Monday, April 6, 2009

Beating Somali pirates at their own game

Read the whole thing. Here is a teaser... Wired

To beat pirates in potentially violent showdowns, the Navy has adopted the pirates' tactics of using "mother ships" carrying fast boats to spring on opponents. [...]

Today, pirates use motherships for nearly all their attacks. "What we tend to see happen is a mothership will ... drag along a couple skiffs with it and have probably 10 or 15, 20 pirates on board, and then they'll send the skiffs out to go after a merchant vessel," McKnight said. He commands a new three-ship, counter-pirate task force.

Warships assigned to piracy patrols rarely engage pirates on their own. They deploy specialized search-and-seizure teams, which in the Royal Navy consist of marines armed with rifles and machine guns, traveling in raider craft. It was one such team from the frigate HMS Cumberland that killed three pirates in a firefight last November.

1 comment:

Dinah Lord said...

Great find, kyros.

Off to read at length.