I told you so.

Pirate-Fighters, Inc.: How Mercenaries Became Ships’ Best Defense
By David Axe

It was a normal morning in April last year. Normal, that is, by the crazy standards of the fishermen, ship’s crews, navy sailors and Somali pirates plying their dangerous trades on 2.5 million square miles of lawless ocean stretching from India to Kenya.

“Dave,” a 44-year-old from Wiltshire in southwest England, was standing watch on the upper deck of a commercial car carrier bound from Mumbai to Mombasa. Scanning the horizon with a pair of high-powered binoculars, the former British Royal Marine of 24 years’ experience spotted something suspicious ahead of the carrier: a small freighter matching the profile of a pirate “mothership,” a sort of floating base for heavily armed sea bandits and their small boats.

What happened next was like something out of a Hollywood thriller. But for Dave and a fast-growing number of for-profit ship guards, it was just another day on the job — and evidence of a surprising turn in the years-old, international war on piracy.

The world’s governments are waking up to the sobering fact that the gazillion-dollar warships they’ve sent to the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean can’t keep up with the region’s elusive pirates. The hijackers’ simple, brutal tactics are too effective. Their business model is too attractive. And they’ve got nothing to lose but their lives.

The days are probably numbered for 10,000-ton Burke-class destroyers chasing down illiterate Somali thugs sailing in souped-up fishing boats called “skiffs.” The future of the piracy war could belong to Dave and guys like him, standing lonely guard on gigantic, fortified commercial vessels speeding through pirate-infested waters.

Destroyers are expensive and ill-suited to long, tedious piracy patrols. Armed guards are comparatively cheap and, as Dave proved that April morning, highly effective. Sure, guards come with their own limitations and complications. But hiring professional ship-protectors beats the alternative: an endless, pointless military exercise.
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Bottom line: as a means of defense, guards are proving cheaper and at least as effective as warships, if not more so. Dave showed just how on that morning last April.
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The guards fired again, this time into the water in front of the pirate boat. The skiff jinked to the side … and kept coming. Soon it was within 500 meters [0.3 miles] of the car carrier — close enough to hit the ship with rockets and rifles. There was time for just one more warning shot before Dave and his team would be forced to kill the attackers.

“The final shot worked and the skiff slowed and stopped in the water. They had gotten to within 400 meters of the vessel and realized that an armed team was on board.” That realization was enough to end the attack.

Today, sophisticated warships continue patrolling the Indian Ocean, capturing or deterring only a handful of pirates at the cost of millions of dollars per ship annually, and leaving most commercial vessels vulnerable to attack. For probably around a hundred thousand dollars, the car carrier’s owner prevented a hijacking after the pirates had already slipped past the naval cordon.

Self-defense succeeded where the world’s navies failed.
If only I could find that old thread and all that moaning about 'escalating the situation' and self defense not working.

CR