(This article is cross-posted with the Tangents Review backup LJ)
The news about the growing number of Somali pirates and the ineffectiveness of the naval forces in the region to stop them has me thinking. There are a number of difficulties in stopping the piracy without a larger fleet or with significant satellite surveys of the region to track the pirates. However, there is a viable alternative that could eliminate much of the piracy in the region. And it is taking a page from some 60 or so years in the past: World War II.
During World War II, the Germans were doing their best to stop merchant ships from going to England. The more supplies the U.S. got to England, the more difficult it would be for the Nazis to invade. Thus indiscriminate sinking of multiple merchant ships occurred, and naval efforts to prevent it were not working.
To compensate for the lack of ships in the Atlantic, the U.S. started creating convoys of merchant ships, escorted by destroyers. These convoys still suffered significant losses, but there was still safety found in numbers (and a number of German U-Boats were sunk in the conflict until finally the U-Boat menace was broken).
In the case of Somalia, the pirates don't want to sink ships but capture them. The use of convoys with military escorts would make protecting these ships much easier. An international coalition of ships could work together to herd merchant ship convoys through the region, and be extended beyond current areas to compensate for the expected expansion of Somali pirate forces who would hope to strike outside of the convoy's area of protection.
Any ships or boats approaching the protected convoy could be examined and pirates captured if they were so brazen as to try to steal a ship from under the thumb of a convoy. While the convoys would need to continue for several years before the lure of piracy was destroyed through a lack of funds, it would be far less costly in terms of lives lost in invading Somalia and trying to, through force of arms, restore peace to a region that doesn't want us there.
It would also allow forces currently deployed off the coast of Somalia to be far more effective than they currently are.
(Alternatively, naval forces could use Q-ships to capture more pirates. Q-ships are armed merchant ships that would lure in pirates and then engage the pirates directly. But this risks more lives and might not be acceptable on an international level.)
Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews