar water.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not sure if the american govt is just a big lumbering oaf or destabilizes the region on purpose. Either way they fuck up everything they touch.
Ah, yes, it's all our fault. Sorry, I forgot that as an American I'm responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. The Somali warlords bear no responsbility at all.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How many countries apart from the USA do you think are stupid enough to allow civilians to carry weapons? :)
I'm pretty sure you'd have a hard time finding a harbor in Europe that will take you in and not put you in jail for a few years
Seriously, guns in the hands of civilians is not a solution. I know it's a subject for discussion in USA, but in most civilized nations there's no pro-gun lobby organizations, nor any desire for guns within the population.
(Guns for hunting and sports excepted, however, still strongly restricted. Also all automatic stuff like M-16 is strictly banned).
Well, in some cases, nominally non-lethal means. A water cannon which can fire 1400GPM out to 100 meters is quite possibly lethal in practice, for anyone who gets in its way. It's not going to run out of ammo. And if it really is big enough to flood a pirate ship, drowning is lethal enough. Yet no do-gooder will whine about it being a weapon, especially if they're told it's fire suppression apparatus.
Well, how much training do you 'really' need? Shooting a gun is pretty easy.
As others have mentioned, when going to a port, just lock the guns away on the ship.
And as for the last point...sure, for now paying the pirates off has been the SOP, but, the pirates aren't just sitting on the beach drinking rum, they're investing that ransom money (millions of dollars) into better weaponry and electronic gear for surveillance and communications!!
If they don't stop paying them off now....the situation is gonna get worse and worse.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yep, he did read it, and I read it too. It doesn't change the fact that if this were the reason for it they would be attacking fishing vessels and waste dump barges instead of capturing valuable container ships and ransoming the crew and cargo for massive profit.
This is equivalent of saying "My neighbor keeps stealing my TV, so I kidnap the children of all the other neighbors EXCEPT his and sell them back so I can buy myself a yacht."
no, Alien taught us that. Aliens taught us the opposite: best response is to take off and nuke the site from orbit. weren't you paying attention?
as penance, you now have to go watch Alien 3.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Maritime law allows you to bring arms into port as long as they are locked away properly.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Who said the world orlife should be a fair or equal place???
Never has been, never will be.
Hey, all the globe started off pretty much from square one....if some areas couldn't keep up, well, that's tough. They can try to catch up, but, it won't be easy...especially when they can't seem to govern themselves effectively, set up governments without jackass dictators, etc.
Like it is 'our' fault they haven't gotten it together over the past few centuries? Sorry...I don't see any reason to drag down leaders with people that just can't seem to do shit with their lives or their countries.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I don't remember the laws WRT mercenaries, but you can't use US Marines except on a US flagged ship*, and very, very few ships fly a US flag. Liberian and Panamanian marines, sure. Have the shipowners go ahead and call up the country who flagged their ship and ask for protection. After all, they certainly provide the same level of defense that the US can, right?
Either that or let them pay the ransoms. On this one I don't have a lot of sympathy for the shipowners- they don't feel like paying taxes, decent wages or maintaining their ships? Don't expect the US taxpayer to bail their sorry ass out of trouble.
*I seem to recall hearing once that there's an exception for allied ships in wartime, but I'm not a naval lawyer so who really knows.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
And until 9/11 hijackers always dealt with their hostages humanely -- with a few, isolated exception. They released planes and hostages after getting money, or flown somewhere or the like. And then someone changed the rules.
Depending on the honor of a violent criminal is just asking to be fucked over on a whim.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Somali pirates take their pick of the 16,000 mainly cargo ships that pass through the Suez Canal annually
times
$350,000 per ship
equals
$5,600 million/year
In last year "they have attacked more than 80 ships and hijacked at least 30, collecting [a total of] anywhere from $18 million to $30 million in ransom"
Cost of paying ransom is 1% of the cost of arming all the ships.
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its causes
Your right... Poverty is the issue.. I'm poor, so give me you frakn Money or I'm gonna come shoot YOU. Sound like an viable option now? No. Instigating force because of an inequality of some type does not help a cause. They are wrong and should be dead pieces of meat if they continue to try that tactic.
Who benifits from the Piracy? Usually the same people keeping them held down in Poverty to begin with. Do yo think they get to split the ransoms? Hell no, it goes to the warlord leaders to buy more guns and kill more people and get drugs, etc..
Their proclamations don't mean shit because, no counting the Yanks and us Brit's, there is no army to back up what they say. So on to more realistic things...
Its how big your gun is and how much damage you are willing to take before backing down. Why do you think they left the Yank's alone for so long?
Wow, a Brit with some balls who understands how the world works. I didn't know Margaret Thacher had a /. account ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
okay. but only one of us will be able to enter many international ports. know which one?
this isn't about "feelgood BS", it's about international and local laws, primarily, and the safety of crew and innocents they come into contact with.
look, i've not seen anyone get particularly defensive of the pirates. if you're raiding, kidnaping, ransoming, and killing, well, you take your chances with getting mowed down. but i find it really interesting that you can't come up with a single good reason why a traditional firearm might not be the best plan other than some straw man hippie love.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
If the pirates were really starving, they'd hold these ships hostage and ask for UN attention, or supplies dropped,
Right, people in one of the most shit upon countries in the world are going to expect anything from the UN. The organization that is practically run by the same country that overthrew the most serious attempt to bring law and order to the country in the last 20 years?
or they'd just take as much cargo as they could and leave. Because really, you can't eat paper money. You still need to exchange it for food, and again, the thing with money is you can trade it for a lot more than just food.
The thing with money is that you can trade it for a lot more food than you could ever haul off as cargo in a handful of speed boats.
Sure they are going to use the ransoms for other things too, but then their former income from fishing their waters, when it was still feasible, was used for a lot more than just food too.
Consider this very obvious fact - somali piracy wasn't a serious problem until this decade. Yet the political conditions in somalia have been fucked up for around two decades, if not three -- the Blackhawk Down incident occurred in 1993, and things started to fall apart in the late 70s. What changed? Fishery poisoning and depletion is the obvious one. You got a better explanation?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yet no do-gooder will whine about it being a weapon, especially if they're told it's fire suppression apparatus.
Maybe we should tell them that M-16s are piracy suppression apparatus? ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I will shoot first, in fact, I won't be asking who it is till I've about emptied my 2nd clip.
If you have a gun, and are defending against an intruder in your house, you'd better assume they have deadly intent to your and/or your family, and use your gun aimed to kill, and use your advantage if you have on....SHOOT FIRST.
Hesitation with gun will get you just as dead as without one, except you have a better chance if you are armed.
I've often told people, that if you have a hesitation to use a gun....then you really shouldn't own one for protection.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You can't impose freedom...
NO, you can't.
I don't have a sig.
They only waive this right if they act in ways that are "prejudicial to the peace, good order or the security" of the country in whose territorial waters they are sailing. One specific example from one of the articles you linked to is "weapons practice", but not "weapons possession". Even submarines, which are well armed, don't need to give up their weapons in territorial waters, they only need to sail on the surface under colors.
Yes, if a merchant vessel came into US waters with guns blazing, I think there would be concern. If, however, they entered with "guns stowed and locked", there is no danger to the security of the US. In Somali waters, there would be no danger to Somali 'good order', unless Somalia decided that successful piracy was part of their 'good order', and then they'd run afoul of international law. It is a reasonable expectation that merchant vessels should receive protection from piracy while they are in territorial waters from the owner of those waters.
Even so, the pirates operate in international waters, IIRC.
How many people read the headline and wondered why a Seattle baseball team was trying to create something to keep Pittsburgh players away?
(b) Don't practice on the boat.
(l) getting hijacked would have a direct bearing on passage, so measures to not be hijacked would have a direct bearing on passage.
And as far as allowing armed MVs in our ports... So what? We have nukes, the Russians have nukes and you think they'd do something stupid with small arms from an armed MV? Boom sticks stay on the boats while they are in port and no harm, no foul.
You don't need a cop in the USA since most places you go a private citizen can legally have a gun in their car for self defense. Of course the vast majority don't because being kidnapped and help for ransom isn't high on the threat list here.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Two?!? One squad of US Marines is a heavily armed element; 8 or 9 M16s or M4s, a couple of grenade launchers, an M240 or M249 MG, and a bunch of AT4s (replacements for the old LAW rocket). More than enough to deal with the level of threat we're seeing in Somali waters. If the pirates want to rachet up, at least you'd have a force in place to delay them long enough to bring up the Navy.
All of these attacks involve a mothership from which they launch the small attack boats. I would rather that they repel the attack boats, but also fire tracers on the small boats. Then after the attack, let the navies know. Once the attack boat hooks up with a motherboat, kill them all. Once a couple of motherboats are blown up, ALL attacks will stop. But if all they lose is a small attack boat, and 3-4 guys, it will do nothing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yep, he did read it, and I read it too. It doesn't change the fact that if this were the reason for it they would be attacking fishing vessels and waste dump barges instead of capturing valuable container ships and ransoming the crew and cargo for massive profit.
So, just why do you think there are any fishing vessels to attack? If the waters have been depleted and poisoned, who is going to fish there now? And what benefit is there to attacking the waste barges? They have nothing of value, you can't eat garbage and you can't ransom it for shit. The fish are already gone, maybe they'll come back in a few decades if the place gets cleaned up, but what are you going to do in the meantime?
This is equivalent of saying "My neighbor keeps stealing my TV, so I kidnap the children of all the other neighbors EXCEPT his and sell them back so I can buy myself a yacht."
No, this is the equivalent of running out of options and taking the route with the highest return for the least risk.
Its really easy to sit back and ignore the conditions that lead up to a situation, demonize the other guys and ignore root cause because it satisfies your own tribalistic tendencies. But that approach never actually fixes problems, it just makes more.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In the Navy (stopping singing the song!) every person was trained for "damage control". We needed to know how to quickly get to the nearest fire station and deploy the fire hose and be ready to combat a fire. Now, you may not understand the power of a 2.5 inch firehose as you have not seen one in action. They are manned by more than one person for a good reason (this is only a 1.5 inch hose).
I for one would not want to be trying to climb a rope ladder with someone shooting water at me from one of these.
Also, if you have never seen the inside of a ship the walls and ceilings are lined with electrical cables, piping (high pressure air, fuel, hydraulic lines, and of course sewage!) that would be easily ruptured by an errant bullet. That is why many sailors are taught to shoot someone by ricocheting the buckshot off the floor to diminish the damage caused by the bullets that do not find the proper target.
See, even cheaper than I thought and less expensive to boot. Pirates get dead, ships get saved, Marines get some trigger time in. What's not to like eh?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It seems like everybody should be OK if the cargo ships armed themselves with crossbows or pneumatic weapons. An addition to the cool "Mad Max" feel it would add to the situation, it might actually be a good way to kill pirates in small boats.
Threaten my supertanker? Here, have a couple dozen metal spears.
Molotov cocktails should also work, maybe rigged to a slingshot launcher of some kind.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
Probably why he can vouch for it...
A saner approach would be to simply not sincerely negotiate at all and always mount military responses if the terrorists don't surrender after a reasonable period of time.
I'm quite curious about what you understand by "sane".
How would your tactic preserve the lives or the innocents involved, anyhow?
I don't have a sig.
Ah, yes, it's all our fault. Sorry, I forgot that as an American I'm responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. The Somali warlords bear no responsbility at all.
As for Somali responsibility, we know that most human beings are capable of horribly evil things if they have little hope for a good future. I agree that they should work for a better future like most Somali's are probably doing, but resorting to violent criminal behaviour isn't terribly unexpected. This is why I took it for granted. We all know that we need law and order for a reason...
If the movie Aliens taught us anything...
Fuck, some of you are embarrassing!
The use of this new tech will debut in the hit series documentary called Home Alone.
So, have them keep the guns on the boat and don't bring them into the LBC. We've got enough, thanx.
You sure got some big angry balls there. You seem to be very proud of them.
What you don't consider is the result of your position. You think you can cow these people into submission.
Humans don't work like that - look at yourself and your chest beating. You don't think they've got chest beaters with big angry balls too? You think because you've got big guns that they aren't going to figure out a way to fight back that negates the value of your big guns? Did you not learn anything in Iraq?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
When are people going to stop equating blame with causation? What the pirates do is wrong, and we can justly blame them and hold them accountable. But if part of the causation of breeding those pirates is something we can positively affect, why the hell wouldn't we? The Blackhawk down scenario isn't the only option; there are other ways that we can be of assistance. Fighting pirates and fighting its cause are NOT mutually exclusive.
