 Thank you so much all for being here. I should begin with a confession of sorts and that is all the more imperative in companies such as this and that is namely that the term private navies in the title of the book is something of a misnomer, but it does contain some essential insights. So private navies is a misnomer in the sense that the forces that I talk about in the book are nowhere near the size of regular navies today. Any one company may only operate half a dozen ships at most. Also these vessels are nowhere near as powerful as the warships in the United States Navy or most regular navies today rather than being guided missile frigates or aircraft carriers. These are fairly small vessels, something like 9 to 30 meters in length, typically ex patrol boats that have been bought surplus from coast guards and navies around the world and converted for private service. But in terms of the ways that private navies conveys an insight, it's useful in several respects. First, although no single company has a force the size of regular navies, collectively there are about as many private warships operating in anti-piracy service as there are regular warships in the waters around Africa. So collectively they do have very substantial weight. Also, even though these vessels are not operating in an offensive role like regular navies do, they are defensive, they're protecting merchant ships, they're operating independently of any formal command structure. So unlike even the private security contractors that were operating in Iraq and Afghanistan like Blackwater, Blackwater was typically under the operational control of our State Department. So even though that was a private company, they were taking orders that had the full force of United States law and sovereignty, but that is not the case with these private maritime security forces. They are not operating on the orders of our Navy or any Navy or any organ of government. They are subject to their own law essentially, and so even though if they break the laws of sovereign states, they can be punished, they have to write their own rules as far as what they think is best for business. So I should frame the development of these forces in terms of the Somali piracy epidemic that gave birth to them. So in 2008, off the Horn of Africa there, there was a very sharp rise in maritime piracy, especially in the Gulf of Aden, which is a choke point in several trade routes that is close to some lawless ports on the Somali coast and was vulnerable to piracy that way. And what had previously been a fairly low level piracy problem, where pirates would board ships and steal cash from the ship safe, take watches and cell phones from the crew, soon became ransom hijacking. So now we saw Somali pirates boarding ships, taking the crew hostage, sailing them back to the Somali coast where the central government couldn't reach them, and then ransoming the ship, cargo and crew all together for typically several million dollars. And this caught the notice of the shipping industry rather quickly. They had formally been able to write off the low level piracy as basically a cost of doing business, but now that ships were disappearing for months at a time through this hijacking process, they knew they needed to actually put a stop to the problem. In November of 2008, the anniversary is coming up in two days actually, pirates sees the Sirius Star, which is the first super tanker that they ever hijacked, and that really shocked the shipping industry. It sent crude oil prices up by one dollar almost immediately, which doesn't seem huge, but from one incident for the global market that's actually rather substantial, that really spooked people to see that one of the largest ships afloat could be hijacked like this, and the international community was helpless. On the other hand, the pirates had some limitations of their own that were reflected not just in that particular hijacking, but most of those since. Namely, although the Sirius Star had about a hundred million dollars worth of crude oil aboard, the pirates didn't have the facilities or the technology, the expertise to steal it and offload it, nor did they have a black market for oil on which they could fence any stolen oil. So they started with an extravagant demand of 25 million dollars, but when they realized that they couldn't really extract value from their prize, they wound up settling for a three million dollar cash ransom that was dropped onto the ship via helicopter, and from that incident, the shipping industry saw it wasn't just the ransoms where they were losing money, it was the fact that they had a super tanker that could carry about a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily output that was out of commission for months. So the international community sent several task forces to the region over the ensuing year, and NATO sent one, the EU sent one, the combined task force 151, which was a joint venture between the U.S. Navy and about two dozen other navies, they all sent a lot of warships to this region to try to suppress the problem. But there was a certain mismatch between the things that the pirates were good at and the things that the naval warships were good at. The warships that we have in service today were still largely conceived to meet the security challenges of the Cold War. A lot of the ships afloat today were designed before the fall of the Berlin Wall or at least contain designed principles that come from that time. So they are optimized to fight against the Red Navy in essence. They're good at shooting down aircraft and sinking submarines and doing high tech things that require a lot of capital investment. So the ships are very powerful, but consequently very, very expensive and that limits how many we can have. By contrast, the Somali pirates were operating in little skiffs that were worth