Why can navies just sink the pirate motherships and be done with it?
Everything I learned from the world of combating drug traffickers tells me that wouldn’t make the problem go away. It is a tactical move that could buy time to build a longer-term solution and a more systemic way of dealing with it. But that’s it. We’ve got to come up with a third-party security effort operating under some agreed-upon rules, with real transparency – we don’t want another Blackwater mercenary scandal – with navies providing some back-up capability. The funding for protection of the fleet can largely come from the merchants themselves. But now, merchant ships can’t protect themselves, navies are unable or unwilling to protect the fleets, so we’re in a no-man’s land where this thing keeps escalating – and these are trade routes that are really important to our economy. It’s bizarre that few ragtag brigands could cause such mayhem. This is really a hard, messy problem, and I don’t have a silver bullet. It shows the danger of our national security apparatus still wanting to
