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>And not getting them all, means the hostages are dead. <

as opposed to what?
Oh .. they are dead anyway aren’t they?

These are the facts.
These guys train day after day after day to retake ships. It can be done and most probably without many casualties if any at all. That is their job, they work their tails off to do it and do it right.

So snipers in tandem with a raiding party can conceivably and in reality retake the ship killing or capturing the pirates on very short notice.

I’ll say it again. All we need is an administration with the will to permit it. We have the people. Not the administration.

I submit that you're still engaged in chest pounding. It's easy to talk about SEAL teams boarding ships and freeing hostages; much more difficult to have it done reliably -- and "reliably" is the key word here.

I’ll say it again. All we need is an administration with the will to permit it. We have the people. Not the administration.

To be sure, this administration is a total waste of space and air.

But you'll notice that nobody is following your advice here -- not the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the British -- nobody. And at least some of them do have "the will" to take action when it's possible to do so.

One reason is probably that doing so will cause the pirates to no longer take hostages, but instead to just immediately kill the people on the boats they capture.

So snipers in tandem with a raiding party can conceivably and in reality retake the ship killing or capturing the pirates on very short notice.

Snipers working in tandem are not going to risk a take down of 15 pirates on a moving boat with 4 hostages on it. If you think that is a feasible course of action, you must watch a lot of television. Even if the pirates were obligingly standing on deck in the open, it would too risky for any commander to green light unless there was imminent threat to the hostages. That's way too much lead to be throwing at a small area with hostages in it.

There was never a good solution to this scenario. It's as worst case as they come, and it ended badly.

If you want deterrent, we need to be merciless with these guys before or after the event. You can't shoot your way out of every scenario. Unless you want to do it in *every* scenario, and basically write off the hostages. There's logic in that, too, for the bigger picture deterrent value. American leaders haven't had that kind of stomach in a long time, though.