Boater wrote in
:

...the world's mightiest navy, the US Navy, can't handle the Somali
pirates. It's yet another example of how unprepared for the 21st
Century our military forces are.

snip aritcle, except for the last paragraph

In any case, shippers say firepower won't rid the region of piracy.
Naval units must go after the pirates' dens and boats to reduce
piracy, they say, not just patrol the 2,400-kilometer coast waiting
for raiders to make the first move.


Well, 2400 kilometers is a hell of a long chunk of coastline to blockade
effectively - you'd need several hundred UAV drones in the air 24/7 to
give you intelligence on boat movements, then you'd need to distinguish
between pirates and legitimate fishermen (life is hard enough in Somalia
without interdicting a major food source) - always remembering that the
difference between a fisherman and a pirate may not be all that clear
all the time. Then to 'go after the pirate dens' means civiliab
casualties in a country mostly controlled by more-or-less radical
Islamic militants - I could see the problem escalating from piracy-for-
ransom to privateering-to-sink
-commerce as part of a jihad against the Great Satans of the West (never
mind that cargoes may be wheat for Iran). It's not that we can't do it
- we could - it's that we have a couple of other things on our plate
that are consuming military resources at the moment. And, of course, in
order to effectively rid the region of piracy one needs to establish an
effective rule of law in the countryside, and eliminate the support
network in the region - either that or sink every last thing that can go
out of sight of land along the entire coastline, and maintain the
blockade to be sure such craft are not replaced. As I see it,the only
real solution is to somehow establish a peaceful, universally accepted
government in Somalia and make it more profitable to stay home and tend
to business than to go buccaneering.

(In the news today an Indian Talwar-class frigate, the INS Tabar, sunk
a pirate mother ship after being fired on. Wikipedia lists the armament
of a Talwar frigate as being primarily anti-ship cruise missiles, with
one 100 mm gun - excellent for over-the-horizon fighting with other
high-tech navies, but lousy for interdicting dhows. However, one must
wonder about the sanity of men armed with RPGs and small arms starting a
shooting fight with a frigate. Same thing happened a few days ago when
the HMS Cumberland captured a pirate dhow - there must be a 'you'll
never catch me alive' code of honor or something in place, or the
pirates can't tell the difference between a freighter and a frigate.)