Pirates

from PolMach Forums

ok, here's my thing.  The waters off of Somalia are a hotbed of pirates.  When the socio-economic problems of Somalia are solved the piracy will dry up (we hope).  But policy makers are looking for a policy to deal with the pirates now.  My question is: When a ship is under attack by pirates and a naval warship is closeby why don't they just blow them out of the water and be done with it?  The frogs, within a day of the Maersk solution, captured eleven pirates who had attacked another.  news.bbc.co.uk said in their article, "It had detected a "mother ship," or command-vessel, on Tuesday, and observed it overnight before launching an assault early on wednesday."  Ok, you've determined they are pirates, when they attack another ship, take your deck gun and blow them out of the water and stop screwing around!

politics
2,439 views 1 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top

There aren't enough warships to escort every merchant ship that passes through the area, which is well over a million square miles of water. The pirates usually don't make their intentions known until they are in close proximity of their target. They don't fly the skull and cross bones like in the days of old. Positioning of warships s a matter of luck. A small boat (45 kts) can easily outrun a destroyer (35kts.). Visibility on a clear day at sea is about 15 miles in all directions under ideal conditions. Radar cannot identify if a ship is a pirate ship or not, too many small fishing boats, etc. But small radar sets can determine cargo ships (big blip, slow speeds). Pirates have the advantage, unless they are within visual sight of the warship and identified as such. Also it would be impossible to stop and check every small boat for weapons. Compare it to X # of police (representing the number of warships available) (this would be less than 100 if all navy's sent some ships)assigned to count the Y#  of people in Manhattan everyday (representing ships and small boats). This is what it would be like.

I'm with you though, if a few were sunk the rest might look for a different line of work.