Okay, I ain’t there and I ain’t the expert but I have served on a naval vessel at sea. Someone who knows please explain why we can’t have Seals in the water around that lifeboat and our best Marine snipers in place on the ship ready to annihilate three lousy Muslim pirates? It would seem that anyone caught between Navy Seals and Marine snipers would have a life expectancy of about one second. Please, is there someone on this forum who is qualified to comment?
Obambi is scared spitless of failure so he is locked up in the inaction mode, reasoning if he does nothing he cannot be blamed for making the wrong decision, But he has already lost this battle because due to his inaction he is viewed as indecisive and weak by our enemies. Basically the moron has once again voted “present”
My preference is a Tripoli Strategy:
Get my guy back
Kill the perpetrators
March on whatever the Capital of Somali is
Blow some stuff up, kill some ugly people
leave a letter telling leave our people alone or we will be back.
Of course they can continue their Jack Sparrow antics with any other country, except the Canadians, and I won't care. It’s their problem.
We have for 200 solve everyone else’s problem and it is time they stand on their own two feet and deal with their own problems.
The French put a good foot forward the other day.
Still, the best strategy would be march, burn, kill and put on notice.
Pictures of the lifeboat were posted on another thread yesterday. The 34 person boat is self propelled (out of gas/engine broken) and completely enclosed with a hard shell top; a real rough sea survival craft. It has 10 days of food and water for 34 people. With only the captain and four Somali pirates aboard, they are not going to get hungry or thirsty for a while. As for snipers, no possibility of a clean shot from a distance as there are only a couple of entry points (camshell type hatches).
I suspect that the SEALS/Delta Force guys are working a nonlethal rescue plan to be used as a last resort. (Got a feeling that with special operations shooters on the scene, if the captain (verifiably) goes in the water again, the lifeboat will be riddled with machine gun fire.)
Personally, I think a nonlethal rescue could be done at night using the stealthy delivery of a knockout gas to render everybody unconscious prior to going in for the rescue. The biggest problem with mounting such an operation (assuming, of course, that the Big "O" actually is President enough to give the go ahead) would be to keep any press embarked aboard the surrounding Navy ships from blowing the operation, alerting the pirates, and revealing important operational techniques to terrorist organizations. The press simply cannot be trusted to maintain operational security.
The Russians used this knockout gas approach in that theater hostage situation in Moscow a couple of years ago. It was introduced through the theater ventilation system. Didn't go that well as it is difficult to build up an effective concentration of the gas (dental ether?) in such a large space. I suspect that the gas (which is heavier than air) built up unevenly and that lethal pockets developed as they were trying to pump enough inside to fill the entire space with an incapacitating dose. An enclosed lifeboat is much more manageable.
In fairness, I should note that the Russians saved hundreds of innocent people (I seem to remember the terrorists as being from the same group responsible for Beslan) but they also fatally overdosed quite a few hostages as well. Oddly, IIRC, very few (perhaps none) of the Chechen terrorists survived. ;-)