Followup on Piracy with Information Dissemination
BY Herschel Smith
15 years, 9 months ago
Galrahn at Information Dissemination takes issue with us taking issue with him. His post is worth the read time. Drop on over and take a look (although we must say that William Lind is not one of favorite analysts, and Galrahn didn’t need Lind to make his point). We didn’t like his focus on equipment, strategy, tactics, etc., and recommended that we kill the pirates, dump the bodies overboard, and destroy their domiciles. Galrahn responds that The Captain’s Journal is speaking from the perspective of what we want, he is speaking from the perspective of what is. Galrahn is working within the system, we want to change the system. Or at least, this is our take on his post. It is more complicated than that, but this little summary will move us forward.
We accept the criticism of our criticism, and confess that it’s true that we are recommending things that have a vanishingly small chance of occurring. Nevertheless, the import of our original article, Pirates? Call the Marines … er, the Lawyers! has not been addressed. The question is not one of what to do within the system. The current system won’t work, or so we have argued.
There may be a real solution within the current system as Galrahn suggests, but it is likely to be so expensive, so inefficient, and so protracted that it is effectively infeasible. We aren’t suggesting that Galrahn is wrong or that we know more about Naval warfare than he does. He isn’t and we don’t.
The most humane solution to the problem – the solution most likely to end piracy in a timely manner, save potential kidnap victims, and prevent largesse inflow to unstable regions of the world – is to rely on rapidly employed extreme violence. This is a specialty of the U.S. Marines. The most humane solution also happens to be the only viable solution.
Galrahn suggests a real but effectively infeasible solution. We claim that the only solution likely to survive the budget cuts and end piracy is to reject his solution and implement our own. If we do not do either, that is, if Galrahn’s solution as well as our own is rejected, then it proves yet again that piracy exists because we wish it to be so. Collectively, we may not want the pirates, but we want them more than we want a solution.
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