Your premise is essentially accurate, but your argument is slightly flawed. The pirates will take anything that moves and isn't heavily armed. Their ransom is not for the cargo or the ship, but for the crew. You can put a dollar value on any material object, but not on life. So to negotiate the highest possible ransom, they take people.
Their motivation is essentially money, but I wouldn't say it is greed. They do it for the same reasons everybody else works: to make a living, and hopefully to enable their children to live better lives. Greed is officers and managers of failed banks awarding themselves multi-million dollar bonuses for failing as spectacularly as they did (which was a product of greed in and of itself) and taking the rest of the world with them. Greed only applies to those who have but still want more. The desire in and of itself is not greed.
You might argue that these are mostly children. That may be by our standards, but the "coming of age" period varies by culture. So they may be children in our society, but they could very well be considered adults in theirs with all such expectations, e.g. that they start a family and provide accordingly.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
i agree with everything you said. i meant that i would first order an intruder to the ground or allow them to flee, and only shoot if there is a clear threat. i certainly am not going to wait for someone to pop off a shot if they have a bared firearm. but, likewise i want to give someone a fair chance to change their mind before they force me to do something that i don't want to.
the nautical equivalent would be to use a PA to tell them to fuck off, followed by a warning shot, and then sink the bastards.
I salute you, sir - whenever the Harkonnens took any prisoners of the civilian population of Arrakis, the survivors held a funeral for the hostages and acted as though they were dead. No leverage, no more hostages.
a lot of the commentary here has to do with the idea the crews should be armed
the rationale being that this is the best policy in civic life as well
well, crews are not armed, because when you give arms to a handful of guys in the middle of the ocean, interesting scenarios develop involving needless death. not even the majority of such scenarios having anything to do with pirates. hey, don't argue with me. this is official policy on the high seas for a reason
which is exactly why no one should have guns in civic life as well: why multiply the number of scenarios in which the outcome is death for the victims, nevermind the perpetrators
i'd actually like to see the common sense we have on the high seas apply to common sense in civic life: stop the proliferation of guns in civic life, which only results in thousands of needless deaths due top pointless escalation from random domestic situations, posturing teenagers, curious children, miscommunications, accidents, etc.
not that you will see gun proponents ever admit this. in their eyes, a gun is always and forever more used only according to the most virtuous of reasons, and the outcome is always good. even though reality and history and statistical fact proves otherwise, by orders of magnitude
but don't argue with me. argue with the wisdom of those who maintain ships on the high seas
as for what to do about the new pirate situation off of somalia that seems to challenge this wisdom: ships in convoys, chaperoned by warships, just world war i&ii in the north atlantic when german uboats were on the prowl. just like we deal with crime on land: with police, not with the arming of random yahoos on the street with dirty harry complexes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have a very simple solution for the pirate problem:
Nuke the site from the orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
When I was young, I used to stick around work after the late shift and use the computers. This required electricity on the part of the company. They were happy to let me do it because having someone ON SITE during times when normally nobody was meant they could get a break on insurance. Someone was there to deal with fires, etc, instead of depending on automated alarms and such.
I tell that story only because it is reasonable to assume that an armed ship will have lower insurance rates than unarmed ones, because there is less chance that they will be pirated and the insurance have to pay off.
Also the open ocean is NOT your backyard. A more realistic scenario would be firing a few shots at the person approaching your car who you think is a pirate.
Stupid and meaningless automobile analogy.
There is no reason for a small vessel to approach a large merchant ship without clear identification and communications on the high seas. There is NO reason for a small, unidentified, high-speed ARMED vessel to approach a merchant ship on the high seas AT ALL.
On the other hand -- "hey dude, you left your lights on".
If I'm a merchant captain, I say anything within 300 yards of my vessel on the high seas IS in my backyard and you better have a real good excuse for being there, and if you try to board my vessel you are no longer in my backyard, you are undeniably on MY property and will suffer the consequences.
stage an old oil platform out there and make it like a big "coat check". you could even leave a crew member on board to watch your gear. :)
Would it be practical to offload the weapons on a small boat that parks in international waters while the merchant ship docks? The merchant ship would be unarmed only during the time it is going to and from port to pick up the armament. Perhaps the port could supply security for that part of the passage.
I mean MLB even outlawed aluminum bats. So now they are going to allow Seattle to use lasers and stuff? And why only against Pittsburgh? They aren't even in the same league.
Also, I didnt know that swashbuckling pirates taking people hostage were that much of a problem on americas road network.
I think your onto something here...
I can't remember ever seeing a Samolian Pirate ship on the roads here in Oklahoma.
But I have seen some pretty strange things on the roads here...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
If they attacked waste barges and fishing vessels (there are fishing vessels to attack in the massive area they commit piracy in) they MIGHT attract the attention of the UN who would say "look, they are doing it to stop the dumping. This makes sense." and they MIGHT get help. However, using your issues as an excuse for being a warlord/waterlord is bullshit. Its a fact - Crime is illegal, and they know it. They do it for money, not for ideals. Do you think Somalis give a shit about the environment? Their own environment? Hello, they want MONEY, POWER, FOOD. They could switch to agriculture and get help but they don't want to do that, they want the quick dollar.
Get off your high horse, before a Somali takes it for ransom... I mean "aid".
Might, might, might versus actual results.
You are supremely unrealistic.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its causes.
But fighting poverty from outside is near impossible. Most of the problems which keep nations in poverty aren't things an outsider can fix. Just imagine starting a business in one of the dodgier African countries. The electricity is off half the time, you need huge amounts of money for bribes to start up and run, there's crippling bureaucracy (more paperwork steps=more bribes, so corruption breeds bureaucracy), government thugs/warlords/criminals/whoever keep arbitrarily seizing your property, you can't get proper title to property so you can't raise mortgages, the courts don't work so you can't enforce your contracts or trademarks (and everyone knows that, so they don't pay and you can't buy things without cash up front), you can spend years waiting for something as simple as a phone line, there's no worthwhile banking system, educated potential workers have all left the country, corrupt currency controls means that only the favoured few don't have to buy foreign currency at black market rates and sell at (lower) official rates, and you've got no hope of raising finance. Oh, and you can't compete in the tradition first-step-up from agriculture (textiles) because the Asians have it thoroughly, erm, sewn up. And, of course, the politicians and politics are all shit.
Then, after all that, some git of a pirate seizes your exports and your customer won't pay when they are four months late.
Yeah, right. All the money is going to food. Oh, and to help support a second wife. Maybe even a third. And half a millions dollars? The average ransom is $2m.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7650415.stm
It's all a matter of economics. As the piracy rate increases, the cost of insurance will increase, and so the ship owners will become more motivated to fix the problem. When it becomes cheaper to kill pirates then to pay them off, the pirates will be killed. That will also reduce the motivation for the pirates, since geting shot is very expensive, changing their economic equation.
Are we responsible for the situation? No. Somalia was a hellhole before, during and after those 6 weeks in 1993.
Can we make a difference without armed intervention, with any amount of money? No. We did try in 1993, which made Mohammed Farrah Aidid simply stronger because he could just rob the UN of all that food and medical aid and sell it wholesale.
Can we make a difference with armed intervention? Maybe, but we're not willing to, because we pee our pants thinking of all those poor poor irregular fighters getting killed, who are soo innocent and only fighting because they are so poor. (On the other hand, I would not want any Marine to even bruise his hand trying to help that hellhole of a country.)
So what to do then?
Doing nothing reaches nothing with the warlords in place, who are really in charge of keeping everyone else down. Pouring in large amounts of money and aid doesn't help but only fattens the warlords. Going in with troops and armor costs American lives, brings civilian deaths and pacifists will whine about killed warlord fighters as well, demanding an instant pull-out.
So what do you want? Pouring in money is what we do, giving millions to pirates, helping no one but the warlords. Doing nothing makes you enraged, killing bad guys makes you enraged and paying millions is insane.
No. It doesn't. It does, however, explain why it happens. A person grows up in abject poverty, and thanks to mass media's portrayal of the western world, he realizes just how much poverty he's got to deal with. He sees that there's not really anything that separates him from people in wealthier parts of the world other than what's effectively birth right. He begins to resent that relative wealth, and he begins to develop a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't he have the same wealth that the rich have?
That sense of entitlement is what, he feels, gives him the right to hold a person hostage demanding ransom.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
we need more of these head-to-head jackass elimination contests!
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Whoa, whoa, the 4th Amendment still applies here. Make it Alien 4.
There aren't any fishing vessels in their waters because of the nuclear dumping that went on there. Did you miss that part?
They're hijacking the cargo vessels because they are what happen to come through and they're ransoming them because, and I'm sure this must be a foreign concept to you or else you would have seen this by now, MONEY BUYS FOOD. The piracy also gets them attention for their cause.
Trust me, if you were watching your entire community die of either starvation or radiation poisoning, you'd make the exact same choices they have, or you'd be dead. The U.N. isn't doing anything to help them. What are the Somalians to do? Wait for "proper bureaucratic channels" to save them? Yeah, that's a speedy process.
definitely "Q' boats. forget the slippery stuff use crazy glue instead. sounds like fun.
Actual results currently are: Get shot to death by SEAL team snipers. Yeah, great plan of action.
How 'bout if a small boat comes along side a ship in international waters without permission, just pour a couple buckets of diesel on 'em and drop a flare (or spray it and use a flare gun).
That might be a fairly quick deterrent...
Merchant ships either cannot carry "weapons" because of laws at the ports they enter, or prefer not to because of massive liability insurance demands if they do.
A diesel powered ship has many, many gallons of diesel on board, has many buckets and other containers, and always has flares. None of those are "weapons" in the usual sense.
In any case, SOMETHING has to be done, and hosing the pirates down with diesel and lighting it just might deter others...
Sorry sparky. The Pirates are doing it because they can. They are criminals and are should be dealt with.
You are right about the illegal over fishing by the Russians, Japanese, and Poland. They suck and should have to pay up for the damage they did. That is why a lot of people are starving. BUT the pirates are interfering with relief food and other aid that would feed a lot of people in Somali.
I agree that innocent of Somali are suffering because the UN let them down and some countries stole their natural resources.
But the Pirates are no the innocents.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This water canon thing sounds like fun. Put that on cruise ship and I'd pay for a pirate-busting theme-park vacation!
As a German, I say thank you America for removing the crazy Austrian and rebuilding the whole goddamn continent.
I'm pretty sure the South Koreans think along similar lines, because they'd only had political speeches to listen to in re-education camps, no rice, no kimchi and certainly no StarCraft championships without the GIs back then.
But no, the US is responsible for everything, yep. Especially the bad things.
The more I read about "pacifist", "liberal", "leftist", "multiculturalist" opinions, the more I think they're here to kill all White guys in the end. I think I now know remotely how a black guy must have felt back in the fifties, when the roles were reversed. But in 2009, all things Whitey does or ever did are considered incredible atrocities while everyone else gets a guilt-free genocide every now and then. A million dead in Darfur or Ruanda is an inconvenience only caused by Whitey not giving enough of its money. Ten cases of torture in Abu Ghraib are a catastrophe and should be redeemed in giving more money.
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
Two?!?
My first reaction also. Two squads of jarheads would be a bit much for this purpose.(It would make an entertaining, if very brief show!)
But, to cut him a little slack, most people have no clue how much destruction a squad of jarheads can wreak in short-order, they've learned most of what they think they know from TV.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
As long as you are under 200 food, have upgraded armour, stimpack, and the opponent doesn't have tanks or defilers, marines are very cheap to maintain. /me goes back to playing Starcraft
I wouldn't root for the pirates, they're just armed thieves, not liberation heroes.
Well the only difference between an armed thief and a liberation hero is which side of the gun you are on.
Yet the political conditions in Somalia have been fucked up for around two decades, if not three -- the Blackhawk Down incident occurred in 1993, and things started to fall apart in the late 70s. What changed? Fishery poisoning and depletion is the obvious one. You got a better explanation?
Population growth of a country exceeding it's ability to sustain that growth, due to reproduction and refugees from Ethiopia.
