Braver Pirates, More Lucrative Booty Posted by The Editors

This post is from Amanda R. Hillman

This weekend saw the hijacking of yet more cargo ships off the coasts of Somalia and Kenya by pirates, despite the recently increased presence of a multinational naval force patrolling the Indian Ocean near the Gulf of Aden.

On Sunday, South Korea reported that a Japanese freighter, cargo and crew included, had been hijacked, but the big news of the weekend was the commandeering of the Saudi Aramco crude carrier, the Sirius Star. Reuters noted that the Star "held a cargo of as much as two million barrels of oil -- more than one quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily production."  The Commander of the US Navy’s 5th fleet, Jane Campbell asserted that this latest attack was testament to “the determination of the pirates and ... a measure of how lucrative piracy could become.” Attacks against oil and cargo ships there have risen sharply in the past year.

“Eleven vessels are currently being held by pirates hoping to secure ransoms for their release, according to The Associated Press. They include the MV Faina, which was hijacked along with 200 crew and a cargo of weapons and T-72 tanks.”

Implications for maritime terrorism aside, the cost of negotiating and retrieving hijacked cargo ships is a growing problem and one that will challenge both the Bush and Obama administrations sooner than either would have probably liked.

Comments

[fact]

Not sure I'd call thuggery and hostage-taking anything remotely resembling "bravery." Actually, I'm sure. I wouldn't.

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poor somalia....her people destroys her good reputation.

[Don Bacon]

Whatever happened to Alfred Mahan's concepts of navies controlling seaborne commerce? Is the US Navy with its billion-dollar aircraft carrier fleets and 300-ship force so powerless? Why do we have a navy, if not to enforce freedom on the seas? Help me out here. I'm an army guy and I just don't get it.

[marc]

Don, I've been wondering the same thing. Wasn't preventing pirates the purpose of the Navy in the first place? The Navy brass seem to be very quick to suggest the answer lies in giving lots of lucrative outsourced contracts to the likes of Blackwater. Is our Navy really so incapable of doing any of it's most basic missions that a bunch of trigger happy yahoos can just throw something together and succeed where they, with a trillion dollar fleet, fail?

Also have you ever seen one of these mega tankers. Larger than the largest aircraft carrier and about 5 stories from waterline to deck. How did the pirates get from their small launches up the side of the ship? Seems to me if the tanker just put full power to the screws any small vessel that got too close would get pulled in and and reduced to bloody pulp.

If, what seems more likely, the tanker crew were fooled into helping the pirates to board than that is a matter of coming up with better "best practices" and procedures for handling small vessels claiming to be in distress.

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