Somali pirates have nabbed their biggest prize yet — a Saudi-owned supertanker, about as big as an aircraft carrier.* The ocean-going hijackers managed to pull off this latest assault, on the Sirius Star, despite a swarm of international warships now working to ward off such strikes.
“Our presence in the region is helping deter and disrupt criminal attacks off the Somali coast, but the situation with the Sirius Star clearly indicates the pirates’ ability to adapt their tactics and methods of attack,” U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, Commander, Combined Maritime Forces, said in a statement. “Typically, pirates attack within 200 miles of the shoreline and go after smaller prey,” the L.A. Times observes.
This is getting absurd. Don’t sit around telling me you are helping to deter pirate attacks when a bunch of them just nabbed a super tanker. Just a year ago that would have been unthinkable. They are not treating this seriously at all.
It starts at the seams…
Yes.
The most disgusting thing is that this is not a hard problem to solve. I don’t think anyone can save Russia. I don’t have a clue as to what even the smartest of men would do about Pakistan.
But any halfway decent British Imperialist from the 1800’s would have solved this problem within a couple of months and smaller fleet then the one already there.
In the grand scheme of things I don’t worry all that much about the pirates. But they sure do illustrate the decline of the west.