This is how cargo ships fight pirates without guns [video]
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The video from the hijacking is so crazy I thought the footage was from a video game at first.
It's literally an arms race, and non-combat measures reduce the risk of loss of life, cargo, and vessels, which makes them much more economical than trying to train and arm crews.
Plain old escalation may work (modulo combat effectiveness of crew members) on an individual case, but there will always be more pirates, especially in the most desperate parts of the world.
When the military gets involved the arms race has to stop because the US is just much better funded than the pirates or any other navy even if they would get involved (which they probably won't).
So generally when this happens it all dies down for a while until the military lose interest and the ships are sailing without protection again.
Ps: I'm not American nor am I a fan of their military but you can't deny they are the best funded in the world.
There is modern data on this, recorded history, and ancient literature going back to ancient greece (and in other societies) that cover this very well.
You can't eliminate piracy with violence under these circumstances, you need to make it too costly or too risky to undertake. As shown by the attack on the Israeli vessel, you also can't eliminate the threat posed by well funded, competent adversaries that are highly motivated.
I don't know if you can make it too risky to undertake in the face of desperation.
Yemen has an active famine, which I would imagine is contributing to the piracy problem. I fundamentally don't think you can make an action so risky that a starving person wouldn't attempt it. Some would likely be willing to die if it meant their children, spouse and parents could escape starving to death. I presume there's a Mafia-esque "we'll take care of your loved ones if you die" pact.
There are tons of grey market jobs with substantial risks that people do. I was watching a video about a guy in the Philippines that dives to run a machine gathering tin from the sea floor. He dives something like 100 feet deep using nothing but a single onboard compressor to pump air down to him. If the pump dies, he dies. And the pump is about what you're thinking; exposed to open sea air, held together mostly by duct tape, and probably 50 years old at this point.
Another was about Indian workers (I believe) gathering sulfur with no respirators and carrying 100kg of sulfur up a steep cliff side with no stairs or railing, with no respirators or even gauges to warn them about toxic fumes.
People already do a wide range of jobs they know will probably kill them. You can't threaten someone starving to death with violence; they're already staring down death, it's not a deterrent anymore.
These houthis are not famined. They have expensive boats and top-notch arms. It looks like they even have guided missiles (you're not going to shoot down a reaper with small arms fire and they've already shot two of them down). The somali's too, they have a lot of money. They could use it to feed their people but they choose to use it to make their local warlords richer.
> People already do a wide range of jobs they know will probably kill them. You can't threaten someone starving to death with violence; they're already staring down death, it's not a deterrent anymore.
There's a big difference between having a big chance (or certainty) to die years in the future or to have the certainty to die on your next trip out. Because that will happen if there's a DDG around with the fingers on the trigger. There's just simply no point then.
Even proceeding under the assumption the accusations of wealth are true (I genuinely have no idea, sounds plausible), it's irrelevant. I'm doubtful the rich Yemenis and Somalis are the ones manning the boats. Their wealth has no bearing on whether the people on the boat are starving or not. Maybe they could stop the famine and thus the piracy, but they don't seem like they're going to, so it's not really relevant here.
> There's a big difference between having a big chance (or certainty) to die years in the future or to have the certainty to die on your next trip out. Because that will happen if there's a DDG around with the fingers on the trigger. There's just simply no point then.
So there's more of a point in sitting around and waiting for starvation to kill you and your kids? Over half of their children have stunted growth from lack of food, and ~15% of kids under 5 are starving to a degree where they have Wasting Syndrome and their bodies are starting to digest their own muscle for food. 1.3 million pregnant or lactating women, and 2.2 million children have had to be treated for acute malnutrition. A child in Yemen dies of starvation every 10 minutes.
Do you realize how utterly fucked a healthy person has to be to have Wasting Syndrome? There isn't a worse level of starving; the only form of hunger worse than having Wasting Syndrome is being actually dead.
15% is roughly 1 in 7. 1 in 7 children is so hungry that they've got the same syndrome as someone dying of AIDS or cancer who can't or won't eat anymore. 1 in 7 children have parents who have to watch the child be so hungry they might die the same way an AIDS or cancer patient has to. 1 in 7 children has parents who have to make impossible choices every day about how to get food, how far they're willing to go to get food, and who gets to eat if they can't get enough food.
