An Inexpensive Anti-Piracy Policy That Will Work!

Okay, how 'bout this for dealing with the problem of piracy against US ships. It's cheap, easy to set up and doesn't require a lot of resources.

1. Place two ships in the Somali corridor, one at each end.

2. Put a bunch of heavily armed seals on board both ships.

3. US flagged merchant ships swing by one of the ships as they enter the Somali corridor and pick up one heavily armed Navy Seal.

4. The Seal travels aboard the cargo ship for a small fee paid to the US Navy.

5. Somali pirates approach the ship, the Seal unlimbers a 50 caliber sniper rifle and picks off pirates as they approach and finishes by putting a few rounds through the bottom of the boat. If the pirates are more heavily armed, the Seal unlimbers an anti-ship rocket and blows up all of the attacking vessels.

6. The US Flagged ship continues on its merry way and drops the Seal off at the other Navy vessel at the other end of the Somali corridor. Ships going the other way pick Seals up and take them back up the corridor back to the first ship. No weapons go into foreign ports aboard American ships, so no problem with local authorities. Seals take their weapons with them.

7. Somali pirates go out, nobody comes back. After losing a hundred or so pirate ships, the Somalis begin to put two and two together and decide another line of work might be more lucrative.

How expensive would that be? One Seal would be all you'd need to take out one of those little boats. If they were attacking they wouldn't have hostages yet, so instead of needing 3 Seals to shoot 3 at once, you'd only need one to shoot 'em one at a time.

Sounds cold, but these aren't nice people and they do kill hostages. If you wanted to discourage them, you could shoot out the bottom of their little boats and let 'em swim home, but that might give them experience they could share to develop new tactics, which would endanger our Seals.

It's a tough call, but I think it would work. One Seal would be all I would need if I were a ship's captain and I'd certainly feed him well!

I'm just sayin'

Tom

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