Friday, October 23, 2009

Piracy

So by now most everyone should know about the pirates off the Somali coast that have been taking large ships and their crew hostage. They made around $80M in 2008 alone (from ransom). Amazing. Now the Navy is getting more involved and using drones capable of deploying weapons to patrol the seas.

That's an interesting attempt, but experts say it won't do much to deter the bandits. They say the biggest thing that would help would be fixing the Somali government, but that doesn't seem like a plausible solution. My solution? Get a big juicy cargo ship, mark it up properly, load it with empty containers, and a couple dozen Navy Seals. Just let it run around collecting up pirates. I mean they "attack" from tiny boats usually with less than ten bandits and some handheld automatic weapons. At best it seems they have some handheld rocket launchers, too. No match for Navy Seals. Probably no match for McHale's Navy, either, but let's not take any chances. Send in the pros.

Let them video each capture for evidence in whatever international court they get tried in and just keep doing it until the pirates quit. They might never quit, but we could just do it forever using it as a training tool for Seals. Just rotate them through every few months. And if a few pirates get killed trying to do their thing, so be it. Heck, let National Geographic do a reality TV show around it. I'd watch that.

2 comments:

Lima Bean said...

i just read a story in the paper today about a British couple who is being held hostage by some Somali pirates. They captured them on their yacht. They are demanding 80 million from the British government--have you read about this? Maybe that story is what inspired this post.

It is crazy. But why those people were on their yacht unarmed all alone in that territory is hard to fathom.

Donnie Barnes said...

No, I hadn't heard about that one. As to why they were there, I have no idea. Perhaps they were visiting their Yemenese friends?