On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:51:22 -0500, Boater
wrote:

...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.

This ship was taken 500 miles off a coastline that's 2000 miles long.
There's only a couple of US ships patrolling an area of ocean five
times the size of Texas.

Fortunately, this is an international effort. You know, today an
Indian Navy vessel happened upon a Somali pirate mothership with two
speedboats in tow and attacked it, leaving it in flames with secondary
explosions on board.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa...tes/index.html

You like international efforts, right? Or do you want to commit the
US Navy alone to patrolling that 1 million square miles of ocean?

Then again, I believe you might want to do that since you're the one
who said, after 9/11, that the US should carpet bomb Saudi Arabia.

For someone with so much disdain of the military, you really like
commiting them to action.

What will probably end up happening to solve the problem is that
either the shipping companies will tell all their captains to give
that area a much wider berth or they'll start hiring security forces
to protect the ships and not make them such easy targets. A 24 hour
watch with a few mounted and armored .50 cal machine guns will ruin
the day of those pirates in their speedboats.

When you're hauling $100,000,000 in cargo, the cost of a few extra
crew and some machine guns is irrelevant and is probably cheaper than
going around the area.

Steve