Pirates!

Piracy is one of the things we importers buy insurance against, because piracy never went away. There are gun chests on those ships, but a 3000 TEU vessel may have a crew of max 12 people. 5 people can easily take over a ship. The ships forbid gun battles, even using mercenaries, because a sovereign nation would naturally detain ship and crew while it investigated gunplay and especially deaths in its waters. Rather face pirates than judges.

Modern Piracy is about robbing the ship's safe and crew, so this hijacking the entire ship is relatively new. There are completely safe responses to pirates: low level threats are met with ship's fire hoses and higher level threats can be met with those sonic anti-personnel weapons developed over the last decade. (and of course in waters that heavily trafficked they certainly could convoy through with PT boat escorts... no big deal.)

What smells fishy to me is the spike which demands a response. India steamed in and sank a boat, who else is on the way? The entire US Navy seems to be over there, will there be a further concentration of military might, under the pretext of counter-piracy. If USA attacks Iran, it could get damned dicey with all of those warships and auto-response defense systems... (recall the Vincennes shooting down a Iranian passenger jet after a skirmish with an Iranian patrol boat?)

I don't like it.

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