Yaaaar!
- Thread starter MikeD
- Start date
Dave,
A raid from offshore on a coastal town followed by withdrawal to a ship is just an entirely different story from the Blackhawk Down situation, where the force was based in a densely-populated city for the long term and the raid in question was just one of many ongoing military operations.
The whole point of such a raid would be to avoid any resemblance to such a Mogadishu situation...clean beginning and end.
I daresay some civilians might be killed in such a raid. Not saying we should be targeting them, or be using standoff weapons which don't discriminate (in fact, quite the opposite if we want to make our point and have any effect...this would about shooting people in the face and blowing up boats with satchel charges) but that's the potential price paid with an operation like this. I also guarantee that, as is standard procedure in Somalia, if such a raid went down, women and children would bear arms against Americans (and/or assist fighters as bait, target spotters, and ammunition bearers) and be shot in the face as well. This will be bad press when the corpses are disarmed and photographed. Oh well; we can handle some bad press if the operation is a success. It won't defeat the purpose of the mission.
Ultimately, piracy is bad business and associating or co-locating with them is bad news. And much like Somali communities are beginning to tire of armed 15-year-old Al-Shabaab thugs telling the town elders what to do and how to practice Islam, any legit communities will likewise tire of the pirates operating in their midst if it brings negative consequences instead of income without risk. (Edit: And if the US doesn't commit the blunder of napalming/Tomahawk-missile-ing an entire town which will piss everyone off and reinforce a view of the US as a gutless wonder in Somali eyes--that's a scenario in which the US will lose politically on all fronts...)
A raid from offshore on a coastal town followed by withdrawal to a ship is just an entirely different story from the Blackhawk Down situation, where the force was based in a densely-populated city for the long term and the raid in question was just one of many ongoing military operations.
The whole point of such a raid would be to avoid any resemblance to such a Mogadishu situation...clean beginning and end.
I daresay some civilians might be killed in such a raid. Not saying we should be targeting them, or be using standoff weapons which don't discriminate (in fact, quite the opposite if we want to make our point and have any effect...this would about shooting people in the face and blowing up boats with satchel charges) but that's the potential price paid with an operation like this. I also guarantee that, as is standard procedure in Somalia, if such a raid went down, women and children would bear arms against Americans (and/or assist fighters as bait, target spotters, and ammunition bearers) and be shot in the face as well. This will be bad press when the corpses are disarmed and photographed. Oh well; we can handle some bad press if the operation is a success. It won't defeat the purpose of the mission.
Ultimately, piracy is bad business and associating or co-locating with them is bad news. And much like Somali communities are beginning to tire of armed 15-year-old Al-Shabaab thugs telling the town elders what to do and how to practice Islam, any legit communities will likewise tire of the pirates operating in their midst if it brings negative consequences instead of income without risk. (Edit: And if the US doesn't commit the blunder of napalming/Tomahawk-missile-ing an entire town which will piss everyone off and reinforce a view of the US as a gutless wonder in Somali eyes--that's a scenario in which the US will lose politically on all fronts...)
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I like how a pirate spokesman said they'll just kill prisoners in the future. Yeah, right. If you kill a hostage, you've just lifted the only veil preventing you from being destroyed by any number of angry nations.
Hostage = bargaining chip(s). They arent that dumb. I am sure the US Navy is pissing its collective self over having to face the pirate types.
The other seafaring nations of the world need to step up and bear some of this weight. The US should not be the worlds policeman anymore.
The other seafaring nations of the world need to step up and bear some of this weight. The US should not be the worlds policeman anymore.
They are. The French have already conducted a few of these rescues. Even the Japanese are thinking of sending some ships.....we all know how that worked out last time though.
I guess there have been plans drawn up since Bush to wipe out the Somali safe havens. Makes you wonder, If he didnt pull the trigger, who will?
it wont be the new prez.....his skirt is too short
I was curious to know if the Seals raid was unsuccessful, would Obama still have taken credit?
He would have referred to the fact that he gave the on scene operational commander the authority to execute if he deemed the civilian's life in danger.
Obama gave the green light to go based on on scene determination, a built in fall back in case things go bad. Every President has had a scapegoat built in if or when things go bad.
SEALs kick ass.
Pearl Harbor? Midway? Solomons?
Rush and Hannity made a days show out of that decision today. I cant believe I listened for as long as I did.
Had it not been succesful he would have certainly resigned under pressure from Rush and Sean...no, not really.
Did Hannity still wish it had failed?
Well, he stated that the fact that the SEALs had to receive the President's permission to fire only if the captain's life was in danger as an Obama character defect.
Is there some way we can lay on a rendition flight to deliver him to say........ Mogadishu or southern Afganistan?
If you're in a lifeboat with 3 armed pirates who are holding you hostage, your life is already in imminent danger.
He's not gonna give the "waste the mutha****ers!" order, but he did make a reasonable statement for the media which essentially gave the operational commander carte blanche from the start.
