The prospect of providing more security & arming the crews seem to be the most popular, but both of these will just raise the ransom demands and increase the pirates access to weaponry while likely not lowering the number of hijack attempts and successful hijackings.

Your pirates already have all the access they need to arm themselves to the teeth, and they have the money to buy any conventional weapon on the market, plus upgrading their mother vessels also for better deep water operation and heavier weapons.

But, they will still have to use speedboats to attempt boarding. These boats can be torn apart by well-aimed 50 cal. machine gun rounds at ranges up to 1000 m. A couple of "Ma Duces" on the merchantman operated by trained men would be very effective, regardless of the armament of the pirates.

If the pirates escalate the threat by declaring that they will sink the ship with some heavy weapon aboard the trawler, unless the ship surrenders, we have cause to put a TOW or similar weapon on the ship, to sink the trawler first.
One must ask also what the payoff is for the pirates to sink the ship? Obviously, the only payoff is the warning to other ships that refusal to surrender will result in their sinking. But, if the merchantman has the defensive armament to sink the pirate,and the will to use it, of course, for the pirates there is no payoff to be had.

Thus, by making the engagement significantly more dangerous for the pirates through arming the merchantmen directly, or by putting an armed contingent aboard ships, and adding the Reaper threat either way, it would soon become quite obvious to the pirates that they are in a very low payoff, no-win situation.

Just make it very highly probable that any pirate crew setting forth to capture a ship faces death and destruction inside of hours.

it's appalling to me that none of the ideas presented in the articles or in the comments suggests giving money to the people of Somalia.

I believe Dave Schuler covered that under "Pay off the pirates". Your solution is essentially that, without the guarantee that it will actually stop the hijacking. Your reference to "the people of Somalia", as if they were one group, shows that you haven't given this nearly enough thought or research, so I'll respectfully defer my remaining criticisms of your post until you have.

'Terrorism' of this type works -- quite well in fact. While I am not a fan of 'Nation Building' it's appalling to me that none of the ideas presented in the articles or in the comments suggests giving money to the people of Somalia.

My proposed solution is a simple one -- increase insurance rates on shipping lines (has to happen anyway...reality of piracy working) but take a large portion of the increased insurance revenue and give it to non-governmental organizations that will in turn invest the money into Somalia. The fundamental problem is not piracy or access to weapons/protection -- the problem is in the living conditions and inequality found in Somalia. Any solution that ignores this and attempts to 'fix' the problem simply by targeting the pirates is bound to fail.

The NGO's used have to be something better than the World Bank or IMF or other US lackey organizations, but I'm sure their are organizations that can make a difference quickly and effectively.

There is a limit to the escalation the pirates can achieve in weaponry given their speedboat tactics, and no one is more aware than the pirates of their serious vulnerability when approaching a merchantman in one of those open boats.

There is a relatively unlimited potential for the merchantmen to employ ever heavier weapons as needed. They would win an arms race with little difficulty. The real limits they face are the laws concerning armed merchantmen at ports of call. These laws can be avoided by offloading the men and weapons at the twelve-mile limit onto a vessel stationed there for that purpose.

Tlaloc, at what point in world history have criminals not had free access to whatever they hell they wanted?

Interesting. Well, somehow I am sure its all the Democrats fault, clear back to pre-history.

let the ship owners deal with the problem. my understanding is that the reason crews are not armed is that insurance companies have determined that there is greater likelihood of loss of life, cargo, etc.(and therefore greater potential insurance loss) if the crews are armed or have armed security personnel on board.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that insurance companies do not have costs associated with the value of life. They may be asked to insure, say $50k per life lost during a hijacking, but they are not insuring the value of life. They are offering a payout in the event of death. I do not know that the lives of the crew are insured; I am certain that the cargo is. If only the cargo is insured, then the insurance company has no interest in any life remaining on board. The presence of guns, i.e. a shootout, only increases the risk to the cargo.

If you simplify the convoy idea to major routes, and let the ships form up and disperse at either end of the main convoy drag, guess where the pirates will wait? In any event, outside the main drag, as we have seen recently.

Seems to me that warships can maintain about 20 to 30 knots, give or take, for some period of time. A Reaper, however, can reach 200+ mph, somewhere around a ten times faster closure rate.

I like those odds better, other things being equal, and Reapers are cheaper to buy and operate than blue water warships, especially of the modern destroyer and frigate classes.

Of course, a mix of Reapers and warships is most likely to be best for a lot of reasons, but I suggest that the ratio of Reapers to warships ought to be about 4 or 5 to 1 as a WAG. You get a much bigger surface picture that way, and good odds of being near enough to engage the pirates with missiles and destroy them.

So, Tlaloc, you would deny the weapons to the crews or professionals aboard the merchantmen, because the weapons might appear in pirate hands also?

No might about it. The second those guns go on sale you'll see the pirates using them. All you accomplish is making the current piracy more bloody and dangerous.

By that reasoning, we should disarm our police because the criminals might appear with Glocks and AK-47s.

Yeah, because giving military weapons to every passing boat captain is a lot like letting highly trained and supervised police officers carry pistols.

Really, it totally is!!!

Tlaloc, at what point in world history have criminals not had free access to whatever they hell they wanted?

When what they want is very hard to come by.

When was the last time you saw a gangbanger with an RPG? Or a tank? Or a flamethrower?

What? You've never seen American criminals packing that kind of weaponry? Well, isn't that interesting.

At the same time you find them with plentiful supplies of small arms, just like the rest of the population. That almost suggests a correlation, one we could even use to our advantage if we didn't like seeing, say, headlines like this:

The US economic crisis and soaring job losses have brought a rash of killings across America with at least 58 fatalities in eight incidents over the past month.

Take easy access to guns out of the equation and it would have read more like this:

The US economic crisis and soaring job losses have brought a rash of killings across America with at least 8 fatalities in eight incidents over the past month.

I was under the impression that laws in certain ports of call prevented armed guards or mercenaries (uncertain about legal distinction). I don't remember where I read it and can't find sourcing with the strings I have googled. Does anyone know if this is an issue?

I assume that is a big issue. That's why I liked the proposal I mentioned above, which involved arming the ship with remote-controlled cannons bolted to the deck. Such specialized defensive weaponry would raise much fewer concerns that they would be converted to common criminal use, and their presence would be readily observable by local security.

In this case, there seems to be no plan offered up yet that avoids maximum risk for the crews and the assault teams.

We could take another page out of the Barbary Coast wars, and just start taking Somali hostages to exchange for our own, rather than insisting on incarcerating them for the rest of their lives.

The whole point of having armed men loaded and unloaded at the three-mile limit, or the 12 mile limit, is to avoid the problem of national or port authorities, their fear of arms, and their laws.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just keep those men in their own well-armed vessel to escort a convoy of vessels? It seems to me you can have a higher ship to guard ratio that way.

A fast attack ship would be able to intercept pirates before they even get close to the convoy, present a smaller target to enemy RPGs, and would be better able to distinguish between hostile and benign vessels.