It's interesting to note that while I was researching the population growth rate of Somalia (3% or more per year), I came across an article that mentions that Somalians haven't eaten fish for centuries, due to tradition, apparently.
http://countrystudies.us/somalia/36.htm
It means that fish were more or less strictly exported, and I can pretty much figure out the problem of a country whose major export is decreasing while its population is increasing. They need to diversify, or limit the birth rate, and they need to do it by 1985 or sooner. Even if their waters hadn't become polluted, it's pretty obvious that relying on only one export (provided by Nature) is tough to sustain, even with a 0% growth rate. So, you're right, fishery poisoning and depletion is the obvious one, but there's a lot more to it than that. Why didn't their leaders figure that out and diversify? Oh, that's right, they were too busy becoming "rich and powerful" and overthrowing one another.
Yeah, right. All the money is going to food. Oh, and to help support a second wife. Maybe even a third.
Don't be so naive. These guys have a lot more than just their immediate family depending on their results. And I'm sure they live large with the money they do get. But so did the hunter who brought home the big kill.
And half a millions dollars? The average ransom is $2m.
That just serves to prove my point even further - $2M buys a hell of a lot more food and supplies than could ever be hauled off in a couple of speedboats.
You seem to be defending the point of view that these people have no other motivation than greed, that they are just bad people and their living conditions are not desperate at all. If that's true, then why did somali piracy just become a significant issue in the last decade? Did these people just suddenly "turn bad" and before that they were all just singing kumbaya?
If you aren't willing to examine the root cause of the problem, you'll never solve the problem.
"Know thy self, know thy enemy.
A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
--Sun Tzu
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's just retarded.
Shooting a gun is pretty easy. Hitting what you're shooting at, not so much. It takes a lot of practice, and even with that practice, if you can't stay calm when you're under the wire, you're still screwed. I've heard many cases of people unloading entire magazines from 15' away and hitting nothing. And when you put a fully automatic weapon into somebody's hands it gets even worse... the first bullet *might* be on target, but anything beyond that is a dice roll.
I think you're *hugely* overestimating the ability of merchant sailors to use weapons to adequately defend themselves. There's a reason that the US Army redesigned the M16 during the Vietnam conflict to prevent it from firing more than 3 bullets without letting go of the trigger.
And I say that as somebody who classed marksman, with both pistol and rifle, when I was in the Canadian army.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Really the best approach is to save up the 1500g, and have a black or red mage in your party learn lit2.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Giving money to pirates is about as useful in combating poverty as is allowing drug trade and gang warfare in ghetto areas.
Crime and terror always creates poverty. Poverty in turn sometimes creates crime and terror, but not always, there are enough poor but peaceful areas around the world.
Fattening warlord's armies is not going to change anything for the better. Money and lawlessness is the fuel that drives these crimes.
And how do you justify them looting food from international aid agencies?
Although I feel like I shouldn't respond to such a blatant troll, since your post was modded up I have no choice but to respond here. (Since nobody else has gotten it right so far)
Calling the GP post BS is just plain wrong. Toxic waste was dumped in their waters, this is a fact. In addition, illegal fishing of their waters is a fact. Your response for the GP to "STFU" is simply uncalled for.
However, none of these facts justifies kidnapping and ransoming people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Many of the first Somali pirates probably started off with noble intentions, but after seeing the potential money that could be made by simply hijacking ships (rather than telling people to get lost) most pirates joined in and the ransoming we see today was born.
At the same time, the GP's suggestion that simply stopping people from illegally fishing and dumping waste in Somalia's waters will end piracy is obviously wrong. As the parent correctly points out, the motivation has become greed. With that said, that means the solution to piracy needs to be a two pronged approach: Stop pirates from hijacking ships, and expel foreign fishermen/polluters from Somalia's exclusive economic zone. If there are fish to catch and punishments for piracy, people will go back to legal methods of income.
So in the future, the GP and P should consider thinking about the other sides argument a bit and coming up with a more logical solution than their gut-reactions ("evil international community" vs. "evil pirates")
Actual results currently are: Get shot to death by SEAL team snipers. Yeah, great plan of action.
If you can't even conceive of what life is like in another country, I can see how you would think they are just kicking back in their mcmansions and playing nintendo.
Live life in poverty and famine with a decent chance of getting killed in a fire-fight with some warlord or take a similar chance of getting killed by the biggest warlord on the planet but if you do survive you are no longer poor, nor starving and hundreds in your community are indebted to you.
yeah, I'd take the mcmansions too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The guy controlling the water cannon remotely is deep inside the ship, and an RPG won't significantly damage the structure of the ship itself. And no amount of RPGs and AK-47s will help them climb a ladder coated in slippery foam. Considering armed merchants aren't allowed in a lot of friendly ports, these sound like pretty good weapons.
You should really be familiar with the code before posting it.
(b) any exercise or practice with weapons of any kind;
- Refers to weapons exercises. For example, merchant vessels cannot partake in military exercises on the high seas. This is no way limits the use of weapons to repel pirates.
(l) any other activity not having a direct bearing on passage.
-"Activity" in this passage refers to an action a merchant vessel performs. For example, a merchant vessel cannot fish, troll, remove items from the sea etc. This line item is the grab-all for deep sea treasure hunters of various sorts.
Since the merchant vessels are not boarding the pirate vessels, this does not apply.
Any other questions?
Well said. Life is not fair, we don't have equal headstart and we will always be very differently-abled. And just as well are some ways of life more compatible with failure than others. Somalia has made their choice and so have we. As long as we claim all ways of life are equally worthy, we will not change a thing, because some ways of life create poverty while others create wealth.
We don't need to lay it down to the survival of the fittest but we sure as hell neither have the resources nor the will it takes to bring peace and wealth to every downtrodden, crime-ridden part of this earth.
We don't need to help everyone equally, people who demand that are clinically insane and need help. I say we help much, but we'd better start at home, we've got enough of a challenge there without needing to ship Marines, money and aid halfway across the globe.
I agree, but I'd imagine that the guys on the ships don't get to make those laws.
Sometimes you have to work within the rules.
Define "give you the right." They live in abject poverty with no basic structures of government, commerce, education, health, or anything that would even approach a livable existence. They are a pre-Hobbsian society - there's no such thing as "right" or "wrong" that really applies to them. The reality is it's either be a pirate or die.
that non-lethal weapons; in their case flamers; will only get you killed.
I don't know which movie you watched but it was quite clear to me that only brute force worked. The same is true with pirates. All a crew with non-lethal weapons is going to accomplish is to piss the pirates off.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The real lesson is that pussies get raped. First ship gets hijacked out of the blue. Owner pays several millions to get it back. Pirates buy huge amounts of guns and bling-bling. Pirates are heavily armed and broke, hijacking the next vessel. Then the pirates' neighbors see all that bling and now try to do the same.
Rinse, repeat and then you have an economy of blackmail, robbery, extortion. Earning millions by simply hijacking a passing ship is sure as more profitable than planting wheat in soil as hard as concrete, so they're doing it. Now that they've tasted it AND have more weapons than they'd ever need, you cannot stop them without killing at least half of 'em.
No amount of training can prepare you to kill someone. The prospect of THEM killing YOU is a fairly effective motivator though......
Actually, this is not true at all. Most people have to be trained to kill. For the early part of the century, in the world wars, it turns out that a huge problem for the American Army was that there were a lot soldiers that simply did not shoot at the enemy because they did not want to kill people. This actually happened even when soldiers were under fire themselves. It turns out that those soldiers that did shoot other people were more likely to have been hunters in their civilian life, so the idea of killing in their minds had been broached just not with human life.
In response to this, the Army would make a lot of changes in its training. Gone were circular targets, and in shaped were human shaped targets, is one. Also, drills and terminology were introduced to dehumanize the opponents. They weren't people to be killed, but targets to be engaged.
It could be argued that in today's culture, this is not so much of an inhibition. We look at something today like Gary Cooper's biblical inhibition against killing Germans in Sgt York and simply laugh as if its camp. But it used to matter to a lot of people. Now, it seems like killing is so common that it doesn't even matter at all.
I just wonder if, people have ever stopped to really look at the media, be it movies, tv, or video games, watched someone getting killed, and really actually just dwelled on what happened for a minute, the significance of the act. I guarantee you if you talked to any soldier that has killed, its an awesome (in the spiritually overpowering sense) thing to have done, and it makes you wonder if some of the alienation that veterans face is the realization that their own deep experience of having killed or be killed does not all square with the cavalier view of the media that holds the death of a man is almost the same sort of thing to talk about like, the weather.
This is my sig.
I don't see anything in your post to support your original claim that they aren't starving. In fact, best as I can tell, you are reinforcing that claim, even if the causes are broader than just fishery depletion, the end result is the same - desperate people making desperate acts and not just simple greed in action.
Why didn't their leaders figure that out and diversify? Oh, that's right, they were too busy becoming "rich and powerful" and overthrowing one another.
Be careful with tghat accusation. Lots of black kettles there. The most recent being the US's covert and overt attacks on the ICU just as it looked like they might actually put together a functioning government.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Remember, terrorism isn't about money, it's about instilling fear in people, i.e. terrorizing. So if you start shooting down every hijacked plane, what actually happens, is that the terrorists will use their readily available supply of martyrs to continuously hijack airplanes with no other intent than getting shot down. Then you either keep your word, shoot the planes and the people within, and soon nobody in their right mind will ever board a plane again (public uproar notwithstanding), or you don't shoot the planes and start negotiating with the terrorists.
Cats and termites.
Go after the pirates' parrots and wooden legs!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
okay. but only one of us will be able to enter many international ports. know which one?
The one who threatens to stop delivering cargo to country-X if it can't defend itself against piracy.
The other will never make it to any ports.
Realistically, I don't think you quite appreciate the sheer importance of the companies involved here... If Maersk refused to pull into a country's ports, that country would grind to a halt in under a week. Stopping service to somewhere like Los Angeles would leave it a ghost-town within a few months. Very few players would dare say "uhh, gee guys, we'd really like to get some food delivered, but could ya leave the guns behind?". More likely, you'd see emergency legislation in even the worst of the nanny-states to allow "reasonably" armed container ships passed almost overnight.
i find it really interesting that you can't come up with a single good reason why a traditional firearm might not be the best plan other than some straw man hippie love.
C'mon, not talking about petty local corruption fleecing a few tourists - This involves real live heavily-armed paramilitary groups out there acting like they live in 1680 and they have the Spanish Main ripe for the picking.
I've been both poor and homeless, and didn't steal rob murder or ransom. The only people who turn to crime are criminals.
hey would be raising the price of aid to areas where local and regional options are insufficient.
Second that. Almost 1/3 of the Maersk Alabama's cargo was relief supplies.
Stop trying to make sense! The answer is Guns Guns Guns! Didn't we invent automatic killing robots yet?
If only whether people lived or died was determined by someone really far away, like slashdot users, controlling guns, with cameras!
Well he did say to mount military actions once the baddies have a resonable opportunity to surrender. So it's not like you are immediately killing the hostages. And even if you go in with a military response you aren't necessarily killing the hostages. Granted if that response is always to destroy the plane instead of a tactical team you will be killing the hostages.
On the other hand if a terrorist knows that all they get out of taking hostages is dead hostages and terrorists, then they won't bother taking hostages anymore. They'll stick with bombs in markets and such which isn't all that much better.
It does make sense to layer solutions.
It does not make sense to insist that one solution must work for everybody and prohibit people from trying their own solutions.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
We tried to help them in the 90s. Certain elements of their society didn't like it, fought back, Clinton ran away, and this eventually devolved into anarchy. As far as I'm concerned, they can GAGF.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Why should any sensible merchantman pick up a weapon?
In order to risk dying protecting the cargo of his employer?
> Shoot them and sink their boats, and they won't be replaced, at least not in this generation.
Great idea. The same tactic that worked so great and generated the goodwill of the public in Vietnam and Iraq.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
As a former US merchant officer, arming the crews is a bad idea. Every ship I served on did have ONE firearm, a handgun in the captain's safe, (along with a substantial sum of cash, typically $20-100k)
Alcohol use is a major issue. I've sailed with quite a few people that literally could NOT function sober. I think the vast majority of people here can see where giving someone like that a loaded firearm would be a bad thing.
Then you have cargo issues. There are a LOT of things on ships that "don't react well to bullets". This is especially true of tankers.
Someone commented on crew levels. The older stick ship freighters I worked on had a crew of 26. Tankers were 16-18 people. There is another problem. It becomes difficult to keep enough eyes around to watch for pirates with such low manning levels. And as others have commented, those little boats won't show up on radar, they'll be buried in the noise of sea swells.
