Since the latest incident off the coast of Africa on the growth of piracy has captured world interest here it seems there is concern that al Qaeda might join with the pirates to create a major world problem. Ship owners seem to feel that it would put their crews in danger to arm them so are reluctant to do this. There is comment that the area is too large to cover with navel ships on regular patrols. So it might be worthwhile to outfit several commercial looking ships with crews of SWAT trained people well armed to make the pirates come to them and then take them out with appropriate weaponry. These ships could also have small robot aircraft to make surveys around the area of the ship’s travel to spot pirates approaching. Even though it’s questionable as to how many actual pirates they might take out the knowledge of these ships in the area might add to the deterrence of pirates being active since, at the moment the pirates more or less have free rein.
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Operating large ships is extremely expensive. They use thousands of gallons of fuel a day. The odds of the pirates attacking a bait ship instead of the real ships would be low unless you had a lot of bait ships.
It would be far more cost effective to do what I have been advocating for years; put armed guards on the actual commercial ships. It would only take four to six men on each ship. The guards could be regular soldiers that are supplied by the countries that the ships are from. Most countries have regular standing armies with thousands of soldiers, so the few dozen soldiers would be no problem to come up with and are already on the government payroll anyway. The soldiers selected would no doubt get some special training and maybe some special equipment. Night vision goggles, two-way radios, body armor and regular rifles would probably do it.
For ships that are not going very far, the guards could simply get on and off in port. For ships that are passing through before going on long voyages, you could have the guards picked up by a small boat and transferred to another ship approaching the region.
Some ships might not get guards, but if most of them do, it would be very risky for the pirates to attack any of them.
Hello, Maybe a scheduled trip with a toll requirement, what would be scary is if the paparazzi will know this schedule. You think it's something to talk about ?!?!?!?