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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.