between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, and so they could be very, very numerous. And the pirates then threatened an expanding area there of the western Indian Ocean that eventually reached a size greater than that of western Europe. So the two dozen or so warships trying to defend that vast sea expanse found themselves essentially playing whack-a-mole. They would get distress calls 200 miles away, go racing off in that direction by the time they'd get there the ship would already be hijacked. Then they'd get another distress call, go racing in another direction and the same thing would be the case when they'd arrive on that scene. So even though the navies were very powerful and when they found pirates they did a wonderful job against them. There's just that fundamental mismatch between the pirates who were a low level diffuse threat and the navies which were a very concentrated powerful deterrent. So the shipping industry realized as 2008 turned to 2009 turned to 10 that the task forces in the region were not turning the tide despite a number of spectacular successes like the one depicted in last year's movie Captain Phillips. Despite even heroic actions like that, the overall toll of piracy was getting worse and worse and the drumbeat of attacks was becoming ever more rapid. So there was demand then for the private sector to supply protection that would meet the gap between what the regular navies could do and the protection that the tankers and cargo ships in those waters needed. At the start of this epidemic though the firearms laws of most major maritime nations were very restrictive with regard to what kinds of guns could be aboard. So the UK for example, one of the world's foremost maritime nations had its domestic firearms laws applying to UK flagged ships. So if a British merchant ship traveling through the high-risk area wanted to have armed guards aboard they would be subject to the same firearms laws as someone who wanted to have a gun in his house in Birmingham. So the law was huffing and puffing trying to catch up to this new threat and as a result it was not legal for most flag states to have armed guards on board the merchant ships. So at first the thinking was in maritime circles let's have private security on board with non-lethal weapons that way we can get around those restrictive firearms laws but still have a solid deterrent that will decrease the losses from piracy. So one of those technologies was called the LRAD, the long-range acoustic device and the idea there is you take a beam of focused sound and aim it at a skiff full of approaching pirates and that sound can be either just a loud tone or American pop music so this was actually the first known case in which Christina Aguilera was weaponized. And so you direct that focused sound at the oncoming pirates and presumably that'll just be so unpleasant that they'll turn around and go home. So there was an incident in which a merchant ship had an LRAD device they had unarmed private security on board to operate the LRAD and this ship called the Biscalia came under attack by pirates so the pirate skiff was approaching they fired the LRAD pirates kept coming they fired it again pirates kept coming finally the pirates managed to board they hijacked the ship the private security team jumped overboard they were subsequently rescued by a german helicopter don't worry but the ship was hijacked and that was seen as a spectacular failure for non-lethal weapon systems in the wake of that incident Lloyd's List the newspaper of record for the shipping industry Lloyd's List punned that the LRAD may not be a sound investment so it became clear that there was need for firearms it was just no way around that but because firearms laws were still so restrictive it was a thought instead of having armed guards embarked on the merchant ships we could have separate vessels escort vessels that would sail alongside the merchant ship in close company with it and then act as a deterrent to any pirates who wanted to hijack it and the first player to try to get involved in that was actually Blackwater and Blackwater converted a former NOAA research ship called the MacArthur and deployed it to the theater hoping to get clients and start operating its own nascent private navy but that was 2008 when Blackwater got involved just one year after the Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad so the Blackwater name was quite tainted and the shipping industry didn't want anything to do with them they felt they'd rather take their chances with the pirates than risk the PR disaster of hiring Blackwater and civilians getting killed but even though Blackwater failed to attract clients and and ultimately scrapped their scheme other private maritime security companies realized that the problem wasn't with the business model the problem was just Blackwater's reputation so other companies began entering this market in 2009 very quietly converting their surplus patrol boats for private service and attracting clients and became rather successful they have to this day not lost any client ships to pirate activity and all through the time I was writing the book I would wake up every morning check my news alerts and cross my fingers that I wouldn't have to change that claim every place I have it in the book but it's quite striking that that defensive record has held up for more than six years now that no ship protected by armed private security has been successfully hijacked so that is quite quite a striking and encouraging result but by 2010 as the epidemic was still spreading and worsening it became clear that there was need for more holes in the water or more protection than just what the private naval industry could provide and so they were expanding as fast as they could but this is a very capital intensive business meaning if you want to set up one