As for a solution, we need to do the same thing as we did with the Barbary coast. Sink all pirate ships, summarily execute all pirates, and destroy the towns they are based out of. Unfortunately, it appears that the gutless, yellow-bellied cowards at the UN have watered down anti-piracy laws. It used to be that piracy was subject to summary execution, now it is subject to the laws of the nation of the arresting ship. I guess we'll need China or Russia to step up to the plate.
As for the Malacca straights, pirates there are almost always only armed with knives/swords, the reason being if they should be captured, and even a single member of the pirate group has a firearm, Malaysia will execute the entire group. As a rule they're boats aren't as well equipped either.
they could have made the crew steer the ship into one of their ports/beaches and then offloaded all the food to people waiting on shore.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
That being said, the pirate's threats to start actively targeting French and US vessels is just plain stupid -- those are exactly the vessels most likely to have arranged some kind of surprise party for our Somali criminal friends -- one involving high explosives. I'm pretty sure the second somebody fires an AK-47 or RPG at your boat, you have the right to turn around and sink them. And don't bother to pick up survivors -- they would threaten the safety of your crew.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/185237&art_pos=4
Uh, where are they going to sleep? In a conex box?
Just because the ship is big, doesn't mean that it has tons of room for people to sleep. 8-14 soldiers per squad is a lot of extra personnel on a ship. That's 8-14 more beds required, enough food for them, etc. Your average crew size for a ship tops out around 25 people for a merchant vessel and there's only enough living room on a ship like that for the crew and a couple extra people.
I've been both poor and homeless, and didn't steal rob murder or ransom. The only people who turn to crime are criminals.
Poor and homeless, especially with no one shooting at you, in the first world is practically upper middle class in a country like somalia.
It's funny how you keep coming up with brand new rationalizations each time the last one is shot down, but seem to be constitutionally unable to accept that crime does not exist in a vacuum, that people have motivations and simply "being a criminal" is rarely the root cause.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Remind us of the lessons from a work of FICTION next time you get taken hostage and half your traveling
companions (including friends and possibly family) get killed.
Loved ones. Don't forget about the loved ones.
Simple solution.
Merchant crews are fully armed and trained to operate weapons.
Merchant crews are willing to shoot pirates, but deny they have any weapons.
Merchant ships can continue to dock anywhere they like.
Deny, deny, deny!
Everyone wins except for pirates.
they could have made the crew steer the ship into one of their ports/beaches and then offloaded all the food to people waiting on shore.
That's unlikely. I've seen videos of much smaller ships that have been captured by somali pirates and unloaded and even those aren't able to be beached without significant risk to the vessel and the people unloading it, the few ports that are still operational aren't held by the same groups so are effectively unavailable.
A cash ransom is far less risky and far more effective than stealing random cargoes.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
One reason for the lack of consequences is that the merchant ships are, by law, unarmed. Instead of getting to innovate their own solutions (carrying weapons, hiring private protection), the ships are forced to rely on the U.S. government to protect them.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
"If the movie Aliens taught us anything..."
when analysis starts with that statement, no wonder we're screwed as a country.
Brand new? I say the same thing every time and you don't get it each time. Fuck it, I'm tired of trying to get you to pull your head out of your ass. Go ahead and think they do this for some idealistic view of the world. Hell, go get a ship and help them. After all, the navy could use more target practice.
Oh, and the pirates have already threatened to start deliberately executing any French or US citizens they come across. So much for their fucking "code"!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"Anything but guns?" What sort of bleeding heart came up with that line of feelgood BS?
Probably the government, which requires the ships to be unarmed. Isn't that despicable?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
2 inch hemp rope, and a yard-arm and some guts from the ever stupid pols in the swamp by the Potomac.
Oooh, GOOD example. is this the basic training that led to the US defeat in Somalie?
Trained soldiers vs a ragtag army of civilians with "outdated" weapons. Who won again?
But you also forget the most important part of weapons training US and most good soldiers get. it has NOTHING to do with firing the weapon. It has everything to do with NOT firing the weapon. OBEYING ORDERS. The hard part ain't arming a man, it is disarming a man. If you armed all civilian vessels, how are you going to get them off again? Pirates can strike anywhere. Somalie is just in the news but other regions got their own pirates.
Where does a ship surrender its weapons? Do you allow any nation to carry arms into your waters? Do you really think the US wants chinese vessels armed to the teeth sailing straight into their harbour? For that matter, do you think China wants that?
The silly thing is that the US would have no problem with these pirates in normal times. One carrier fleet would be enough to control the entire area, but its big fleets are busy fighting the war on terror and that costs so much the US can't afford to patrol this bit as it intended (its carrier fleets exist to keep the sealanes save).
Other countries have cut down their own fleets because with no-more war we don't need these bottomless pits. After all, no war means no harm to international shipping.
Basically, we have to wake up to remember that the world is never going to be save, all it needs is a handful of people with guns to see more profit in war then peace. (Note the pirates happily attack vessels carrying food to their own people).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This thread seems to have stirred up a lot of buzz.
People who have no stake whatsoever, or who are impacted only in a very negligible way by this piracy, probably a mere two cents out of their big fat wallets, seem spoiling for a fight. Lots of cowboy swagger here...
Some things I'm wondering...
It's called "shoot the hostage". In the short term, it results in public outrage. If the principle is applied consistently, then in the long term it results in zero hostage taking situations occurring, and thus results in the greatest common good.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
because the pirates are better armed! That's what happens with all the stray arms in war zones, even 1 or 2 small pieces of military grade guns is no match for the hulls of modern ships let alone the crew. Any weapon for a civilian that's legal to own isn't nearly big enough.
If you did find an effective gun to carry, then you'd be a target because some pirates would want to come and take it!
I totally agree on the effectiveness of a military solution, but the sheer volume of shipping means that you won't have enough Marines to go around. Perhaps one squad randomly placed per hundred ships may be a deterrent, but I doubt it. Maybe we need to go back to using convoys ala WWII. A destroyer or cutter for each convoy, with all the major navies providing ships to escort multinational convoys. (Many of these navies are already patrolling the area.)
More music, fewer hits
On April 24, 1895, at the age of 51, Joshua Slocum departed Boston in his tiny sloop Spray and sailed around the world single-handed, a passage of 46,000 miles, returning to Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898.(1) Along the way, he developed several methods to discourage, yes problems even then, trouble from pirates. Sometimes, he would out run them. Other times he would put on different colored watch caps, sweaters, and pop up from hatches and companionways all over his boat. After it appreared that his boat had a significant crew, the pirates retreated and left him alone. On a suggestion from another captain, he employed a method where he spread tacks all over the deck of his boat when he went to sleep. Several times, he would be wakened by screams and spashes as pirates jumped off his decks at night. The next morning, he picked up the tacks with a magnet and was on his way. His story,"Sailing Alone Around the World" by Joshua Slocum, documents his creativity and courage. Look around and you can find it as an e-book. On November 14th of 1909, at the age of 65, after learning that he had incurable cancer, he set out on another lone voyage to South America leaving from Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard, but was never heard from again. (1) http://www.joshuaslocumsocietyintl.org/
Wherever you go, there you are.
If you are unarmed, I rob you. If you are armed, I murder you, then rob you. Proven fact. Why do you think the US has such a high murder rate?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
so no particular country feels a need to respond.
To put it another way they get away with it because it's cheaper for the shipping companies to pay the occasional bribe than to reregister thier ships under the flag of a country that is willing and able to protect them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
He sees that there's not really anything that separates him from people in wealthier parts of the world other than what's effectively birth right. He begins to resent that relative wealth, and he begins to develop a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't he have the same wealth that the rich have?
Having actually lived in Ethiopia for a month, and having talked to dozens of people there, I assure you this isn't the case.
This view you describe, which seems to be based in cynicism and class envy, simply doesn't exist all over the world. I can't speak for Somalia, but in their neighbor Ethiopia, the attitude is largely one of overwhelming generosity despite having close to nothing.
I talked to one guy who said that he had a brother who lived in America, but he never even cared to visit. He loved his life in Ethiopia. The attitude that everyone in the third world resents everyone in the first world and is willing to set aside their morals to attain material wealth is ignorant and potentially racist.
Certainly every society has their criminals. But poverty is not itself a spawning pool for criminal behavior. Go ahead and witness children who eat about 10 bites of food per day offer you some of theirs, and come back and post again.
Although I certainly do not claim to be an expert in maritime law, commercial ships have helicopters take off from and land on them all the time, which would seem to violate those statutes just as blatantly as adding a few .50 machineguns would.
Good luck convinging the world their is money to be made in killing muslims. Oddly enough, it was the muslims extremists who used to kill the pirates under islamic law. Then the west got rid of them in Somalie, so the pirates got free reign, then the big money attracted involvement from Dubai, a western muslim ally. You got to laugh. Or cry. I forget which.
Anyway, if bounties worked we would have no Mafia. We do.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
hey idiot, read the effing posts before you reply to something. weapons are illegal on merchant ships.
Dead floating in the water until the sharks get there pirates are no longer a threat.
There are more where that came from. Ever played Whack-a-mole?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would expect a non-lethal weapon would not violate the intent of "innocent passage." The trouble I find is that any allowance we afford the merchant ships we must also afford the pirate ships. This means the pirates would be able to use non-lethal weapons to commandeer a target vessel, just as the target vessel would be able to use them to defend against such an attack.
Still, I would expect something like this dazzling device would be highly effective, especially mounted on a tranquilizer gun.
No one is saying the actions of all the Pirates are justified, only understandable.
It was a slippery slope, but a logical one. IE they have no navy to defend their waters legally from the illegal actions of others. So logically the Somali fishermen take the law into their own hands, and start attacking/boarding the vessels doing illegal things in their waters. (so far so good?) Now they have caught the guilty parties, so they try to get restitution (with some success.) Of course those boarded would never admit guilt, and always blame the "pirates." Now some Somalis have found this new and more reliable income (since the actions of a few have destroyed their only other legal living, fishing/farming.) and that's where the bad pirates take over. Now it feels okay to the mariners to be lawless to the Somalis, and the Somalis feel forced to act lawless to the other mariners, and innocent people are now being hurt on both sides (along with the guilty.)
don't the pirates have rockets, so they can hold the ship hostage long enough to board? So if the pirates heard the alarm or saw water slowly filling their ship wouldn't they just sink the ship with the aforementioned rocket propelled grenade?
huh... well I guess pirates are afraid of loud noises
NINJAS RULE!
While I respect your views, I do not do the same. If someone is in my house illegally, ie. they have broken in, I will shoot immediately without warning. I will shoot to kill and will not stop till they are totally incapacitated. I will not risk them reacting at all.
Different thoughts on life I guess, but, if someone has broken into my house, I assume they are there to kill me, and I will act as soon as I have a clear shot. Unless they are lucky, they will not leave my front door still breathing.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I think I now know remotely how a black guy must have felt back in the fifties, when the roles were reversed. But in 2009, all things Whitey does or ever did are considered incredible atrocities while everyone else gets a guilt-free genocide every now and then.
If you really believe that white in 2009 = black in 1950, then I can only conclude that your grasp of American history, as a German, is about as good as the average American's grasp of German history.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think the limitations probably have more to do with our forces being so heavily committed on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.
WE (the USA) don't need to be there. WE (the USA) should avoid the area entirely to ensure we don't need to be there. WE (the USA) should stop running around the world solving, or attempting to solve, other people's (not the US) problems.
Let the fucking Euro-weenies go fix it, or something.
Actually, the three round limit serves to provide a more controlled ammo consumption than anything else. Having the three round burst as the second firing selection naturally limits the shooter. It does help with accuracy over long distances because of barrel climb, but actually can be a handicap in close-quarters/urban combat.
A standard combat load for a US soldier is 6 30-round clips.
I did some range instruction while in the US Army at both Fort Hood and in South Korea. (My punishment for qualifying Hawkeye in M16, M60, and M203 I guess) A soldier's inclination is always to shoot more bullets than is required. Fully automatic weapons like the M60 and the SAW perform are always abused by newer soldiers because they have just seen too many damn movies or whatever and thing they need to burn belts until the barrel glows. This is why we limit issuing those weapons to those that qualify with them and demonstrate the coolhead to use it like it should be.
The proper firing position for any fully automatic weapon is to place one hand over the top of the weapon just forward of the feed tray/ejection port and rest your arm on it. The weight naturally holds the weapon in place, stops barrel climb, and doesn't affect accuracy like stiffly holding it down would.
