Give the Navy and Marines a simple set of orders. Go along the coast of Somalia. If it has an engine and floats, destroy it. If the Somalis want to fish, they can do it from sailing vessels. End of story.
>> Give the Navy and Marines a simple set of orders. Go along the coast of Somalia. If it has an engine and floats, destroy it.
And you expect this from the same American government that would send 50,000 of its young men to their deaths and couldn’t ever get up the guts to mine the Haiphong harbor? That, in Somalia, after watching the mob looting and harassing American soldiers from a downed helicopter, did nothing? That, after 9/11 portrayed airline pilots as too irresponsible to be trusted with weapons in the cockpit? Yeah, right.
Or, if you want to maintain plausible deniability, hire some members of the Somali "government" to form an "anti-piracy" unit, and pay them a $mil per month to kill anybody trying to perform piracy. If a ship is attacked by pirates, they don't get their payment that month, and they get told that if it happens too often, the contract goes to Blackwater.
Alas, sailing vessels can carry pirates too.
Any smart Somali fisherman is going to be armed anyhow, so he doesn’t get pirated himself.