of these companies you have to invest millions of dollars in procuring the ships converting them hiring and training personnel that's not something you can do on a whim but as firearms laws were being loosened in places like Norway and the UK finally other actors were starting to get into the industry because suddenly they didn't need their own separate escort vessels they could act as embarked armed guards so by 2010 and 11 the embarked guards side of the market was swelling very rapidly leaving the private naval sector left to protect targets that were particularly high value passenger ships in fact the cover photo on this book was taken by a Danish tourist who was taking a cruise in the Red Sea and snapped this photo through his telephoto lens and it's one of the few extant photos we have available of these ships just because they do operate discreetly but in addition to then the passenger ships and particularly high value ships also very volatile ships so if you have a tanker carrying highly volatile hydrocarbons even if you could legally have armed embarked guards on that ship and even if those guards succeed in defeating attacking pirates that's still going to be a firefight that involves hot lead coming into the side of your ship and so they found it tactically better to stick with escort vessels in many of those cases also there are tug and toe operations oil and gas operations survey ships that side of the market has stayed pretty firmly with the escort vessels because they have particular tactical needs that embarked guards can't fulfill very well but for the rest of the market the lower tranches of the market there was a flood of often fly-by-night sort of operators trying to get in and cash in on the private maritime security boom off Somalia and the trouble was unlike the private naval companies that had to invest millions of dollars before they could start protecting merchant ships with the embarked guards sector a lot of those companies would be a bunch of ex-servicemen who would literally go online buy an ar-15 buy a kevlar flak jacket put up a website and start trying to hire themselves out and even though some of them were certainly very competent others were not and the shipping industry realized it was going to have a hard time discerning the reputable operators from the disreputable operators and the private maritime security industry realized that as well they realized that they were vulnerable to a blackwater moment that if one of these fly-by-night sorts of companies shot lots of innocent fishermen that could sink the whole industry so there was a push then in 2011 for self-regulation in the industry and so we saw a flourishing of several different professional and trade organizations that tried to establish standards for what these companies should do and we've seen development in that area along several different lines one is the ICOC the international code of conduct code of conduct for private security service providers and what the ICOC is focusing on is humanitarian compliance and the ICOC applies to both land-based and sea-based private security companies and they're concerned with making sure that the human rights of innocent civilians are protected they're concerned with ensuring reporting so if a firefight happens at sea they want to make sure that that gets reported to the proper legal authorities and in general they focus on the humanitarian and ethical issues parallel to that we see efforts at competence accreditation so making sure that companies are not just ethical and moral but can also do a good job of defending your ship against pirates so SAMI the security association of the maritime industry has taken the lead on that they have an accreditation standard now called the ISOPAS 28007 a very descriptive lively name I know and what that standard is intended to do is ensure that companies are acting professionally that they are documenting the weapons and ammunition that they have that they're training their operators properly and that has proven fairly successful in keeping up the standard of professionalism in that industry and fortunately then I can still report there have been no major incidents on the order of an issuer square shooting that despite all those entrance into the market trying to cash in fortunately they have managed to avert a serious and tragic incident like that by 2012 then we saw actually a majority of merchant ships in those waters off the Horn of Africa having some form of armed private security either embarked guards or escort vessels and by that point with a majority of ships thus protected it became harder and harder for the pirates to find easy prey because we really have to remember the pirates are in it for the money they are a business and so if the pirates know that they might be killed in the course of one of these operations they're not going to be very eager to take it on they'd rather abort that attack and wait for easier prey in the form of an undefended ship but by the time it wasn't just 10% or even 20% of the ships protected like that it was a majority oftentimes the pirate crews would have to return to the coast empty handed and their investors ashore were finding they were laying out money for fuel and ammunition and food and cot which is a stimulant that most of the pirates chew and they weren't getting their ransoms anymore because it was hard to find unprotected ships so the business model began to break down then in late 2011 early 2012 as the profits were shrinking the returns on investment were starting to collapse and so we saw a precipitous drop in pirate activity in that region that has held up through 2013 and and even this year the pirates have been largely dormant there have been a few attacks here and there but the conditions on land that precipitate piracy namely lawlessness and extreme poverty do remain quite