Britannia Radio

These teenagers may be untrained and ill-disciplined but they've 
acquired money beyond their dreams and in limited gang areas dominate 
the local scene ashore where there is no national government at 
all.    Ship convoys and naval patrols are merely dealing with the 
results of this.   It is in Somalia itself that the solution lies.

Since they dominate their local areas and use massive 4 x 4s to do 
this and to show their might, one suggestion I've seen today is to 
use strikes to 'take-out' all such vehicles.

As far as competing command structures are concerned there is clearly 
only room for one and that one should be NATO.

After 1815 a similar problem affected Mediterranean  shipping off the 
Barbary Coast (roughly Morocco,  Algeria. Tunisia  to Libya) .  The 
nations got together, released all the captives and executed all the 
pirates, destroying their ships.  The French finished the job by 
occupying Algeria in 1830 ,  180 years later it hasn't restarted.

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BBC NEWS 15.4.09
Mark Mardell's Euroblog
Picking out pirates

The confrontation between some of the world's biggest navies and the 
Somali pirates reminds me of one of those "Walking with Dinosaurs"-
type reconstructions of web-footed little mammals darting and diving 
between the ponderous bulk of leviathans. Still, it doesn't make 
sense to me.

What the pirates must be bemoaning is the lack of any bureaucratic 
structure to guide their activities. And some initials. After all, 
they face the might of the US, Nato and of course our own EU. These 
are only the first initials. The EU force is called EU NAVFOR, Nato's 
operation is called Standing Nato Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2) and 
America's is CTF 151, which is also a multi-national force which, as 
far as I can discover, means there are some Canadian ships involved.

Ever since the EU developed its own military operations there have 
been worries about duplication with Nato. The US no longer seems to 
share these concerns and most military types are sanguine, so most of 
the objections come from those who are opposed to the EU. Fair 
enough, but how does having three task forces with their own chain of 
command contribute to such an operation? But that is not what puzzles 
me.

Most explanations of the difficulties faced by the world's navies 
focus on finding what the US defence secretary has called "untrained 
teenagers with heavy weapons" in such a huge area. But in the 
admittedly smaller border region of Pakistan there seems no problem 
at all picking out individual suspects and sending a missile their 
way. Presumably a combination of space satellites and spotter drones 
are used. Any idea why this is not possible off the African coast?