Nobody knows how to do anything anymore:

FBI Hostage Negotiators Helping Navy With Ship Captain’s Rescue

U.S. Container Ship, Freed From Pirates’ Grasp, Heads to Kenyan Port

According to Capt. Joseph Murphy, a Massachusetts Maritime Academy instructor whose son, Shane Murphy, is in command of the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama, the ship’s owners have directed it to head for Mombasa, its original destination, which is about 50 hours away

Meanwhile, the container ship’s captain, Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vt., is still being held by four pirates on a Maersk Alabama lifeboat that is being monitored by the U.S. Navy, Murphy said. The USS Bainbridge, a guided-missile destroyer, reached the scene early Thursday.

“The great news there is they have nowhere to go,” Murphy said. “There’s nowhere to run; there’s nowhere to hide. They’re not going anywhere, and they’re surrounded by gray sides. The U.S. Navy is there doing its job.”

Piracy is not a new phenomenon off the coast of Somalia. It is a problem off the coast of Nigeria and in the Malacca Straights. Pirates have been operating in these waters for years, even decades.

According to the New York Times;

The Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest and most important shipping lanes, is patrolled by an anti-piracy flotilla from the European Union and a U.S.-led coalition of ships, plus warships from Iran, Russia, India, China, Japan and other nations. But pirates using mother ships — oceangoing trawlers that carry speedier attack vessels — have extended their reach into the waters far off the East African coast. On Saturday, for example, a German freighter was hijacked about 400 miles offshore, between Kenya and the Seychelles.

At the time of the attack on the Alabama, the closest patrol vessel was about 300 nautical miles away, a Navy spokesman said.

The pirates have captured dozens of ships that are held for ransom. A vessel carrying military supplies and a Saudi supertanker were hijacked within the past six months.

As part of their insurance coverage, most of the major merchant lines with ships transiting the Gulf of Aden have contracts with professional crisis teams that are called when hijack situations occur. These teams include former special forces commandos and trained hostage negotiators who deal with the hijackers and their ransom demands, deliveries of food and supplies to ships during lengthy negotiations, the relaying of ransom payments (usually in U.S. 100-dollar bills), and the safe release of hostages.

“There’s a lot involved, and it can get very expensive,” said John Wick, director of a London-based company, International Security Solutions, which specializes in maritime hijackings. “There can be language problems, all kinds of security problems, and you have to make sure you’re talking to the right person, the ultimate warlord. Just running a dropoff of ransom money can cost $1 million.”

Mr. Brodersen said Maersk kept crisis teams at the ready, and the company confirmed Thursday that a team had been called to help with the Alabama attack. But the Maersk spokesman, Mr. Speers, said the U.S. Navy was calling the shots.

Maersk occasionally uses a longer route around the Cape of Good Hope for some of its large tankers and other slow-moving ships with low freeboards — vessels that sit low in the water, with their decks more reachable by pirates using grappling hooks, ropes and ladders. Container ships with high freeboards, like the Alabama, are usually harder to hijack. But any ship, maritime experts say, is vulnerable to the skilled, fast-moving and heavily armed pirates.

Mr. Brodersen said the E.U. flotilla, U.S. Navy Task Forces 150 and 151, and the international warships in the gulf had done “a great job” in reducing piracy there.

This is absolutely idiotic. Patroling and negotiating – which means giving the pirates money – simply encourages more piracy. At some point the sea lanes will become unuseable because of piracy. The Gulf of Aden as well as other pirate hotspots are transit choke points for much of the world’s supply of petroleum.

The solution to pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia and other pirate zones is simple: Organize convoys of commercial vessels and escort each convoy with a small cutter or patrol boat.

The pirates’ speedboats would be no match for a Coast Guard cutter.

A Predator drone could be deployed from any vessel large enough to allow takeoffs and landings … such as a barge. The drone would provide overhead security and be used to attack pirate ‘mother ships’ – larger ships such as fishing trawlers that permit pirate operation in the open ocean.

This solution would be cheap and effective. Convoys were used by the British in the Atlantic to stymie German U- boat attacks on shipping during both world wars. Convoys were used by the Americans to prevent submarine and air attacks on shipping during World War Two. The Japanese did not use convoys and American attacks completely destroyed the Japanese merchant marine.

Instead of convoys, the US and other navies spend tens of millions of dollars to patrol mindlessly in the open ocean and to respond to attacks after the fact. The current situation required a day’s sailing for a fast frigate to respond to the container ship’s hijacking. The cost of using convoys would be far less than the cost of the current naval deployment added to shipping risk and ransoms. Shippers could be billed for the cost of operating the convoys as a form of ‘piracy insurance’.

As Homer Simpson would say … “DUH!”

The same idiots who ‘forgot’ convoys are running our economy, people.