troublesome and so if we see a drop in the use of private security or if the naval task forces in that region withdraw prematurely it's very plausible that piracy could have a sudden resurgence in those waters it's notable though that in considering the role that private security played in suppressing the Somali piracy epidemic it wasn't just the fact that they were sometimes shooting pirates that's really a small factor a much greater factor is the deterrent value it was what I described that the pirates don't want to even get into firefights so when they see that a ship is either sailing in company with an escort vessel or protected by armed embarked guards they have almost always aborted their attacks so the deterrent value is very significant but another factor that is much less reported and less studied is that the use of private security actually made the regular navies in those waters more effective because now that there was that diffuse blanket of protection over a majority of merchant ships now the warships didn't have to play whack-a-mole they didn't have to just spend their time responding to distress calls they could actually go out and interdict the pirates on the way from the coast they could go hunt pirate mother ships and so in that sense private security wasn't effective on its own but in addition really enhanced the effectiveness of the regular navies there so just as piracy was declining off the east coast of africa it was spiking in the Gulf of Guinea off west africa and the notable difference between those two epidemics is that the business model was quite different off Somalia it was the ransom hijacking model that i described earlier they would take the whole cargo and crew all together and then ransom them back to the owners or their insurers what we've seen off west africa though is called oil bunkering so the pirates will see a tanker passing by and then send out a little boat to hijack it and then rendezvous with a pirate-owned tanker connect the two leech out several million dollars worth of crude oil and then take it back to the nigerian coast where there are illicit refineries that the government can't readily reach and Nigeria has the world's largest and most sophisticated black market for oil so unlike Somalia where even when the pirates got the serious star they couldn't resell the oil off Nigeria the pirates can do that very easily so once they get that oil back to the coast they resell it and it's desperately difficult for us to track or stop at that point and also there's a lot of corruption going on within Nigeria so their government has had its efforts to suppress piracy undercut by the conflicting incentives between trying to police their own waters and a lot of money that's greasing a lot of palms additionally Nigeria and its neighbors have been reluctant to let in foreign private security companies where Somalia understood its own inability to police its waters and essentially said come on in and help us out the Nigerians for a combination of reasons largely nationalistic ones but partially due to corruption they have forbidden foreign private security contractors to operate in their waters with firearms so what that often means is that a ship sailing in company with an escort vessel has to stop at the 12 mile limit of Nigerian waters part company with the escort and then sail unprotected into Nigeria's territorial waters that of course makes them very vulnerable so some of those shipping companies have been forced to make deals with local police or paramilitary groups to provide protection to them off the books and so that factor is again suppressing Nigeria's incentive to crack down on this problem as vigorously as it could we've seen very recently since this book went to press a resurgence of piracy in the Strait of Malacca and that had been quite a problem about a decade ago but had been successfully suppressed by the navies in that region and around 2012 it started to flare up again but mainly that low level form of piracy with stealing watches and cell phones and that wasn't something that could financially justify bringing in private security but in the last year we've seen now a spike in oil bunkering attacks which is something that very few analysts predicted I did not foresee that but the Malaccan pirates are now taking up the methods of the West African pirates to steal the oil and resell it and that's something that they can do without needing a safe haven on land like ransom hijackings do so that is something that is now drawing some private security companies to that theater as well now the presence of private security in these waters introduces a host of legal complications because we haven't had to deal with private navies in international law since the time of the british east india company two and a half centuries ago when they were fighting pirates in their heyday and at that time was considered perfectly acceptable to just hang captured pirates by the yard arm there was no expectation of human rights or due process for people captured in those circumstances but we've evolved since then and now there are robust expectations that you will presume pirates are innocent until proven guilty and that that requires a different model for combating that and so the private security companies have not been able to use force offensively as their predecessors in the east india company were able to do instead they follow rules for the use of force that are a defensive model so even though there are no internationally binding rules for the use of force for private maritime security companies there's a standard that was formulated last year by a number of different stakeholders including the private maritime security industry the shipping industry maritime insurance industry a number of NGOs they work together to hammer out the 100 series rules for the use of