I carried an M16 with an M203, M60, and a 9mm my entire Army enlistment because of it.
The 2nd amendment applies to foreigners on US soil as well doesnt it? So whats the problem? I dont see any.
I think you missed Hillary's pledge to get help for the root cause of Somalis problems. IE they finally got enough attention years later, by attacking a US ship to get some help. Your solution was the initial attempt, and for years got little attention. (you can spare me the opinions on if anyone would want Clinton/US help, or if it will even be helpful, but it will be attention.)
When are people going to stop equating blame with causation? What the pirates do is wrong, and we can justly blame them and hold them accountable. But if part of the causation of breeding those pirates is something we can positively affect, why the hell wouldn't we? The Blackhawk down scenario isn't the only option; there are other ways that we can be of assistance. Fighting pirates and fighting its cause are NOT mutually exclusive.
This. This this this. This.
What you're seeing here is a bunch of macho morons, who have never seen anyone die violently and can be reasonably sure they never will, indulging in their blood'n'thunder fantasies from a safe distance, and who regard the work of trying to get at the root causes of piracy as ... well, kind of boring. Which, let's face it, it is: that's why there are a whole bunch of video games where you kill people, but not too damn many where you try to rebuild a shattered infrastructure. (I can think of precisely one, actually.) Sticks are exciting, carrots are dull.
If they ever had an up close and personal view of what their way of thinking leads to, they'd probably change their minds. I did, years ago, and I still sometimes wake up from nightmares about it. But for most of them, it will never happen, and that's the way they like it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My point has never changed from my original post - there are motivations other than pure criminality at work here.
You on the other hand just keep piling on the bullshit - you are arguing with someone else when you write stupid shit like, "Go ahead and think they do this for some idealistic view of the world." I said that their options for putting food on the table have been reduced to this and you think that's idealism?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As I did in the Navy, fairly recently. I don't get the macho thing. I was a soldier (scout recon marksman), I shot guns, consider myself a kind of guy's guy, and I don't have this attitude at all.
'Potentially' racist? You are being tactful I presume :]
Also, the idea is that responding militarily to Somali pirates might polarize Somalia and encourage fanaticism. We might start seeing terrorists instead of pirates; and terrorists are much harder to deal with than pirates. Pirates at least have some incentives and desires that you can use to stave off attacks and protect vessels. Terrorists will attack any vessel just to make a political statement.
Whatever we do, we don't want Somalians to get the idea that the US Navy (or any other navy) is out to get them. We need to portray this as bringing justice to criminals, rather than politicizing the situation.
This is VERY analogous to the "war on terrorism," and the great folly that that was. Our government portrayed terrorists as "foreign combatants" rather than criminals. They politicized the crimes of terrorists and tied them to local Middle Eastern governments; they invaded foreign countries with massive military force. Why were we surprised when that only made the fanaticism and extremism worse?
Be careful with tghat accusation. Lots of black kettles there. The most recent being the US's covert and overt attacks on the ICU just as it looked like they might actually put together a functioning government.
Yeah, I did some reading on that, too. An Islamic faction that tries to tie the country's clans together by force, killing it's own countrymen. You're right about that too, there are lots of black kettles there: America has had it's own Civil War, and has killed it's own countrymen in the course of 5 years. We know all about it. And yes, both sides had help from other countries. The difference is that we got our shit together for the betterment of the country. Somalian's loyalty is to their family clan, not their country. And as long as that loyalty remains entrenched to the clan, they will simply be a bunch of clans, raiding freighters and herding livestock. If America followed that path, we'd still be 13 colonies fighting over the division of the rest of the continent. No, nix that: We'd still be 13 colonies of the original size, Canada and Mexico would be a lot larger than they are, and Alaska would still be a Russian settlement. But we're not, because we got our shit together. Somalia has universities and schools, perhaps in 75 years they'll figure it out and join together as one country.
and so begins an endless cycle of back and forth between pirates and shipping interests, until in a galaxy or time far far away, the poverty ridden state of the country is improved and the pirates all become salarymen.
the ship captains now without a decent challenge, decide to hunt for white whales
If WE didn't rely so much on imports and exports I would agree. But that is a far larger question, and pirates are but a small factor in that discussion.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
When did I say that everyone feels that way? I said it explains the mentality behind people who commit piracy, not that it reflects the mentality of the whole country. They feel they're entitled to it, and they're driven by greed. Can you offer a better explanation of why piracy still happens?
If everyone felt that way, there'd be 10 million pirates in Somalia's waters, as opposed to the relatively small number that there actually are.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I had to stop and re-read my post. Your response to it had me wondering if it was a response to some other post. My previous post is not so much directed toward the piracy itself as it is the human tendency to justify our actions, legal or otherwise. You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I also get torqued when the inevitable soft-hearted and soft-headed "solutions" palette gets dredged up, from hardly effective soft responses of non-lethal means to "reasoning" with the offending party. Non-lethal means of dealing with those with lethal weapons is largely ineffective and sends a message laced with weakness. You simply don't fight fire with smoke and expect the desired outcome to occur. You bring your own heat. And lots of it.
My policy position is to let those who would commit piracy know that they're not going to ride up to an unarmed, defenseless vessel and climb onboard without a reasonably good chance that they'll be killed/injured/captured in the process. The deterrence has to be credible, the consequences of failure severe, and the likelihood of success remote. And it has to be communicated in such a way as to make sure that the recipients get the message loud and clear. I have history on my side to bear witness that this is effective.
And your Iraq troll-fu is weak. This is not a war. You are correct, however, that this is an asymmetrical conflict. On the one hand you have pirates with lethal weapons. On the other hand you have commercial vessels with no weaponry. The pirates have the upper hand. All I propose is that the odds be evened up, that symmetry be restored. As with most systems, balance tends to be the most preferred state and the one that spawns the least problems.
Yah. The tendency of soldiers was to panic and hold the trigger back until their magazine was spent, wasting large amounts of ammunition firing at nothing because the recoil of the weapon, while significantly smaller than older weapons like the M1 Garand, was still enough to get the barrel pointing at nothing. Spray and Pray. The 3-round limit was introduced to force the soldiers to release the trigger, re-aim, and continue firing, limiting the amount of ammunition wasted in panic situations like that.
That actually depends on the weapon. The proper firing position on the FN MAG (C6 in Canada, M240 in the US) is with your right-hand on the grip, and your left hand resting on the stock, holding it into the fleshy part of your shoulder so you don't hurt yourself with recoil when firing the weapon.
Similarly, the FN MINIMI (C9 in Canada, M249 in the US) also uses a left-hand position on the stock when firing with a bipod.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
That's half of why we end up in situations like Vietnam and Iraq -- worrying about goodwill rather than just doing what needs to be done.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
That too... and once the pirates learn that you'll give in, they have all the incentive they need to escalate their own operations.
"Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane." -- 10th c. British saying
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Have you ever been outside of the US?
... because I have, and I can tell you most people I've met in the third world see their own nations as the place where success and material wealth are a birthright, and they see the US as the one place where success is actually accessible to anyone (even immigrants).
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
What you're seeing here is a bunch of macho morons, who have never seen anyone die violently and can be reasonably sure they never will, indulging in their blood'n'thunder fantasies from a safe distance
What makes you think this has anything to do with trying to indulge in fantasies? This is a bunch of well intentioned people asking why our merchant crews need to be as vulnerable as they are. It makes no sense to me to place our merchant crews in harms way without the ability to even defend themselves against teenagers in speedboats. Your comment suggests to me that you are looking to stereotype everyone on this side of the argument so that you can dismiss us easier, rather than try to explain why it makes sense to disarm our merchant crews and leave them this vulnerable.
and who regard the work of trying to get at the root causes of piracy as ... well, kind of boring. Which, let's face it, it is: that's why there are a whole bunch of video games where you kill people, but not too damn many where you try to rebuild a shattered infrastructure.
Why is rebuilding the shattered infrastructure our responsibility? The Somali's don't seem to respond particularly well to foreign intervention on their soil. Do tell how you plan on going about rebuilding that shattered infrastructure.
If they ever had an up close and personal view of what their way of thinking leads to, they'd probably change their minds
What does "this way of thinking" lead to? I'm not advocating rounding up the pirates and killing them. I'm advocating giving our merchant ships the ability to defend themselves. Is self-defense not justifiable in your world view? Should we just keep paying ransoms? Should we stop using the oceans for trade?
I did, years ago, and I still sometimes wake up from nightmares about it
What happened?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
(Force 80 squirt gun) This sounds like the perfect repellent. So what if it sinks them.
But poverty is not itself a spawning pool for criminal behavior.
Huh? Of course it is. I don't even know what to say to argue, what you're saying is like saying a circle is 276 degrees.
This is not to say that every or even most poor people is a criminal, but the odds of a poor person becoming a criminal are of course higher than those of a non-poor person.
Fighting poverty would be a lot cheaper and better for everyone than fighting its symptoms
FTFY.
An overall policy of fighting/solving poverty will solve things long-term. But fighting poverty in the big picture doesn't help the guys on the ship being attacked by pirates. They need something to protect themselves, and they need it right now.
To make a bad analogy, let's say piracy is a disease, like cholera--generally spawned and spread by certain social conditions. Cholera is bad, but it can be largely prevented with the proper measures (good sanitation, clean drinking water, etc). What you're advocating (helping desperate people in bad conditions) is like implementing a program to clean up water supplies and teach people hygiene. That's a good thing, don't get me wrong. But clean water and proper hygiene don't help the guy with cholera who's literally shitting himself to death. He needs to deal with the symptoms and drink a lot of water/electrolytes, and take antibiotics to kill the disease posing an immediate threat to his life. Similarly, aid programs and anti-poverty efforts don't help the sailors on the ships being attacked or boarded by pirates. They need a more immediate solution.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
http://nukeitfromorbit.com/
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Well yes, but how could the average US citizen know that, just going by their name: 'Marines'?
What you ask is just too hard!!!
Why yes, I do know my countrymen well!
The United States Marine Corps traces its institutional roots to the Continental Marines of the American Revolutionary War, formed at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress on November 10, 1775, to raise 2 battalions of Marines. That date is regarded and celebrated as the date of the Marine Corps' "birthday".
That explains so much....[from: wiki page for USMC]
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
All I see in your response, and your original post, is firepower. That's only a short term solution and does not necessarily lead to a resolution.
You say my "Iraq troll-fu is weak" - yet your response is exactly the problem we had with Iraq. No matter how much "heat" was brought to bear, the situation just got worse. It was only when the surge was implemented, which, despite the name, was less about simply putting more boots on the ground and more about a wholesale policy change towards developing community relations.
Consider this very Iraq like scenario - we start shooting pirates and sinking their attack skiffs. Pirates figure that out. Pirates decide to start mining the shipping lanes instead and thus are able to hijack boats without even getting near them. Sink one boat and now they can sell "protection" - for the same price as their ransoms, maybe even more, they offer to sell information about where the mines are. Plant new ones every couple of weeks to make up for any that are cleared and their job gets even more lucrative with less risk than it is today. Even if mining turns out not to be practical, I'm sure that a few desperate men over there can come up with plenty of other ways to extort money out of those ships - a skiff loaded with explosives, throttle locked and the wheel tied straight aimed at a big tanker maybe, the improvised torpedo.
You claim that I'm "chest beating". I'm simply tired of those that will justify any action no matter how horrific.
I see no justification here, except perhaps the guns, guns. guns brigade, just looking to justify feel-good retribution instead of functional problem solving. I already posted this once:
"Know thy self, know thy enemy.
A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
--Sun Tzu
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It'd get expensive to guard all of it - but we spent over 10 million on the mission to rescue that one captain. I'm just curious how the actual math would work out - 20,000 ships a year is about 54 ships a day, which would mean less than 1000 soldiers to put 15 men on every ship going through the gulf. That's a lot of armed men, but not from the standpoint of even any single army, let alone the combined armies of everyone who uses that shipping lane.
Mk 44 Bushmaster 30mm. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M242_Bushmaster and http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a6f_1179347015 . Yes there is a shipboard version.
1. stick servo equipped gun turrets on ship
2. control gun turrets over intarweb
3. sell gun turret time (gun cannot fire unless captain has gone to action stations) to would-be gunners
4. profit
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
No, you just don't. If you did you'd understand how many people are required for this, and how much all this would cost.
Here's some hints for you:
1) How many piracy areas need protection.
2) How many ships have to be protected at the same time.