I don't even think certain death would matter. If my options are getting blown into a pink mist by a Predator drone or watching my family starve to death, there's a perverse sort of kindness in a death that's at least swift (and likely less painful than starving).
The only thing you could threaten them with is a worse death (read: torture, it takes genuine sadism to find something worse than starving someone and only giving them cholera-infested water), or to threaten their families (a war crime and a genuinely horrifying thing to do).
There is nothing that isn't a war crime or a crime against humanity you can do to someone worse than starving them, period. Even a swift death is preferable; it at least spares the suffering.
Yemen has been blockaded and in a famine since 2015, and there is no sign of that changing. I'm doubtful there's enough hope and optimism left for anyone to be presuming that the situation will improve on a timeline relevant to their starving children.
I can't morally justify using overwhelming force against pirates who genuinely may not have any other way to feed their families.
To me, a prerequisite of that kind of force is offering another viable way to get food. We have to give them some kind of plan B before launching Operation Scorched Earth.
I have no idea if it's politically viable to kill the warlords, but that would be my plan A. Kill the warlords so humanitarian aid can reach the people, stabilize the humanitarian crisis, and then we start cracking down on the pirates.
The cynic in me says killing the warlords won't help, though. It'll just be a new set of warlords. At the very least, we can send a strong "don't interfere with humanitarian aid" message.
I know but so is the use of naval forces to eliminate these pirates, even if permitted by other states.
> You can't eliminate piracy with violence under these circumstances, you need to make it too costly or too risky to undertake.
But that's exactly what violence does. If you simply sink them as soon as they get close to a merchant vessel, they will stop in short order. If they're not afraid to die they will stop due to a lack of boats and personnel.
> As shown by the attack on the Israeli vessel, you also can't eliminate the threat posed by well funded, competent adversaries that are highly motivated.
That seemed more like a covert military operation than the usual somali pirate scum. It's hard to defend against that if it's backed by a state (in this case it seems to be Iran) but militaries are made to go up against other states.
PS: I might sound a bit harsh but I've been a victim of violent crime in the past too and I have lost all respect for those who perpetrate it. Don't forget the crew of that hijacked ship is still missing!
If you start thinking "violence solves nothing", you are wrong: you simply haven't done enough violence against the miscreants.
-- The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
I would discourage the use of African American English spelled out like that generally, but especially when discussing African people or people of African descent.
The primary historical usage of that style of writing was to belittle African American people by making them look dumb and illiterate, and to other-ize them by making their language seem strange and different.
I wouldn't pretend to know your intent, but that writing style makes it appear racially biased even if you didn't intend it to be.
> just shoot them and kill them so they be dead
The goal of avoiding that is likely to avoid an escalation in hostilities. My understanding is that modern piracy is like plane hijackings before 9/11. People are mostly unharmed, the ship is mostly unharmed, the company pays a ransom to get both back and everybody goes on with their day.
If this escalates to live fire, the pirates might decide it's easier and safer to fire an RPG into the ship, loot what they can before it sinks, and then let it sink.
Even if successful piracy attempts become less common, the costs of a successful piracy attempt skyrocket. Those ships cost millions; the shipping company can pay a lot of ransoms for the price of a single sunk ship.
Insurers are probably also happier this way. Their losses are small but consistent, which is easy to plan around. It's much harder and riskier to plan around the event that eg 3 ships are all sunk in the same week.
It's like shoplifting in stores. It's cheaper to watch the thief leave and accept the loss than to have security try to physically stop them and occasionally have to pay out injury claims.
Since you don't know intent, why not shut up about assumptions of racial bias? I'd argue that these days a hell of a lot of social damage is caused by so many tediously sensitized people assuming racial bias over any trivial thing, sometimes more damagingly than whatever a random racist causes.
The colloquialisms in the other comment might not be the politest things in the world, but they're popular and widely used among all kinds of people in ways that have nothing to do with racism. Is somebody imitating rap lingo for fun (or as a fan) a racist too because of it? I'd say the opposite. The singers themselves certainly try hard to popularize it, but then it's racism if that widely succeeds among many ethnicities?
I am black and I will type however I like. Shut your mouth, whitey.
Just like when your bike gets stolen or someone has sex with your wife and the amount of happiness in the world has a net increase, so overall it's a win-win.