force and although those are not binding in and of themselves they're written to take into account the binding national laws of most of these stakeholder companies so essentially the 100 series serves as guidelines for private security personnel telling them if you adhere to these laws to these rules you won't fall afoul of the actual laws so far that has proven pretty effective largely because the rules for the use of force in the 100 series are written more thoughtfully than some of their predecessors a previous rule set that had been devised a couple of years prior had a very awkward series called the escalation of injury that says if you can cause pain to pirates without injuring them do that if you can injure them without wounding them do that if you can wound them without killing them do that and that was something that was just totally implausible when you are on a ship at 15 knots rough seas everything's pitching you're not going to be able to shoot someone so precisely that you injure but not wound them that was ridiculous but the 100 series involves not so much the targeting procedures as how to distinguish friend from foe the procedures for how you fire flares or use warnings to try to distinguish what might be innocent fishermen from aggressive pirates and so they have a gradient for the use of force that they're instructed to follow and that has proven so far pretty successful in scaring away the innocent fishermen and ensuring that anyone who comes within a certain distance is actually a pirate another concern then is jurisdiction because by definition piracy occurs on the high seas in international waters it is considered a crime of universal jurisdiction any country can define what penalties and evidence for piracy it wants and prosecute accordingly so that means that if pirates surrender to private maritime security forces multiple different countries may be able to assert jurisdiction more troublingly if private security forces commit some kind of crime or atrocity in international waters there are multiple different nations that can assert jurisdiction over them so for example if you have a private escort vessel that is sailing in company with a tanker the tanker may be owned by interests in the UK a company registered in Singapore operated by a Maltese company and crewed by people from the Philippines and India and half a dozen other countries the escort vessel may be owned by an American firm flagged to Cyprus and crewed by Ukrainians and so suddenly then you have a tangle of half a dozen or a dozen different countries that could assert jurisdiction in the event of some kind of an incident and there is really no good precedent in international law for how to sort those things out so there's a concern that you could have some incident maybe off the coast of Iran and the Iranian government gets the idea that American private security contractors are pirates and under Iranian law they can decide well piracy is a capital crime let's execute these Americans and that would be a very difficult crisis for us to deal with the closest analog to that is something that happened actually not with private security but with active duty Italian marines in February of 2012 there was an Italian tanker called the Enrique Alexia which was sailing off the coast of India outside their territorial waters but within their exclusive economic zone there was a misunderstanding the Italian marines shot at fishermen causing fatalities and as a result the Indian authorities caught up with the tanker arrested the marines and charged some of them with murder and the Italian authorities didn't like the sound of that they knew that could be a capital crime so they begged the Indian government let us have our marines back what can we work out here and the Indians had no real incentive to exceed to that but eventually after a lot of weedling from Italy they said all right you can have the marines back on the condition that when it's time for trial you send them back to India so the Italians said oh sure sure sure send them on back they sent the marines back to Italy India said okay we're getting ready for a trial time to send the marines back and Rome effectively blew a very large raspberry in New Delhi's direction this escalated into a full-blown diplomatic crisis eventually the Italians gave in their foreign minister resigned in protest and the idea was the marines would be sent back to India but with the promise that they wouldn't be subject to the death penalty well now India is considering the death penalty so it's it's really the sort of situation that can readily give rise to international crises from what might seem like very small beginnings finally the the threat I'd like to flag to you all that's not manifest yet but is keeping people in this industry up at night is the threat of maritime terrorism so in 2000 we saw the attack on the American destroyer USS Cole in aid in Yemen where an al-Qaeda suicide boat drove right up to the side and blew up if not for the timely and heroic action of the crew the coal very well could have sunk in the wake of that incident everyone in maritime circles was talking about maritime terrorism that was the threat two years later there was a French tanker called the Limburg that suffered a similar attack fortunately did not sink either but that was in 2000 2002 the threat on people's minds then maritime terrorism faded into the background piracy captured the headlines and people largely forgot about maritime terrorism but we've seen in the past few years al-Qaeda and its affiliates are shifting their center of gravity away from Afghanistan and Pakistan toward Africa and now also the ISIS area but particularly in Africa we now see they have affiliates on all the different coasts of Africa they have al-Shabaab in the east Boko Haram in the west al-Qaeda in the Islamic makhrib in the