Kaplan on the Benefits, and Innocence, of Piracy

As U.S. Navy warships continue to surround the Ukrainian cargo ship holding weaponry in the Gulf of Aden recently hijacked by Somali pirates—who, realizing the reality of their situation, decrease their ransom daily—our patron saint Robert D. Kaplan writes about an unintended benefit of piracy: multilateral cooperation among the world’s navies.

The one upside of piracy is that it creates incentives for cooperation among navies of countries who often have tense relations with each other. The U.S. and the Russians cooperate off the Gulf of Aden, and we might begin to work with the Chinese and other navies off the coast of Indonesia, too. As a transnational threat tied to anarchy, piracy brings nations together, helping to form the new coalitions of the 21st century.

Kaplan also gives a beautiful summary of what life is like as a pirate, abridged and bolded below by myself:

Somali pirate confederations consist of cells of ten men, with each cell distributed among three skiffs that are ratty, and roach-infested, and made of decaying wood or fiberglass. A typical pirate cell goes into the open ocean for three weeks at a time, navigating by the stars, equipped with only drinking water, fuel, grappling hooks, short ladders, knives, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They bring millet and qat (the local narcotic of choice), and they use lines and nets to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat so tough it had teeth marks all over it. Their existence is painfully rugged.

The classic tactic of Somali pirates is to take over a slightly larger dhow, often a fishing boat manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiff attached. Once in possession of a dhow, they can seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to yet bigger ships, they let the smaller ships go free. Because the sea is vast, only when a large ship issues a distress call do foreign navies know to look. If Somali pirates hunted only small boats, no warship would know about the piracy.

Off-hand cruelty is the pirates’ signature behavior. “Forget the Johnny Depp charm,” one Navy officer told me. “Theirs is a savage brutality not born of malice or evil, like a lion killing an antelope. There is almost a natural innocence about what they do.”