Take it down. Now.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali pirates Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 21 crew members aboard, a diplomat and a U.S. Navy spokesman said.
The Kenya-based diplomat identified the vessel as the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama and said all the crew members are American. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The U.S. Navy confirmed that a U.S. flagged ship with 21 members of crew was hijacked early Wednesday off the eastern coast of Somalia.
Piracy was one of the reasons we have a Navy. We need to use swift, decisive force now to kill the pirates on this ship and send a message to all the other ones out there waiting.
Note that this is the first US flagged merchant ship that has been captured by pirates off Somalis.
I couldn’t agree with you more. This requires more than just a “strongly worded condemnation” in the UN security council.
It requires some precisely targeted ammo.
The new pres. will do nothing of the kind.
“The area we’re patrolling is more than a million miles in size. Our ships cannot be everywhere at every time,” Christensen said.
You don’t need to cover those millions of square miles if every sumbitch Cap’n Jack Sparrow wannabe knew they’d have 4 SEAL platoons shoved up their ass in a most unpleasant way if they even look at a ship that didn’t belong to them!!!
But no…they know all they’ll get is an official phone call or maybe even a certified letter asking them to please release the good guys or we’ll reduce your grain shipments by 20 bags per day…and if that doesn’t work, we’ll send the Children’s Miracle Network over to film more commercials in your villages.
Seriously folks (“folks” being our powers that be), how many millions of dollars do we spend training, equipping, and maintaining teams for this exact situation??? The first news we should hear about these A-hole skinnines taking over a boat the size of their country is “Navy SEALs Deliver KO Punch to Pirates–Send Message to Rest of Wannabes by Hanging Pirate Bodies From Back of C-130 and Flying Low-n-Slow Over Pirate Homeland.”
I pray for a plate of crow to eat on this one. Prove me wrong, please!
C5F calling…NSW/NECC…let’s roll!!
Remember the French Admiral about a year ago? Yeah, let’s make that look under-played.
DS
Totally agree. These pirates need to be dealt with in such a way to set an example for other morons who think that this behavior will get them anything other than a merciless death. This is a legitimate threat to US Citizens – let’s kill these bastards.
From the most recent reports, sounds like the civilian sailors did what our government won’t let our Navy do-fight back. Word is the civilians regained control of the ship.
Two words: sea marshals. Every U.S. flag vessel, put a SEAL element aboard, with proper ROE, and let them repel boarders.
Maybe the Merchant Marine needs to be issued some of those nifty shotguns from the previous post? I’m sure it would beat a cutlass for repelling boarders.
This ain’t over yet, and I’m sure it’ll take a few days for all the details to come out. Good on the crew for fighting back! Somewhere, Stephen Decatur is cheering. Just think what they could have done if they’d had arms…
BTW, The Torch has some good commentary.
Negotiations MAY get the captain back, but they will not end piracy. Until we see the price for engaging in piracy raised to the point where it becomes obvious to all that the consequences are swift, sure, and deadly, there will be those who test the waters.
It will undoubtedly become necessary at some point to go ashore and seize a sufficient number of pirates, try them (preferably with drumhead courts, and execute them swiftly.
Taking a lesson from the Royal Navy in yers past, it might also provide an object lesson to display the heads on pikes at local ports, and with a nod to Blackjack Pershing, we might bury the bodies in pig $hit.
Once the word gets around that the inevitable reward for piracy is that the rest of the civilized world will hunt you down, and kill you, piracy suddenly becomes a less attractive career choice.
But I don’t think we ought to hold our collective breath waiting for this administration to decide that enough is enough.
This needs to be solved. The perception (whether or not it’s fact) is that the world’s navies are tooling around the west IO while a bunch of rag-tag pirates ply their trade under their noses.
Bad press.
I know that, at least right after 9-11, they were putting a squad or two of mobilized Nat’l Guardsmen on navy auxillary ships going to the Med and PG. Why can’t we expand this to all American-flagged merchantmen?
I’ve a feeling there’s some law or convention that gets in the way of a common-sense solution. That’s usually the case.
Either that or we scrap our multi-billion dollar high-tech Navy (which seems to be useless in this situation) and go back to sailing ships. They seemed to be able to handle pirates pretty well.
Well, I agree, as I show by this post, where, BTW, I quote Lt.Col. P.
http://www.captainsjournal.com/2009/04/09/piracy-the-only-solution/