north and al-Qaeda has repeatedly stated its intentions to target maritime shipping we know they'd like to do that if they could score an attack on a passenger ship causing mass casualties we know they'd love to do that in 2004 there was an attack near the philippines on a vessel called the super ferry 14 carried out by Abu Syaf which was another al-Qaeda affiliate killed over 100 people so we know they want to do this we know they've succeeded before and now the question in many people's minds is just when can they get their act together and finally do it but if that happens if Boko Haram manages to blow up a tanker off Lagos and cause an ecological catastrophe and and kill the sailors or if a ship in the Red Sea carrying hundreds or thousands of passengers is hit by a suicide vessel that would have devastating consequences for the industry and I would foresee if maritime terrorism has a resurgence that there would be relatively a strong shift away from the embarked guards model which is now favored because it's cheaper toward having more of the private escorts because the escorts have the tactical flexibility to engage suicide boats or other threats at a safe distance from the client ship so that's essentially what the outlook is today and I very much look forward to your questions thank you yes sir how come Newport doesn't have a recruiting station for these jobs and the armed guard well there's a lot of guys hanging around bars and things that's actually how a lot of it happens absolutely because the private maritime security sector draws so heavily from former marines former navy in many different countries the networks are largely personal and professional so they don't have to hire in the same way target or wal-mart would they work through those professional networks buddies from the service five or ten years ago the companies recruit a lot online again exploiting those personal relationships and so even though there are certainly Americans who are working for those companies they don't find out about them through a shop here in Newport thank you yes sir I have the authority to stop and search that is somewhat unclear so the UN convention for the law of the sea or uncloss has provisions that would allow private vessels to stop and search if they were acting under the authority of a sovereign state because the current business model is that they're not they're acting independently and working for the shipping companies they don't have that authority but theoretically they could get it so they might just be selling right in company exactly without without knowing it yes it's a it's a defensive model I believe your hand was up first sir yeah just just a quick question so far everything has been on the water I'm kind of surprised at some point on either side that you haven't had any sort of air surveillance or interaction well we've seen some of these companies do operate drones now and so that has been in a reconnaissance no helicopters well blackwater had a helicopter for the ship that it deployed in 2008 but they just couldn't get clients as far as having helicopters now I think the main impediment there is that in order to have a helicopter you need a very large ship so unless you can already justify that ship for other reasons it's just not really economical yes sir as you said these these are fairly small ships so if you're operating in the Gulf of Guinea or even off the point of Africa you have to have a place to resupply to refuel where are they resupply these are not state actors right where are they resupplying refueling is there a state that is actually covertly supporting them well their their principal ports are in Djibouti and the UAE and Sri Lanka which have all been relatively friendly to them by contrast there was an escort vessel that got into a scrape with the Eritrean government a few years ago in which the Eritreans thought that they were terrorists and they were mainly British nationals and so they were locked up in Eritrea until some diplomatic maneuvering by the government in London was able to get them out but that is certainly a risk that private security forces can run up against unfriendly governments a more recent example of that occurred with a vessel called the Seaman Guard Ohio which was taken by the Indians and it had strayed into their territorial waters the Indians arrested the crew and held them in jail trying to figure out what was going on and during that process the company that owned the Seaman Guard Ohio went belly up so then they were stuck in jail in India without even a company to advocate on their behalf and only recently most of them have been freed but that was a very long and difficult or deal for them that again reinforces the idea that because there are so many conflicting jurisdictions here different sets of national laws different sets of ethical norms for how these companies should operate that you can often have problems yes sir you mentioned that how private security played a major part in declining the with the private activity or far far from Somalia it's one in how much of that could be contributed to maybe lack of payment from countries that was you know people's get kidnapped or something are also from the moving that line you know because it shaped them used to actually help the Somalia coast very close and then they would start moving that line out farther so the pirates can't get out that far how much of that paid into how the client got to you well there's a very interesting interplay that goes on whenever there's a ransom because the ransom market is established by the media effectively when the media reports that pirates in one crew scored five million dollars the pirates and all the other crews are going to have their expectations adjusted accordingly and so that gives the pirates a strong incentive to inflate the ransoms they claim they're