3) How long does each journey last
4) How many "spare" marines do we currently have
5) How many per ship are needed
6) How much do you have to pay for those marines to spend X days a year at sea; who pays for it all
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
What's stopping them from doing something productive, such as planting some crops? People got along just fine for millenia before boats were even invented, just by building themselves mud huts and picking berries. Now, it's even easier, as we know how to plant crops and grow food for ourselves.
These pirates aren't struggling to survive; they're taking their ill-gotten money and living in luxury with it, buying SUVs of all things.
For the ransoms they are getting, they could probably feed the whole country.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
A better way would be to have either hired mercenaries or actual naval / marine personnel on the boats in the pirate infested waters. When the vessels transits the area, the military people get off the boat, on to a plane, get a week of R&R and do it again. The merchant ships won't have to have weapons in various ports. The merchant marine sailors won't have to learn how to shoot people.
The military folks can play shuffleboard and run laps around the ship. What's not to like?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
were i live, if someone does not present a threat to you while trespassing you may be prosecuted for using any force at all. so that is always in the back of my mind. and there are quite a few home invasions around here.
of course, if they charge you or have a weapon at ready then you are pretty much at liberty to do what you think that you need to.
If WE didn't rely so much on imports and exports I would agree
I wish I could choose between "Made in China", and "Made in the USA".
But that is a far larger question, and pirates are but a small factor in that discussion.
Agreed.
There aren't too many reasons for which somebody would approach a merchant ship in international waters in a Zodiac or some related kind of cheap, fast and unmarked vessel. Also, no bum is gonna try and clean your bridge's windows. Doesn't happen in the open seas ;)
The coast guards have no business outside the 12 mi zone; leisure cruises (talking about small boats, not fully grown cruise ships) tend not to happen in piracy-endangered region (or international waters) and navies... well, even a drunk sailor ought to be able to recognize a destroyer if he sees one.
Having that cleared up, even though I usually disagree with any unnecessary kind of weapon use and/or violence: Stock a bunch of 5.56 mm assault rifles with some clips each on most merchant ships. Get the semi-automatic kind, they aren't as legally problematic (in some areas) as fully automated ones, easy to handle and easy on your joints (not that much recoil). Train them sailors in pointing-and-shooting and even if only 80% of all vessels have any arms, the high-seas kind of piracy will quickly die down.
An Israeli shipped wrapped the ship's hull with barbed wire...
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/04/05/pirates_attack_israeli_ship_off_somalia/
Two thoughts:
"From the halls of Montezuma
to the shores of Tripoli..."
Iowa, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Missouri. They're not just states. The Iowa is sitting and rusting. If you want to dump some ordinance in, they're pretty good at it.
not likely, at least not in the face of competition not making such demands. see below.
well, now that's fairly obviously false, isn't it? given that the prevailing rule is that conventionally armed ships are not allowed into many ports, and most ships comply to get into most ports, and most ships get to their destination, your claim looks pretty foolish.
you have this idea that Maersk could simply dictate terms, but that's not true (or they would have done it already). as long as there's enough competition (and you only need a handful of companies, not a diverse ecosystem), someone will be willing to say "we'll take our chances with the water cannon and oversized loud speaker in exchange for Maersk's share of your traffic".
mind you, i think it's quite likely that the government in question would, in fact, cave to Maersk's demands, but there isn't really an economic reason to do so, at least in this market. we've just built a global culture where governments are afraid to stand up to corporate interests.
and your last paragraph seems like a total non sequitur to me. what does what you said have to do with your inability to imagine any plausible motivations for this "anything but guns" mandate other than hippy love? i just don't follow.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Danegeld is just another name for extortion. Historically it has always worked in favor of the extortionist, and detrimental to the foolish that pay.
When you act like sheep, you pass directly to the bottom links of the food chain. Always.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Your math is faulty in that I believe most ships spend more than a single day in the danger zone. Nevertheless, I agree we should be putting a dozen Navy gunmen on each US-flagged ship. I'm pretty sure that legally the second they fire a single shot at one of our ships, we have the right to blow them out of the water. Unfortunately, we don't have jurisdiction if they attack other countries' ships. Pirates sent back to Puntland to be tried get 3 years in jail; pirates attacking US ships that get caught by US forces get sent to jail for life if they are lucky. If they are not lucky, they get killed. They would have to be incredibly ignorant to not quickly decide that they shouldn't fuck with US flagged ships, and attacking French vessels ain't such a good idea either! Trust me, these cowardly criminals are only going to go for the ones they know will bend over and pay up.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Many (most?) ports don't allow armed ships to enter. Having even a gun on-board will, likely, (dis)qualify. "Packing some serious heat" will definitely do...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...thrown in the ocean handcuffed, with a lifevest on and 20lbs of chum stuffed in his pants. Video that.
That would probably make for a TV show that would get me back in front of a TV again, after 6 years of actively avoiding TV!
Get some 'audience participation' going on. Let them phone/text in to vote on how many sharks and how soon the sharks come during each episode. Get the crew from MST3K to 'host' the show and provide commentary.
It would make Millions!
"My Pirate Chum" would be a good name for the show!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The reality is it's either be a pirate or die.
What happened to the option of just pulling some fish out of the ocean and making an honest living? Last I heard there were plenty of fish in the sea.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...my aunt fanny. Have you not read the news reports? These pirates have more money, cars, and toys then you or I will have in a lifetime. If you want equality, we should be stealing from the pirates.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They are in fact thinking of doing this. It's a money-based decision, if paying ransoms is cheaper than having your helicopter security force, then they'll pay ransoms.
Having actually lived in Ethiopia for a month, and having talked to dozens of people there, I assure you this isn't the case.
Having visited several other third world countries, including Honduras, Belize and Venezuela, I also almost no stealing. When I did see stealing, it was people who actually had comparatively high wealth, like having a beat up old pickup when 95% of families don't have a car.
Similarly, in the U.S., you rarely see people stealing to feed their families. It is almost always people stealing because they are greedy and want what someone else has but don't want to work for it. These are people who consider themselves poor, but have more wealth than 80% of the rest of the world.
I have been in the class that the United States calls poor, and I have been in the class that the United States calls rich, and now am in the class that the United States calls middle class. When I was poor, I felt the same attitude that many poor do, that the rich were somehow just given their money and didn't deserve it, nor the things that came with money. I never acted to right this perceived wrong, but I did have the attitude. Then after working my way up to rich, I realized that I had worked hard for what I had, and when people stole from me, I resented what i perceived their attitude to be, which is the same one I had when I was poor, but now having worked hard for what I had (and lost) I understood that the rich are not someone to despise for their wealth. Then I became poor again, thanks to 9/11, and now have worked my way up to middle class. I feel I understand (certain members of) the poor's attitude toward the rich, but think it is wrong.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
This is not to say that every or even most poor people is a criminal, but the odds of a poor person becoming a criminal are of course higher than those of a non-poor person.
While true as a whole that the wealthy generally are less likely to commit certain criminal acts, I for one would like to see statistics of criminal behavior broken up by even smaller brackets. For instance, I would bet that the bottom 20% of people in terms income commit fewer crimes than the 20-40% bracket. Because I believe that people who have nothing don't steal, it is people who have SOME things, but want more, and can't ever seem to get ahead enough to get it, that do the stealing.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"Is this gonna be a stand up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"
"I just need to know one thing. Where. They. Are."
SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!!!!!
The problem with that (and merc's or proper military being stationed aboard ship) is that ports will not allow a ship to dock when its carrying any kind of weapon. Having to police small arms in every port is not cost effective and requires too much co-operation from the shipping companies/sailors to declare arms.
Besides, most governments wouldnt allow it simply because they fear attack, governments remember the merchant warships from WWII and governments don't really need reasons to be paranoid. (strange how governmental memory works, armed merchantmen are forefront on their minds but they seem to forget about their lack of ability of occupy foreign lands).
Piracy is limited to very small parts of the world so keeping firearms and/or troops on board all the time isn't cost effective. If a company keeps guns on board then they need to make sure the crew is trained to use them effectively otherwise its a waste of resources. Piracy is really limited to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean around Myanmar.
However the real problem with the Gulf of Aden pirate situation (anyone who thinks it's just the Somali's is deluding themselves, rouges and SOF's the world over would be taking part in this, just using Somalia as a base of operation) is who is going to pay for it. A military patrol of the waters from Tanzania to Egypt and the UAE is incredibly expensive and ongoing cost. No government or corporation wants to foot the bill so we keep having this problem. Of course we could onload/offload marines around the effected area's, this would get around the nervous government problem but it fails in two ways. The most effective means of defence against pirates it to take them out before they board, a repel boarders situation is difficult and dangerous, for the crew and marines, secondly it still doesn't cover who is going to pay for it, keeping enough marines in the area on standby is going to be incredibly expensive even with a multinational effort.
This situation could be used as a proving ground for large scale UCAV operations, unfortunately the UCAV's would need to be rushed into service which rarely turns out well in wartime and almost always goes wrong in peace time. Also, generals could oppose it, with Navy commands being notoriously conservative and Air Force commands beginning to follow suit and become reluctant to change.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
First thing, who is going to pay for it? Keeping an army on standby in the gulf of Aden is expensive. No government of corporation wants to foot the bill, this is the reason nothing has been done, not because we don't have the means.
Second thing, if they're close enough to be shot, you're close enough to be shot. Ultimately having to put marines and the civilian crew of the ship in jeopardy is not the preferred option. the moment the pirates are close enough to be shot at with hand weapons the situation becomes a repel boarders exercise, except with civilian crew in the way of the marines. Too much risk of lives being lost, its far safer and far far more politically convenient if pirate vessels are taken out before they get within M240 range.
Third thing, this will be a multinational task force, I'd trust my life to US marines, Royal Navy marines, Australians or Germans but I'd be a bit nervous about the effectiveness of Pakistani or Filipino troops. Also some nationalities would object being put under the protection of US or British troops, considering that crews are taken from many different ports and will likely complain just adds to the "political inconvenience".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This really has to be the cheapest, most effective method - so there must be some, likely political, reason that it's not being used. Much of the issue with arming crew members seems to revolve around 1) training and 2) what to do with the weapons in whatever random port the ship ends up at where weapons aren't welcome.
From what I've heard, serious arms on board may change the classification of a merchant ship into a warship, probably with negative financial consequences. There are likely insurance consequences to boot and, as we all know, insurance companies have a stranglehold on all sorts of behaviors.
As for water cannons and noise generators, what do you do in a merchant ship when the pirate comes on the bridge radio saying, "Turn off the motherfucking noise and water or I'll turn them off with my RPGs, which may even put you on the bottom of the sea. If I can't have your vessel and its cargo for ransom, you can't have it either. Since you're of no use to me, I don't mind sinking a couple of you as an example to the next guy who thinks of resistance."?
Same tactics as any land-based terrorists -- Janjuweed (sp?), taliban or any random hezbollah suicide bomber -- knuckle under or die.
Mod parent up. I'd also add that giving guns to crew that are not trained to use them is more dangerous to their safety than not arming them. You should also consider the following question: how motivated are the crew to defend the ship? It belongs to their employer and they probably aren't getting paid enough to risk their lives defending it with violent means.
Let the countries where the ships are registered defend them.
Flags of Convenience
In order to risk dying protecting the cargo of his employer?
Maybe he wants to risk dying in order to save his freedom and/or life? Would you want to be a hostage and totally at the mercy of armed criminals who may kill you to make a point if your employer doesn't pony up the money they want?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
and a 9mm my entire Army enlistment because of it.
Is the 9mm really as pathetic with Hague compliant FMJ ammo as the rumors say it is? Friends of mine that deployed to Iraq came back cursing it. One of them tells a story about shooting an insurgent six times center of mass and not stopping him. I know that a lot of the older guys thought the .45 was better but that isn't an option for most units (outside of special forces) these days. I've also read that a lot of police agencies abandoned the 9mm, in spite of the fact that they are allowed to use expanding ammo.
Were your experiences with it similar or did you find it to be sufficient?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
should throw them a RIAA lawyer.
One thing people seem to miss is that Somalia shattered because of warlords. The warlords employ the pirates and get a cut of the loot. The pirates are actually very rich by Somali standards. Hell, they're probably not poor even by first world standards either.
