“Travel the World, Shoot Some Pirates (Maybe)™”
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Ok now I’m conflicted. Fratricide – fraternity members killing one another, right? That has me conflicted. I know it’s wrong, but on some level the concept sounds so right. I’m ashamed.
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Yeah but the summary mentions that the guns are sometimes cached off shore because they can’t be taken into some ports. So presumably portable weapons are preferred.
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I once met a representative of Swedish navy helping to patrol the area against pirates so I took the opportunity of asking if they did something against the illegal fishing as well, as a PR move if nothing else. He just looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about.
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killing your brothers in arms. Also called friendly fire.
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I’m surprised they’re taking on the pirates with just AK style rifles. The pirates have heavier and longer range weapons. Perhaps that is all the country of registry allows on board the ship.
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The security forces are on a much stabler platform. It doesn’t matter how much range your weapon has if you’re trying to fire it from a little motorboat bouncing around on the waves, nevermind the wake of a cargo ship.
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To be more precise, the government collapsed along with a lot of civil society. And without a government to defend the waters, the fishery collapsed due to foreign ships overfishing and dumping toxic waste.
So the fishers started arming to protect the waters against foreign ships, eventually the young men who would have grown up to be fishermen instead grew up to be pirates.
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“Peace is our profession.”
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“Floating armories” sound like cool ships out of Starcraft.
We live in such cyberpunk times.
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A fantastic visual, but ask any B-17 ball-turret gunner & you’ll find this idea unwise. Couped up at altitude where outside temps might be -40 degrees is merely uncomfortable. In tropical temps it would be deadly in short order.
More effective, although not nearly as cool looking, would be the remotely operated twin 50’s like those on the B-29.
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Yes it is, when ships are operating near Africa. The rest of the time, it can be rolled up and stores in drums.
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I think this is about constructing a narrative where the pirates are really super nice people, only reluctantly participating in the activity, and really don’t want to hurt anyone. A narrative about crime as an empowering, revolutionary act.
They are members of criminal gangs, led by the same warlords that keep their country in endless turmoil. Many of the ships that they attack are only there to deliver humanitarian aid to the Somalis themselves. And they know that, they just don’t care.
The armaments carried by the ships, if any, depend on the nationality of the ship and crew. Sometimes, ships will refuel or take provisions at an intermediate port, and bring on security teams there. Other ships have their own onboard armories, and have crew members trained as reaction teams. Here is an image from one of my trips there:
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I’m sure convincing oneself in such a simplistic, one-sided manner would make it easier to kill them.
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IN the case of Somalia, it seems to be a combination of lack of options, the need to defend against problems like corporate dumping of toxic waste off the coast, and some amount of criminal syndicates seeking to take advantage of fact that years of war destroyed the Somali government. South Park got that in their Cartman wants to be a pirate episode.
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Corporations regularly dump toxic waste in Somali waters. But I guess that’s okay.
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Yes, my time spent in Somalia, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania have led me to see the people there in a “simplistic, one-sided manner”. As opposed to the views I would hold had I learned about Africa on the internet.
The image I posted was from a trip where we were bringing direct food aid to Somalia and Mozambique. Bags of grain and cans of cooking oil. The pirates in that particular area are affiliated with Al-Shabaab. One of the ways we can differentiate between honest fishermen and murderous, terrorist pirates is that fishermen often engage in fishing activities, and the pirates are the ones shooting at us with rocket launchers.
There are very strict and specific rules of engagement. We don’t shoot at anyone without very clear proof that they are in the process of attacking us. Even then, we go through several phases of warning. Firing at people is only done as a last resort, when all other methods of self defense have failed. If you think it is ever easy to make the decision to take someone’s life, you are the one using simplistic reasoning.
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This is one the cases where South Park makes an incredibly smart and effective point about international relations, power differential between the western powers and African states, and the diminishing options of real live human beings in places like Somali, which are in a constant state of being besieged by both more powerful countries and from within:
People make the choices available to them in the situations in which they live, which in many cases are outside of their control. People can only take so much being drone bombed and having shit dumped on their doorstep before they turn to whatever defense measures they can. Sure, al-Shabbab is taking advantage of that, but turning them into inhuman monsters doesn’t help matters.
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Apparently one of them was a taxi driver in London who was consulting Lloyds Register to see what was worth going after.
A Scientific American article some years ago suggested it’s more a case of front waste disposal companies actually run by the Mafia. But the Mafia is also said to have arranged “accidental” sinkings of insured ships carrying toxic waste, for a double hit.
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That’s interesting. Do you have a link to that? If not, don’t sweat it. But I’d say that many corporations can act like a mafia when let off the hook.
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