getting and it also gives the people paying the ransoms a strong incentive to chip away at those numbers and make them seem like they're lower than they actually are and so from that process I can see how the delay and difficulty in getting ransoms has contributed to the difficulty pirates have been having I wouldn't say though that that has been decisive in in what's actually turned the tide against them though does that answer your question okay yes sir I understand that in the painting process they have water now 40 000 psi that blows paint right off the hub yes when you do that you have iron shoes because if you hit it you've got your foot off so my question is why don't they round the perimeter of the ship with nozzles then you put 40 000 psi on it they put a ladder up the soles that you have so they put them right up and they come back from there or not now this may be cruel and inhuman to some well it is a very good idea and many ships have actually tried that there are sophisticated systems that merchant ships install that can provide exactly that technology yes well they were using their their hoses purposed for that but effectively you're you're right but the trouble is if you have that system the pirates can still pull up alongside at a safe distance out of hose range pull out their rpg and say if we don't turn off the hoses this is going right into the bridge so for that reason even though the hoses can physically stop boarding the pirates still have enough leverage with their heavier armament to induce the crews to turn the hoses off now you're saying they've got larger vessels and the small ones without board motors well they do have mother ships but the mother ships are are not uh are not used in the attacks themselves the pirates still actually bored from the small skiffs now with the prisoners why don't they turn them all over to the chinese and let them pay them because we are party to a number of treaties that would forbid that essentially the concern is that if we hand over pirates to countries with suspect human rights records that is our fault and in fact this notion was expressed to the extreme at the beginning of this epidemic with britain's royal navy and the royal navy was under directives from the government in whitehall that they were not to formally arrest any samali pirates because if they did they couldn't take them back to samalia because of the human rights abuses there they would have to go back to the uk for trial and if they did that the suspected pirates could claim asylum again on grounds of the things going on in samalia and under uk law if they claim to asylum they could then get a path to citizenship so to avert that whole mess london told the royal navy look if these guys surrender to you take their weapons check them for infectious diseases then give them food fuel and a compass and send them back to the coast we just can't be bothered that catch and release policy as it was called was the subject of great international scorn and was eventually reversed oh you disable their boat and let them go the russians may have done that and the pirates were not heard from since you can see his sordid youth oh yes yes there is still piracy going on in those waters but it's that very low level petty crime sort of piracy that might in any given incident have a financial cost of a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars as opposed to hundreds of thousands or millions or even north of 10 million yes i know because i sell that there were especially up before the number of instances of smaller vessels yachts sail boats um is that still going on and is there any protection for that so most private naval companies don't want to get involved in that because the tactical complications are more than they would like to take on some yachts do have that sort of protection none of them have been hijacked there was an instance with a dutch yacht that was rescued by the private escort vessel that was sailing in company with it the pirates were able to get aboard but the private security defeated them there was an incident with a yacht called the quest in which the pirates through some misunderstanding or paranoia killed the civilians on board and that prompted more demand for private security from the yachting market but still i would say most yachts in that region don't have actually an escort or embark team so could we read into that like the around the world ventures and so on and sailing and races and so on that these people automatically gear up then for private security probably not because those races go through the roaring forties and furious fifties down there where the winds whip around the world unimpeded from cape horn to the cape of good hope down beneath australian new zealand and those seas are too rough for the pirates they don't even try to get that far down actually in the boat they did they embarked on the transport vessels for that particular they did they just say oh god yes we built a boat for a fall that was going around the world and i asked them you know the pirates are active over there and he walked with a cane and he says i've already bought a bazooka you say just maybe it's a bit elitist but i have followed this from the naval perspective navy us navy never developed a strategy okay to combat these pirates but one of my questions is why did they not go after the clans of the somalia base of operations they knew where they were they were very well identified they knew who the clans were so how come they were attacked in three words blackhawk down in a few more words than that the battle of mogadishu in 1993 cost 19 american lives so what is that the american mentality yes so we can't bomb them from 20 000 people we're doing now in iraq but i mean that that incident has cast a startlingly long shadow over both american and european policy towards