E.g. see this
http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2009/04/11/somali_pirates_a_far_cry_from_buccaneers_of_old/
So saying the piracy is caused by 'extreme poverty and a shattered Somalia' is really missing the point.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What makes you think he isn't going to kill you anyway once he has your wallet? By pointing that gun at you, he has placed your life in mortal danger. I'd shoot the SOB as soon as I had an opening to do so.
Because he wants your money, not because he's a rampaging serial killer. You watch too many movies.
If you would really kill someone for taking a few of your things, then you are either 1) really poor, 2) fuming with rage, or 3) waving your e-peen around.
Property is transitory and meaningless. Your life is all you have. Why would you risk it to get back a few measly bills and credit cards?
If all these politically correct traitors would just start mass suicides, we could go back to actually helping somewhere and winning wars against the bad guys, instead of prolonging every situation because clearly identified bad guys must be respected.
If the United States had been politically correct back in 1942, all you people would be speaking Deutsch.
I used to think these people were a threat, but actually they aren't. When the Democrats get elected they actually have the same sort of foreign policy as the Republicans when it comes to things like dealing with pirates, dictators and other scum. It's an endearingly American mix of high principle when they can afford it and a touch of high tech ruthlessness when pushed into a corner.
Basically the extreme left can rant and rave on the internet, and they are useful to the Democrats because they get people out to vote. However once the Dems are in office, they have no input into policy.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Also, I'm not saying *we* should pay for it all. Just trying to make a rough ballpark estimate of how much total manpower it would take to do it.
Bullshit. If these guys were really liberation heros they'd be willing to sacrifice their personal interests for their country's.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I don't mean US marines (at least on non-US vessels). I mean some sort of armed force, mercenary or UN or whomever, paid for by the company that owns the ships.
Let's kill off the inbreds, and the government will prosper, and piracy will end.
I agree with killing off the inbreds, but I think a more likely outcome will be that Somalia will stay chaotic but the remaining warlords will just tell the pirates not to attack foreign ships.
The US can and should sink their ships and bomb their on shore bases. It can't and shouldn't get involved in trying to completely eradicate the warlords and civilize Somalia.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
When you say it's needed to "...stop them from thinking that..." you clearly are speaking of all Somalis. However, all Somalis do not think this way.
How dumb would a person sound if they assumed all the people in your geographic region were thieves because there were thieves near where you lived?
In all honesty, the Somalis probably don't want much change besides wanting governments to leave them alone. Every attempt to establish government there just makes things worse. It tends to create a power struggle where none previously existed, and it tends to introduce weapons to the power-hungry parties.
No. It doesn't. It does, however, explain why it happens. A person grows up in abject poverty, and thanks to mass media's portrayal of the western world, he realizes just how much poverty he's got to deal with. He sees that there's not really anything that separates him from people in wealthier parts of the world other than what's effectively birth right. He begins to resent that relative wealth, and he begins to develop a sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't he have the same wealth that the rich have?
That sense of entitlement is what, he feels, gives him the right to hold a person hostage demanding ransom.
I believe the phenomenon you refer to is more commonly know as 'liberalism'.
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
Can you provide some information regarding how the lack of government has "failed" Somalia? From what I've heard, they are doing comparatively well compared to regional nations (apparently, even despite the fishing and toxic dumping off their coasts).
Also regarding failure due to absence of government, how many pirates have there been that have been involved in raids? How many robberies have occurred in your town tonight or in the last week? It's not as if the whole country consists of pirates.
People seem to have somehow lost a handle on the truly small magnitude of this issue. As others have said, it would vanish if merchant ships carried a small armament. Of course, that'd leave some bad people on shore instead of in boats, but that's the same as any place.
hey idiot, read the effing posts before you reply to something. weapons are illegal on merchant ships.
Because, y'know, pirates follow international and local law to the letter, right?
And at what point does a 1700GPM "water canon" go from a fire suppression device to an outright weapon? How about if they freeze the water first into 50mm cylinders, that cool too (no pun intended)?
As a former marine, I can tell you this.... Marines will sleep anywhere. I used to catch a lot of shuteye under/inside a turning CH-53e while waiting for other birds to launch. A connex box would be a luxury. And as a matter of fact, we used them for shops (workspaces) a lot of times anyway. Easy to transport, they aren't too heavy to offload via 53e/ch46, pretty roomy inside and protected from the elements. As far as food goes, MRE's are delicious and nutritious. I friggin love 'em. Even as a civilian I "procure" them whenever I can for camping and survival rats. Problem solved.
The best pirate repellent is two squads of armed marines.
On the other hand, it you actually kill a few pirates, you'll actually have fewer pirates, and the remaining ones might think twice about attacking your ship.
There's no place like
phosphorous
depleted uranium
VX
sarin
mustard gas
ebola
I'm reminded of the adage that "if it's worth shooting, it's worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap."
And ammo and weapons would most definitely be MUCH CHEAPER that all this "repellent" nonsense, unless your preferred repellent comes in 5.56x45mm -- or better yet 7.62x51mm, or best of all, .50BMG. Ahh, the memories of "Ma Deuce"...
I believe they are referring to ship armaments and not say handguns, rifles or other personal weaponry.
If you want to get technical then saving your own ass by shooting back at the pirates is not an 'exercise' or 'practice', it's the real deal. Life or death.
I'm sure things like electrified fences, water cannons and superlube all over the surface of the ship might help but the only thing to stop a truly determined pirate is a lead slug.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Get a 12-guage semi-auto with 00 buckshot.
Bonus: very large magazine, pistol grip, and sawed off
The 2nd amendment applies to foreigners on US soil as well doesnt it? So whats the problem? I dont see any.
Unfortunately a lot of people these days forget about that small but important detail.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
All that said, I do agree with you in general. The kind of measures TFA talks about are band-aids - what is needed (easier said than done, perhaps) is to stop the profitability of the pirating business. The first and most important thing that has to happen is companies *must* stop paying ransoms for their ships and crews. If necessary, sink the damned ships. But the flow of money has to be stopped and stopped for good. A more co-ordinated and effective naval mission would be an ideal adjunct in the mean time, but again the size and number of vessels to be protected make effective policing a hard problem. The most effective solution is stopping the money.
[FUCK BETA]
I was going to say the same thing. A ship is only armed if it has a gun. ie a mounted .50 cal or something. But crews *are* often armed. Especially around Africa. Most countries have rules with personal arms when entering territorial waters. In NZ you must tell them what you have and have them secured. Then the Police will check and either secure them further and return them when leaving or accept the current arrangements.
One Vessel got a sound bite on the news once when they even had rocket launchers! It was stressed that having arms was not uncommon, and perfectly legal, just they had never seen so much on one ship.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
The fishing boats are already armed, they have anti aircraft guns and assorted other weaponary which is why the pirates don't attack them so much any more. I'm not sure many other countries have this particular problem and if they did I suspect the method other countries would use to deal with it would be send warships to sort out the fishing vessels.
Obviously Somalia doesn't have any warships and Somali fishermen are not capable of dealing with anti aircraft armed fishing raiders yet so they have decided to tax vessels moving through their waters in order to earn enough money to buy an effective counter to the armed fishing raiders. This is a perfectly acceptable international practice with a long pedigree since at least Elizabethan times if not longer.
If you're rooting for them, you have to realize that most of the shipping there goes INTO Africa.
Um, no. Most of the shipping off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden goes to the Suez canal and on to Europe (or the other way). I'm too lazy to search for actual figures, but I'm sure only a small fraction of the goods is intended for Somalia, or even Africa.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
People dying?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Since you seem to think that people shooting at and killing one another is an entertaining show, I think it's you who has watched too much TV.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Wasn't it the Soviets who captured Berlin and did the bulk of the fighting against the Nazis? Also, the UK did a pretty decent job of defeating the invasion attempts there.
What the Allied invasion of continential Europe probably did prevent was complete Soviet rather than Nazi domination of the continent (and possibly of the UK as well).
Is chicken a la king still the best of the MRE bunch? It's been a long while since I've had a MRE (I'm a military brat).
Anyhooo, I have no doubt that you guys could easily sleep damn near anywhere, after all you guys are Marines. It still is important to get the non-military people thinking about the more 'human' aspects of the logistics behind stationing a squad or two of Marines on board a civvy ship.
Conex boxes on a cargo container ship while secured well, have been known to get accidently 'float tested' so there's the safety aspect there (not to mention the 'oh shit' moment of realizing all your gear is now being inspected by the local marine life). On an oil tanker, you guys would have to find somewhere below the main deck to camp out on (not to mention the potential hazard of shooting guns on the main deck where not even smoking is allowed), so on and so forth.
People tend to forget about all the ancillary stuff when discussing things like this.
"You get what you pay for"
You pay millions TO pirates and get millions OF pirates.
Why would you risk it to get back a few measly bills and credit cards?
Who said I wanted to risk it to get back my credit cards? I really don't care about my property. I do care about my life though. If he pulls a knife and keeps his distance I'm not going to argue with him. He can have the wallet -- my property isn't worth taking a human life. But if he pulls a gun or tries to get close enough with the aforementioned knife to use it then it's a different animal altogether. Someone pointing a gun at you represents a mortal threat to your life. Assuming that they are only interested in your wallet seems pretty foolish to me. It's not a video game -- you don't get a do-over if he pulls that trigger.
If you would really kill someone for taking a few of your things
I wouldn't kill someone for my things. I would kill them for threatening to take my life, which they are clearly doing if they point a firearm at me. It's the same with the house. If I came home and discovered that my house was being robbed I'd leave and call the police. But if they come into my house when I'm home I'm not going to assume that they are only there to steal my property. I'm going to resist them with every means at my disposal.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How about we send a line of B-52s in and turn the entire Somali coastline into a parking lot? Or maybe we could change 18th century treaties to deal with real-world realities.
I haven't set foot in the US since 2001, actually, and I've never called it my home. I've lived in Europe and the Americas, and spent a lot of time travelling in some of the poorer parts of the world, including countries where US citizens are not allowed to go, like Cuba. In places that are less US-friendly, they don't see the US as a land of opportunity, they see it as an imperialist power trying to extend its influence over people who don't want it.
And why do I need to keep repeating myself when people take a statement about criminals and extend it to a generalization about everybody who lives in poverty? Did you actually read what's been said? Nowhere does it say that this sense of entitlement extends to the general populace. Not once. Because it doesn't. It applies to the people actually committing the piracy.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Very well put! I also spent a month in Ethiopia while traveling through and found the same sort of thing. I was in Africa for almost three years, and again, found the same sort of thing generally. Americans are so ego-centric they find it hard to believe that "others" can be human, yet I found the people of Africa to be MORE human than most Americans. I felt like a great burden had been removed soon after moving there, only to have that burden return when I returned (for higher education.) I can hardly wait to get back out of this country (USA).
I've heard of cops helping a home owner out by dragging the body of a shot thief that somehow made it out the door, so that it would look better in the photos for the crime scene for the homeowner.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why not just weld a one inch thick, five foot wide chunk of metal all the way around the ship, along with a rounded three to five foot diameter tube along the rails to prevent grapples from finding a purchase?
The Soviets wasted 500'000 of their soldiers as cannon fodder just to rush a capture of Berlin before the US.
As an inhabitant of the former Eastern Germany, I'm not thankful to the Soviets for "liberating" my half of the country, because they just replaced brown shirts with red flags.
Maybe the Soviets would have captured the whole continent, maybe the Germans would have captured the whole Soviet Union, nobody knows.
I"ve said it before and I'll say it again, women and seamen don't mix!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Ha! That's an excellent way of viewing it!!
Now if only we'd apply that to our own out of control government... :/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What makes you think he isn't going to kill you anyway once he has your wallet? By pointing that gun at you, he has placed your life in mortal danger. I'd shoot the SOB as soon as I had an opening to do so.
Statistics. The vast majority of times when that situation occurs, the mugger walks away after getting the wallet.
I suppose you can shoot someone as they walk away, but I don't really think my wallet is worth a life, even a mugger's.
This is what one of them thinks about fishing
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8010061.stm
There is a correlation between the two. Which way does the correlation run? Is there a third common cause? If you can't think of how crime could lead to poverty instead of the other way, then you really haven't thought about it much. Short term thinking is a potential common cause, but could also arguably also be triggered by both conditions. That's just three linked effects.
