Europe’s mainland piracy attack will escalate conflict

 

1. You’d think with all it’s sophistication, open borders, data shared amongst all the justice agencies, NATO and Interpol, Socialist State control, plus a spycam on every street corner, not to mention access to American spysat tech, that Europe would be able to track and interdict every arms purchase made by the Somalis. And that they’d have a real time map of every radar (as if the Soms have any!), SAM, or artillery piece that did get through, making an air assault a simple exercise of dropping a thousand or three precision glide bombs from high altitude offshore, a la Gulf War I, only with better results given 20 years of tech development since then.

   In the same vein, the entire Somali “navy” could be taken out with a few flights of tiny JDAMS, or God forbid, a few bombers full of cluster bombs. No boats = no pirates.

   With a lateral bombing strategy (glide munitions) you wouldn’t even need to suppress their AA defenses, just knock out any active long range radar first ... NATO has missiles that can do that job from 100 miles out that can be launched from helicopters (add a booster stage to a standard HARM missile). Once the radars are down, bomb the shoreline. At best the pirates will be taking their boats on trailers a few miles inland ... to the same spots each time ... spysats will show you where ... boom.

   This whole thing can be solved with some military action far smaller than “shock and awe” (which wasn’t really). The world doesn’t care if there is collateral damage; SOMALIA doesn’t care if there is collateral damage. So don’t worry about that.

   No boats = no pirates. Blockade the coast up close and personal; if these people want to eat, they will start letting the hostage ships and crews go. It really is that simple. All it takes is a bit of will from teh white folks, and two or three Somali cities bombed into ash and rubble to make believers out of them.

   Posted by Drew458       05/16/2012  at  07:12 AM  



2. Recall the lyrics to the Marine’s Hymn: “...to the shores of Tripoli.” That’s a reference to the Barbary Coast War of the early 1800s, when the U.S. Marines landed in North Africa to wipe out the Barbary pirates.

   Two differences between then and now:

   1. Weapons and technology - as Drew points out, we don’t need to send in the Marines. We can achieve the same results through surveillance and air power.

   2. Cojones - Politicians had a pair back then. Today, they don’t.

   Posted by CenTexTim       05/16/2012  at  08:48 AM  

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