somalia ever since yes it has a race in somalia lately one in fact there was there was one helicopter raid in may of 2012 which shot up an empty beach and was not repeated so you see what i'm trying to get at is the level of response of irresponsibility so the strategy was to do this bounce around chasing these guys knowing you may or may not catch them yes that that's a pretty irresponsible strategy for one of the largest navies in the world well i would say in the navy's defense used to do some stupid things but the thing is is if your objective is to stop piracy you think you would develop a strategy to do that the trouble is the navy already has a mandate for international waters it does not have a mandate for somalia itself and there just isn't the political will to instruct the navy to do those things i'm sure they would be willing to where they called upon to do so you know if you ask philips and the rest of me to say you need more graduates from mass maritime you know i thought we just might throw that in yes ma'am for sports dialers better but anyway um for the um you were talking about the navy and the pirates i have two questions number one how many real american bobbins are out here not that many that are not on the jones act right now don't have a lot of american bottoms right waters now the captain philips one yes that was the marist vessel it was crewed and flagged in the united states or the navy to get involved what kind of issues are we talking about less than a hundred maybe but the other thing i was going to ask you have you noticed on the pirates you take a look i had the pleasure of sailing singapore and the streets of malacca for sea land we got bored a couple times but i found that those pirates were extremely like a mafia they knew exactly what container they wanted yes we didn't even have a full cargo manifest to know what was on that vessel but these guys knew exactly where they wanted to go so to me it was very well organized yes where you look at somali pirates and i know there was a story on ntr trust that if you will but uh they were talking about how the pirates i'll be a pirate for a day i'll go earn like i don't know ten twenty thousand dollars and i'll quit and i'll be you know my family be set for life yeah do you guys look into that the difference of the background yes it does appear that the reconnaissance or intelligence efforts of the somali pirates were much less sophisticated than those of either the malaccan pirates or the west african pirates and a key reason for that is off the horn most ships are just passing by whereas in nigeria the ships are actually stopping there and taking on or discharge in cargo so it's easier for the nigerian pirates to get a good sense of what they're going after as for the american presence in those waters not very large and so you're you're right that there is a certain sense among the various navies in those waters if you as a shipping company want to skirt labor laws and skirt pollution laws and fly a flag of convenience and then you get hijacked that's kind of on you as the shipping company so even though out of humanitarian principles certainly we'd like to defend all seafarers in that region i think there is a certain political reality that the ships that fly the us flag or the red duster of the uk are going to get more military response on their behalf um have you seen any change as far as the tactics in the beginning prior to um you know the security force taking over and escorting the ships them as far as anybody pirates is concerned have you seen any tactics in how they start um you know approaching the ship or holding the ship as a change in yes it's become more and more common for pirates to attack with multiple skiffs at once the pirates have attacked further and further out to sea with the help of mother ships so the mother ships are usually small cargo ships that they hijacked years ago and couldn't get a ransom for so now they use those to sneak out into shipping lanes discharge the skiffs far out to sea and go hunting and so that has been an innovation and this all comes around after the security forces well concurrently with so i i can't say that it actually followed in a clear causal relationship but the two trends were progressing at the same time there would appear that the being politically correct is not the answer to handling pilots is there a question or or i i mean in principle i don't think that's how we're going to solve the epidemic either one of the non uh military solutions they're actually trying to trace trace the money you know that is one thing they're trying to do now yes away from the actual pirates follow the money after so that's something that has proven very difficult but worthwhile the the trouble is the Somali piracy industry has developed a system of investment and payoff so for a time at pirate controlled ports you could literally go into a place like a stock exchange and buy shares in pirate ventures and in investors from elsewhere in the arabian peninsula or elsewhere in the islamic world could arrange to invest from overseas and then get their money back out of Somalia the trouble was that didn't happen through swiss bank accounts or even really bank accounts at all because our treasury department and interpol are very good at cracking down on that actually the trouble is the financial transfers that accompany piracy largely go on through the hawala system of informal banking that's very common in the islamic world and through the hawala system it's not about a numbered account somewhere it's about couriers and passwords and people meeting in a cafe a thousand miles away from where the hijacking took place and the apparatus of our intelligence services just isn't very good at cracking down on those sorts of transfers just hard to do all right thank you all so much for coming thank you