I'm extremely suspicious of any claim to have identified the true root cause of any social issue.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
A few observations: There are thousands of vessels in the danger zone at any given time, several times that many heading into or out of it as well. That would require perhaps over a hundred thousand marines, mercenaries, whatever, to be aboard ships from port to port to provide coverage for each one that passes through the area. Merchant vessels are prohibited by international treaty from being armed. So far, the pirates have not executed any hostages (except when a rescue is taking place). If the force equation tilts upward, they may begin to kill instead of capture. Untrained seamen are not likely to provide coordinated, effective resistance with light weapons. Cost/benefit analysis has thus far not driven the shippers to change the situation. Why would a government assume the huge cost of effectively protecting an entire region when only a small percentage of ships traversing it are under its flag? No easy answers here.
Right, because there are lots of Marines sitting around with not much to do right now. In reality, doing this with any significant number of ships would require us to, you know, hire more Marines.
Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of merchant shipping is not US-flagged, so we'd have to get permission from countries like Panama and Liberia, who are not necessarily all that interested in hosting US troops. Plus you'd need to get buy-in from the shipping companies (and more importantly, their insurers, who are not going to be too interested in exposing themselves to wrongful death lawsuits). Finally, your plan either sticks the US taxpayer with the bill, or forces us to try to recover costs from the shipping company... and most of them think it's cheaper to just accept the losses.
No, no, and no. We don't have plenty of them, and the ones we have are already kind of busy. I submit to you that pirates are a lot cheaper to replicate than Marines, as the pirates don't need any particular training, whereas Marines do. And getting a bunch of Marines sent to the ships in question is a logistical challenge that you obviously don't appreciate.
There's a whole lot of mindless "let's just kill 'em all" spouting off going on around here. I used to do maritime security for a living, and I can promise you that this problem is a lot harder than people think it is.
Statistics. The vast majority of times when that situation occurs, the mugger walks away after getting the wallet.
I'm not going to place my future survival on statistics.
I suppose you can shoot someone as they walk away, but I don't really think my wallet is worth a life, even a mugger's.
Why would you shoot him if he's walking away and no longer poses a threat to you?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Put three marines on each ship with 3 shoulder fired rockets. Its a lot less expensive than building additional ships and wasting gas sailing around the area. You just set up areas where the ships stop to allow the marines aboard and a place to let them off.
Don't judge the effectiveness of months-long operations by one battle. General Anthony Zinni ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Zinni )had quite a bit of experience with the US operations in Somalia and he firmly believed that the US armed forces were capable of stabilizing the region with a unified and recognized Somali government (opposed to territorial warlords), but they were ordered to leave by President Clinton prematurely. You may want to read his memoirs to get a more detailed view of how things went down there, including the Somali politics!
Many countries will not allow armed ships to dock. Having guns on board does in fact count. Most shipping companies don't want the hassle.
snig
Certainly. There is a number of valuable, poorly guarded targets passing through an area with lots of people but no functioning government. Consequently, the oddball psychopaths, fortune hunters, and other assorted scum see an opportunity floating past them, ripe for the picking.
It has nothing to do with poverty - the pirates are rich enough to be able to afford boats and guns - and everything to do with opportunity.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Opposition to armed resistance against piracy isn't driven by bleeding-heartism... it's driven by freakin' practicality. Some food for thought:
This is not to say that I'm particularly in favor of non-lethal means, as they're even less practical than lethal means. I read an article not long ago in which a ship had actually contracted with a private security company to repel pirates. They were "armed" with LRAD, among other things. After being hit with LRAD, the pirates shot up the ship with RPGs, and the security force jumped over the side. Pirates 1, private security 0.
While I was in the reserves, I was the CO of a maritime security squadron that did exactly this kind of thing. People need to understand that unlike in the movies, not every problem can be solved by applying more force. The real solution is probably some combination of convoying/sticking to defined shipping routes, so that naval forces can escort commercial ships; and cleanup of the situation ashore in Somalia.
The key word is "relatively". Sure, it's relatively small compared to the Indian Ocean... but it's still thousands of square miles. And to transfer the troops to the ship means you need to keep track of all the merchant vessels - and with dozens of them transiting in every direction, all the time, that's a lot harder than you think. You then need to either have a troop transport rendezvous with them before they enter the danger zone - so they can transfer the troops via small boat - or have a helicopter rendezvous with them to lower the troops one by one to the deck of the merchant (you typically can't land on them). This is difficult and expensive to do.
You're hitting the nail on the head. Piracy's much in the news these days, but it's still cheaper to just take the losses, at least for now.
Frankly, this is fucking ridiculous. You can do in an afternoon what the Army takes three weeks to accomplish? Sure you can.
I'll tell you what - you let me know which ships are being protected by your single-afternoon-trained troops... so I can stay off of them. They'll be more of a danger to themselves than to the pirates.
There is no freakin' way you're going to be able to assemble the crew of a merchant ship and give them a couple weeks of weapons training. These guys are picked up all over the world, from places like Pakistan, Greece, or the Philippines. They have no training in anything, and mostly likely they don't all even speak the same language.
What's more, the crewmembers have no incentive to actually resist - it makes it much more likely that they'll be killed, and the crew is hardly ever targeted for kidnapping (there's no money in it) - it's mostly the comparatively well-off officers who are nabbed.
You're making my head spin. Navy SEALs practice for freakin' years trying make sniper shots at sea... on a rolling, pitching ship, your random deckhand is not going to have a prayer of making a shot like that. And "modern detection equipment"? Like what, a pirate detector? All those ships have are very basic search radars, and if you sent out the security force every time you got a contact, you'd literally never do anything else. Radar can't tell you if a contact is a pirate, just that there's a boat out there. And in coastal regions like this there are a shitload of boats out there.
Just to buy the gun would be millions of dollars. Probably a million more to install it. The sailor is going to cost a $150k a year or so.
People ought to think about what they're saying. Oh, right, this is Slashdot.
Just to get this out of the way, I'm a retired Navy officer with 20 years experience, much of it at sea, and one tour as the CO of a maritime security squadron... we did this stuff for a living.
Your post is bunk. At the risk of repeating a bunch of stuff that's already been said:
But I guess it's more fun to spout macho bullshit than it is to actually think about the problem and discuss solutions that might actually be practical.
Yes indeed, the practice does have a long pedigree... and in keeping with it being a form of national natural selection, we had a name for nations that didn't cut it:
Colonies.
Actually, I'm not so sure that isn't a viable solution.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Apparently you missed the posts that mention about over-fishing by non-Somolis and the illegal garbage dumping. Of course none of this excuses turning to piracy! I'm just saying that there probably aren't a plenty of fish in that patch of sea right now.
No more entertaining than watching a 'Master Craftsman' at work, which I can appreciate. While pirates may still be human beings, 'people' implies a certain willingness to accept and work within society's bounds, which pirates do not. I consider them 'targets', not 'people'.
I don't watch any TV, btw. so it would be difficult to watch too much of it.
That should clear it up for you.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
navy seals: kills pirates dead!
Why are you guys so against pirates.
Those guys are reversing global warming!
I say we need MORE pirates!
*dons appropriate gear, heads off to get more booty*
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Per what I've read about post-WW2 East Germany, yeah, the Soviets did the people no favours, just switched the chain from your right arm to your left arm. :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How do guns get shipped from one country to another in large bundles? One at a time?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Depends on what kind of deal. Sometimes the Navy moves them.
Normally with "White" deals all parties are told before hand, conditions are agreed upon, security is arranged and so on and the transfer happens within the bounds of the laws of the source and destination. With "grey" deal, the dock masters are just paid off and the arms is moved quietly, I'll let your imagination fill in what happens with "black" deals. Ships carrying Arms to be traded legally don't may not even dock at the same port as regular cargo ships, when arms are being shiped the authorities will inventory every one before allowing them to be traded.
Most nations have rules that apply to arms shipments, few nations prohibit arms shipments completely but most will regulate them for safety and taxation. Moving large arms shipments is completely different to allowing every ship to carry small arms into port.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
OK, have a more relevant example.
I doubt US authorities would be happy when a small, elderly cargo ship full of Saudi Arabian crew with high powered assault rifles turns up in a major civil port.
Currently the laws of the sea make it quite clear that carrying weapons is a no-no, making it easy for US authorities (and the rest) to make policy without having to make snap (and probably unfair) judgements. Scrap those laws, you've scrapped the easiest way of policing your ports.
After all, who wants to be the port official who has to announce the new policy- "Guns allowed, whites only"?
East Germany (the GDR) actually was much better than the German Reich before, but still an awfully totalitarian society.
The GDR had The One Party, dangerous secret police above all laws, state-owned everything, state-controlled arts and education, disappearing dissidents, political justice, a large army, bellicose rhetoric and of course the hallmark of socialism worldwide: scarcity of everything else.
But other than that, they had enough edibles, bearable housing, no Holocaust and no wars. Unfortunately that's why people around here indulge in "Eastalgia" time and again, because when seen against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, most other dictatorships look terribly weak. Maybe when compared to the Black Death, cancer doesn't seem so bad.
Anyway, without an unyielding and definetly unfriendly Reagan, the expensive arms race, and maybe the aftermath of Chernobyl, a sensible Gorbatchev may have never come to power.
Maybe it's time to remember again what effects Chamberlain had on the Nazis and compare them to the impression Churchill made.
It's good to hear about this from someone who lives there and remembers their country's history.
My impression of the GDR gov't (myself being old enough to remember the Iron Curtain and what it meant) was that they didn't play fair even by the "rules" of totalitarianism -- exactly as you describe. Nothing and no one was safe. I wish more Americans would remember, and fight against our own slide into socialism. But because we don't have jackbooted thugs roaming the streets, too many people just don't see where it goes, nor remember what we fought against in the past. Reagan must be spinning in his grave.
My German friends have spoken of this "Eastalgia" with horror, as they watch its influence eroding united Germany's freedoms. And as Germany goes, so goes the rest of Europe, or so it has been historically.
It occurs to me that in today's world, there might not BE any capacity for breaking loose once socialism and oppression get into power, as (lacking outright attacks) there is not enough incentive to go to war against it, nor any great statesman like Reagan, who can get an unbalanced gov't hoist by its own petard.
The fact that we've chosen to appease pirates rather than blow them out of the water speaks to that.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Important points you should factor into your strange idea that this not feasible. a.) The area doesn't matter if you're putting marines on the ships themselves. b.) You don't have to put marines on all the ships. Just a majority of the ships. c.) Contrary to what you appear to believe the United States is not he only country on earth that has "Marines". d.) I don't know any other way to make this clear to you and you can't seem to get it through your head. Marines are getting paid whether they are on assignment or sitting around the barracks fucking your mother. Sure they get increased pay for the former (and maybe should for the latter) but this is not going to be an exceptionally expensive enterprise where salary and benefits are concerned. Add up the cost of operating "x" number of naval vessels in these waters and then compare it to the cost of Marine detachments from many nations boarding (and getting off of) these ships at points in the Red Sea, along the Arabian peninsula, and in Kenya. Then look at how many more ships can be covered and pirates engaged and permanently retired. Then try and work out how many years you're going to be doing either approach taking into account the rate we're shutting them down today. You need to go back to programing and playing counterstrike or something and I need to quit arguing with a stupid nerd about something I understand and he clearly does not.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
perhaps its time for you to move to a more sane area, no way am I going to wait for anything if someone breaks down my door.
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it is a choice you have to make, i suppose. if you live near the city center where there are things to do, then you are within walking distance of slums and people with nothing to lose. i can't afford to, nor do i want to, move out to the cookie-cutter suburbs where there is nothing but chain restaurants and strip malls. statistically the chance of my place being the one with its door kicked in are pretty low, but if it does happen i want more than a frying pan in my hand.
I'm thinking along the same lines...
Why bother with all the new 'tech' that is probably expensive, etc. And just use something known to work....a simple fucking gun?!?!?
Liability.
Shooting a Somali pirate may or may not be a crime, depending on circumstances. Shooting a Somali fisherman definitely is. How do you know which one that boat coming toward you is?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
According to people that I know that have been to Africa, the same could be said for something as simple as driving on the roads. A 'Rover may be made to only fit 8 people, but it doesn't stop someone from putting 16 inside, another 10 on top, and driving like a bat of out Hell. :)
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The attitude that everyone in the third world resents everyone in the first world and is willing to set aside their morals to attain material wealth is ignorant and potentially racist.
Agreed, but I disagree on one point: It's maybe potentially classist, but not potentially racist. You get rich black/yellow/green/sky-blue-pink people in non-third-world countries too. These days a lot of people are too peecee and are ready to play the race card too quickly; usually due to the misconception that all whites=haves and all blacks=have-nots.
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!