And I truly appreciate (and am appropriating, Aaarg!) ratherdashing’s joke on outsourcing!

Small arms aren’t a real problem for the ships, but anything larger is. There are laws that prohibit most arms on vessels any larger than an automatic rifle. Those laws may need to be tweaked in order to allow heavier armaments.

Owners will have to eat the expense of hiring, feeding, and housing more guards, but I’m sure the insurance companies will give them adequate encouragement.

More activity and cooperation among nations with navies will help mostly in surveillance and tracking, I think.

In fact, I’m surprised that the Blackwaters of the world haven’t already jumped into the fray given how long we’ve known of the danger of Somali pirates.

An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected pirate “mother ship” in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats into the night, officials said Wednesday, yet more violence in the lawless seas where brigands are becoming bolder and more violent.

Apparently the defense of shipping lanes has been outsourced to India just like everything else. LOL.

I do think that private security forces would put a dent in pirate activity. A handful of well armed and trained Blackwater-types should be able to fend off any boarding attempt by a bunch of Somalis. Are the Gurkhas still busy in Iraq? Probably not, so grab some of them.

Will there be stories of how the dead pirates were “good Muslims” and that violent jihad against non-Muslims is the proper response?

That’s a very good point. My dismay has more to do with the idea of Saudi Arabia asking the West to engage in naval assaults on cities of a country it has in the past intimated has been a victim of Western military interventions.

Yes, it would be great for Saudi Arabia to “stand up” instead of using Western proxies (a process that allows the religious establishment the Saudi gov’t tolerates *and coddles* to spew anti-Western propaganda into Saudi society), but I would go further and offer alternatives to Naval assaults on port cities that would kill non-combatants: arm the cargo ships, escort the cargo ships and follow India’s lead: blow those mosquito boats out of the water as they approach. These are guys in glorified row boats with rinky-dink RPGs for Christ’s sake! (An RPG’s range is shorter than the range of weapons and radar on even the most basic naval warships, no? It’s not like these guys have shoulder-fired rockets.)

And of course: the white elephant is the fact that Somalia is a mess and nobody seems to know what to do about it. George HW Bush decided to make it his pet project of democracy and failed by passing that quagmire to Clinton. Everything the US tried to do in Somalia failed and there seems to be no desire to confront the problem . . . until some ships get hijacked.

One other point that’s slightly off topic: This amazing story has underscored another tragedy (with the capture of that Ukrainian ship): that big superpowers are basically using African regional conflicts to sell weapons, helping prop up their own industries — something that doesn’t get a whole lot of coverage is all the “hardware” countries like Ukraine, Germany, Spain, even India, etc., are selling to African countries. I read that Romania is one of the largest exporters to Africa of the world’s deadliest weapon of mass destruction: the AK-47. Spain is the No. 1 supplier of bullets for those guns in West Africa (Nigeria being another pirate haven). That’s another interesting angle to this story — it’s not just oil and cheap crap from China being shipped through these lanes. Yes, I realize countries have rights to buy military hardware, but Africa is a mess filed with regional and tribal conflicts and it seems that it’s just being used in a lot of cases to unload military products. And these weapons don’t always end up in the hands of angels. But I digress.