US Seamen trained to fend off pirates...with water.

[gorfle]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/02/02/national/a113706S42.DTL

"Colleges are teaching students to fishtail their vessels at high speed, drive off intruders with high-pressure water hoses and illuminate their decks with floodlights

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Often the pirates are armed with knives and guns. Pirates off the coast of Somalia have taken to firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

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In the old days, ships were armed with cannons to guard against pirates. But nowadays, crew members for the most part do not carry guns. And maritime instructors say that arming crews is not the answer.

It is illegal for crews to carry weapons in the territorial waters of many nations, and ship captains are wary of arming crew members for fear of mutinies, Nincic said. Also, some worry that arming crew members would only cause the violence to escalate.

Instead, the best defense is vigilance, Nincic tells students."

So...when faced with sea-going thugs armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, the response is to use water hoses and floodlights and hope you can out-run them. But you can't give the crew any weapons to deal with the problem, because it might offend the sensibilities of some of the nations who's waters they are sailing through, or the employees might mutiny.

Bull. They need to mount cannons on the decks of ships traveling in these areas just like they did in WWII. A pair of fifties on the bow and stern should do the trick for most of these bass-boat bandits.

[Skink]

1. How about a laser.

[ret5hd]

2. hmmmm....

[Skink]

3. More like this.

[Sherman A1]

4. There are a variety of crew served weapons

both lethal and non-lethal that could be added to ships that would be defensive in nature and not easily turned into the tools of a mutiny. Water canons, Heavy Machine Guns mounted (as suggested above), loud noise devices, nets, entanglement devices and such that would probably work in most cases.

[jeepnstein]

5. How about this instead?

http://www.dillonaero.com/content/p/8/catid/1/pid/1/Standard_M134D

The problem is most merchant vessels are crewed by men just a couple of steps away from piracy themselves. Arming crews would require spending money and cutting into profit margins.

[denverbill]

8. Or, they could pay their crews enough that they don't want to mutiny.

I know that's a fricking radical solution. But frankly, if the owners of these ships are more worried about mutiny than pirates, they deserve to get their shit stolen by pirates.

Maybe Americans could even start getting jobs as merchant seaman again if they weren't competing with impressed labor.

[gorfle]

9. Yup.

That was my thought, too. If you are paying and/or treating your employees so badly that you have to worry about them mutinying against you with the ships defensive arms, you've got a loyalty problem that needs to be addressed first.

[iverglas]

12. actually

what you have is a group of people in a confined space, and the same problem as you have with any other group of people -- absolutely no way of knowing which one or more of them might behave erratically, criminally, insanely, etc. Mutiny is not always a result of ill treatment (whether economic or otherwise), although I do not disagree at all with the comments about wages and working conditions for merchant vessel crews; it's not at all inconceivable that a segment of a ship's crew might decide to engage in a little piracy itself, if it had the means. And mutiny is not the only form of violence that might erupt on a ship.

As for your other moronic comment:

it might offend the sensibilities of some of the nations who's waters they are sailing through

-- yes, you're right, it would "offend" my country's "sensibilities" to have heavily armed private vessels entering our territorial waters. Just as it would "offend" our "sensibilities" to have any other armed posse crossing our borders, or private aircraft carrying bombs flying over our territory.

I kind of think that the US just might be one of the countries with such delicate sensibilities too.


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[gorfle]

13. It wasn't a problem 60 years ago.

what you have is a group of people in a confined space, and the same problem as you have with any other group of people -- absolutely no way of knowing which one or more of them might behave erratically, criminally, insanely, etc. Mutiny is not always a result of ill treatment (whether economic or otherwise), although I do not disagree at all with the comments about wages and working conditions for merchant vessel crews; it's not at all inconceivable that a segment of a ship's crew might decide to engage in a little piracy itself, if it had the means. And mutiny is not the only form of violence that might erupt on a ship.

I think these problems can be well enough overcome without leaving ships and crews defenseless against pirates.

-- yes, you're right, it would "offend" my country's "sensibilities" to have heavily armed private vessels entering our territorial waters. Just as it would "offend" our "sensibilities" to have any other armed posse crossing our borders, or private aircraft carrying bombs flying over our territory.

Armed merchant ships wasn't a problem 60 years ago when situations merited it. Shouldn't be a problem today where situations merit it.

[Captain Hilts]

6. High pressure water hoses do a nice job, actually. And you're never going to run out of ammo. nt

[gorfle]

10. How's the saying go?

Never bring a squirt gun to a gun fight? :)

[krispos42]

7. TOW antitank missiles

Those will wreck any small, fast boat that tries to intercept them, they outrange machine guns and RPGs, and they can't be used to overthrow the ship's officers.

Four launchers with a dozen reloads for each: bow, starboard, portside, and stern. At least two launchers could be brought to bear on any attack vector. They would probably need to replace the armor-piercing warhead with something with more blast and less focus.

They are command-guided, so they could be used to fire a "warning shot" by having one hit the water near the boat. And they don't move all that fast, so at extreme ranges there's about 15 seconds of flight time for the pirate to see the incoming missile and turn tail and run before impact.

And they aren't that expensive.

Problem solved.

[jody]

11. I thought one of the first lessons taught young seaman was not to piss into the wind! Looks like

those making decisions about protecting ships from pirates need to study and learn from maritime history.