But good ol' Thomas Jefferson killed a LOT of pirates, courtesy of the US Marine Corps.
Just ask the erstwhile Pasha of Tripoli...
MD
Crazy pirates are at it again, undeterred. Seized three more ships today...
I dont/cant understand how these huge tankers get overtaken and seized over by teenaged thugs in skiffs. Cant the ladders be pulled up or the ship just suddenly swerve and crush the boat?
I dont/cant understand how these huge tankers get overtaken and seized over by teenaged thugs in skiffs. Cant the ladders be pulled up or the ship just suddenly swerve and crush the boat?
If someone threatens to put an RPG through your unarmoured hull you might be think twice about fighting them off. If they are just carrying small arms I would think that some remote operated pepper spray cannons would work nicely and should be legal. Of course that could lead to an arms race that the pirates would certainly win.
Where is Erol Flynn when you need him? Some swashes apparently need buckling....
You obviously don't understand pirate ingenuity. They use trebuchets to launch themselves onto the deck of the target ship. (But oh, how they long for a nice sail to land in and slide down on the blade of their daggers...)
Seriously, though, they can grapple onto and board even the larger ships, and 1) these huge ships have miniscule crews in the days of automation, which makes any defense very difficult 2) the small boats come in swarms, so they're mutually supporting--try and swerve to avoid or crush one, and you're vulnerable to the others. And when boarding looks pretty inevitable and you've got no other defenses, I'm guessing that pissing them off even more looks like a pretty crappy idea.
It seems crazy that it's possible, but the fact that they do it literally every day shows that it's eminently so...even easy for the experienced pirates.
Also (as a US Navy Master Helmsman) you can't "swerve" a tanker, let alone swerve in the areas they are being captured. It's not like they are being taken in open water.
Or just break out the 18" Naval Tasers.
Don't taze me matey!
How about side exit flame throwers like the South African anti car jacking ones?
we should pay them to pirate north korean supply vessels.
oh, geez. Turns out they're just misunderstood. (I bet Defenstrated wrote this under a nom de plume...)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
--
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Johann Hari
Columnist, London Independent
Posted April 13, 2009 | 10:05 AM (EST)
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
--
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Johann Hari
Columnist, London Independent
Posted April 13, 2009 | 10:05 AM (EST)
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
So we made their water glow with nukular waste then stole their fish? I guess rich white people are impervious to nukular waste.
Yeah, take that defensive anti-colonial armed action right where it counts--taking hostages off of unarmed cargo ships in international waters. Christ.
And yes, genius journalist--asking the pirates what motivates them is likely to get the answer, "money for more khat and hookers, plus the ability to shoot people. Plus a general culture of dominance through violence in the hell in which I was raised."
Don't read the article comments. I had an aneurism on page 4.
And yes, genius journalist--asking the pirates what motivates them is likely to get the answer, "money for more khat and hookers, plus the ability to shoot people. Plus a general culture of dominance through violence in the hell in which I was raised."
Don't read the article comments. I had an aneurism on page 4.
My advice if you want to start a shooting war: have the biggest gun.
We have it, they don't. And having a stockpile of AK's and RPG's ain't going to help against US Destroyers.
Maybe if Somalia had chosen the rule of law instead of anarchy, they could have stopped the dumping and fishing legally.
We have it, they don't. And having a stockpile of AK's and RPG's ain't going to help against US Destroyers.
Maybe if Somalia had chosen the rule of law instead of anarchy, they could have stopped the dumping and fishing legally.
True, but I was making a reference that if it had gone bad and he wanted a scapegoat, the decision to the on scene commander would have been his out, essentially waste the CO of the Bainbridge.
Sort of a la Dick Marcinko and Ollie North. Sort of.
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Hey now what's wrong with good old fashioned boiling oil?
Worked for the crusadery types didn't it?
And I sure those oil tankers have plenty to spare!
Hmmm Now there's another good idea!
You want armed troops to go in and "Shoot'em in the lips" But don't want the moral issues/guilt/political fallout from doing so?
Easy to fix!
Just taunt/trick/con the Russians into doing it.
They like to prove they have the biggest balls
They are gullible
Totally un subtle and can blow the crap outta the place
And they don't mind civilians getting in the way.
And the west gets guilt free butchery of the pirates.
BRILLIANT!
You want armed troops to go in and "Shoot'em in the lips" But don't want the moral issues/guilt/political fallout from doing so?
Easy to fix!
Just taunt/trick/con the Russians into doing it.
They like to prove they have the biggest balls
They are gullible
Totally un subtle and can blow the crap outta the place
And they don't mind civilians getting in the way.
And the west gets guilt free butchery of the pirates.
BRILLIANT!
Do you really think he'd say anything other than words to the effect of, "I gave the CO the authority to make a difficult decision under impossible circumstances...he made the best call he could and was forced by evil men to take a great risk in the face of certain disaster. Despite his noble efforts, things didn't work out as planned."