Seriously, pirates. Drudge has a link-less story that pirates have hijacked a cargo ship in Hong Kong. another tanker was hijacked in nigeria http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081118/ap_on_bi_ge/piracy_denmark_ship_1 and we know already about the saudi tanker hijacked by pirates. really?? pirates??
GPS and wireless communications has made life a lot easier for pirates than for pirate catchers. Imagine you vs. a mouse, but if the mouse had radar and GPS. It would totally own you.
PS it's not a ship in Hong Kong that was hijacked, it was an HK flagged cargo ship hijacked off East Africa/pirate central.
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I think this should be merged with the "tough love" global economics thread. Insecure trade routes and brigands appeared when the Roman financial networks started to crash. Arrr!
For those who might wish for a scaled down American presence abroad, this is a perfect example of why that needs to be thought through, and consideration given to reality. Reality is that you have rogue states apt to do anything, and then you have "countries" that are fractured entities controlled by several factions that are either active in actions like this one, or helpless to do anything about them. Which leaves action to those, like the United States, intelligent enough to have a military capable of doing something about it and one that, unlike Great Britain and the Falklands, is already deployed in the region. Clearly, we need to move assets to the mouth of the Red Sea and, in concert with our allies, establish an ongoing naval force to stamp out piracy. There are numerous reasons for that, not the least of which impact the so-called "war on terror." This piracy, in my opinion, is helping, directly or indirectly, those who would do us harm. Time to ramp up our forces there and those of our allies, and stamp out these pirates. It won't be easy and it will be impossible to completely rid ourselves of this problem, but we can make that vital sea lane essentially safe for international travel. We've acted before.
This is all well and good unfortunately this sentiment is going to be used by many in the Pentagon to justify aircraft carriers, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, and seaborne lasers when there's a lot of other cheaper more effective ways to address this issue. Quite frankly I wouldn't mind if the Saudis used their some of their oil money back from the $147 a barrel days to, you know, police their own coastal area a bit more closely. Also while Piracy costs a lot in the form of insurance premiums etc....is it necessarily as costly as deploying a full scale US naval force to the region? These types of considerations need to be made in our new financial reality.
Sam, there's no need for a carrier battle group to deal with this. Heck, the Coast Guard might be better suited for the task. And I agree with you that the Saudis, who have spent money like a drunken, uh, pirate on every bit of military equipment one could imagine, should deploy patrol craft there. One of the best things we could consider doing is using our high technology to track the small boats used by the pirates. We're talking extremely low tech from the dastardly fellows, causing millions in damages, from the ransoms paid, the cost of sending the navy there (the Russians, typically crazy, "rushed" a frigate from the Black Sea to the area. it took forever to get there. whatever happened in that instance?), to the huge increase in costs for insurance, to those who decide to take the long route around the southern tip of Africa, just to avoid this. I understand your cynicism, but sometimes these assets serve a purpose. A better purpose than a heck of a lot of it was put to by Bush.
We've always known about pirates off the African coast. But my sense of it was that they hijacked boats, took what they wanted, and sped off. The fact that they actually took a massive oil tanker and *kept* it is just stunning. You can't hide an oil tanker. Can the Saudi military really not go in and just take the thing back?? It has 2 million barrels of oil - that's $100 million in cargo, not to mention the ship itself. It seems like something that would be worth doing.
The navy has reported there is not much you can do once these guys get on board. It's the hostage thing. And they are very crafty come well armed, have extended their reach to almost 500 miles offshore and are good at what they do. Almost Navy seal good. It comes with practice. Not to mention we are talking a large mass of water to cover. Most governments just pay the ransom or not rather than engage in battle.
These must be bad pirates that hurt people, not like the good pirates Music download pirates Corporate takeover pirates Software pirates Pirates of the Carribean The Pirates who don't do anything
I don't think letting them build a nice sized Navy is really in anyones best interest. It would probably cause more problems than it solves and piss of a ton of people in the region. Is there really no GPS on this freakin ship that can be tracked? Hell the average UPS truck has about 100 RF devices on it allowing tracking from the base. I agree we need to let other countries solve some problems now that our debt has completely screwed us though.
