5 ms·

Oil tanker hijacked off Yemen, steers toward Somalia

60 points by delichon 6mo ago

radu_floricica 6mo ago
I still don't get how this works. My world image must be pretty off at this point if this kind of thing is possible. A tanker is big, expensive, and not exactly easy to misplace. And for a nation to be able to send this kind of expeditions it must be both dysfunctional enough to allow this, but competent enough to be able to mount it. And other countries allow it? Why? Again with the "expensive and hard to misplace".
- OutOfHere 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mcphage 6mo ago
    > the US will probably take action against Yemen and Somalia So we’re losing 1 war, and your solution is to start 2 more?
    - OutOfHere 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - afiori 6mo ago
        Naval blockades are an act of war even according to US own laws.
      - vel0city 6mo ago
        > Firstly, there is no ongoing war with Iran Talk about mischaracterization. The head of the Department of ~~Defense~~War has called it a war many times. The President has called it a war many times. Members of Congress of both parties have called it a war many times. It's a war my dude.
      - tokai 6mo ago
        A ceasefire dictates by definition that a war is on.
    - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      It's the neocon version of "you wanna supersize dat?"
  - afiori 6mo ago
    The US and its allies are likely the biggest sponsor of terrorism and genocide worldwide
    - _DeadFred_ 6mo ago
      Maybe maybe not. But doesn't change what Iran does. The Iranian embassy in the UK just encouraged violence in the UK. Then next day random jews were stabbed.
- toasty228 6mo ago
  All you need is a dude with a small boat, an rpg and some kind of short range radio really.
  - OutOfHere 6mo ago
    Many but not all tankers these days do have defensive equipment, e.g. jet sprays, but these probably can't stop too many boats, or if the tanker doesn't have such protection.
    - ceejayoz 6mo ago
      If I have a hose and the other guy has an RPG I’m probably not starting shit.
      - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
        If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might. See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship. So they can't kill the crew, or at least can't kill very many of them.
        tokai 6mo ago
        >See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship Its pretty dumb to assume that. Somali commercial sailors and merchant mariners do exist. Information and simulator software is available also in Somalia.
        bayarearefugee 6mo ago
        > If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might. In this scenario you are standing on a ship that is full of highly flammable oil. There are more outcomes than just the hijackers gain control of the ship or they leave you alone. If gaining control is no longer an option they could decide "fuck it" and just fire into the side of your hull.
- dgellow 6mo ago
  For the « how », you can watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) to get an idea of the pirate logistics
- fredoralive 6mo ago
  Oil tankers only have like 20-30 crew on board, you’re not going to need that many men with AK47s to take over. Navies do patrol piracy hotspots like Somalia, freedom of navigation is kinda important to world trade, but they can’t exactly be everywhere at once.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    Which navies though? The reality is that very few countries still have the expeditionary navies capable of doing that. The US Navy (plus Coast Guard) can do it. A few others like China, Japan, India, and France can do it on a limited basis. The remaining countries can maybe send a token frigate on a temporary basis. That's about it. Even the UK, Russia, and Germany no longer have functioning expeditionary navies.
- SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  It's very simple. "Pirates" use small arms and small boats. The US navy uses helicopters and ship mounted canons. Occasionally they double tap "drug smugglers" with missiles. Or sink inadequately armed "enemy" ships with a torpedo, followed by a second one after 19 minutes. The difference is minor between piracy and war crimes: "δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν"
  - echelon_musk 6mo ago
    Trump was quoted in the last day as saying "We’re like pirates" in reference to the US Navy.
    - doodlebugging 6mo ago
      It wouldn't be surprising to find that Trump or some Trump-aligned group had contracted Somali pirates to commandeer tankers, guaranteeing them riches that will never be paid. The ships would find their way to friendly refineries where the oil can be laundered into a legitimate stream. Without even including his children, there are so many individuals associating with him who would have the pieces to make something like this happen.
  - doodlebugging 6mo ago
    >"δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν" That's all Greek to me so I had to translate. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Very appropriate. Thanks.
    - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      It's from the Melian Dialogue. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-historian https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-histor...
- dmitrygr 6mo ago
  All it takes is a world which has convinced itself that it is “time to be tolerant of all and punish none — all misbehavior is not a fault of the actor but instead the world at large is responsible” Start dealing with pirates like they did in the 18th century, and watch how fast it ends. It would only take a few dozen publicly hung pirates to make the point.
  - senordevnyc 6mo ago
    You know that various navies have conducted operations that have killed many more Somali pirates than that, right? No idea what you’re quoting there, but it’s a bizarre caricature of the world we live in.
    - dmitrygr 6mo ago
      Yes, it takes time. It took the British navy decades to rid the seas of most pirates. When a random somalian considers piracy and realizes that the RoI is very negative, hr job will have been accomplished.
  - mlyle 6mo ago
    Did that work in the 18th century? Hanging a few pirates eliminated piracy? It's my understanding it was more about the loss of favorable basing and the reduction in Spanish shipments of treasure that caused the decline. We've killed plenty of would-be pirates recently. Doesn't seem to have ended the problem.
    - delichon 6mo ago
      > Did that work in the 18th century? It did in the early 19th century. Check out the first and second Barbary Wars. They were not permanent solutions but they had lasting effects. The real blow was the French conquest of Algeria after that.
      - mlyle 6mo ago
        1. Doesn't seem like this quite fits under "hanging a few pirates" 2. One of the big problems here is there's no real counterparty to negotiate with/cow like the Algerian Dey. That's not to say that I'm against increased anti-pirate action. I just don't think it's as straightforward as you all say.
- BirAdam 6mo ago
  Much of the current state of the world is coasting on things done in prior eras, and this is always the case. A country needn’t be able to build a large boat now to have built one in the past. They can send that boat around the world until someone realizes that the US guarantee of safe water ways too is something it can no longer enforce. The world behaves as if the USA were its older self, but it isn’t. Also, a large navy isn’t very useful when ships that cost more than a billion USD can be disabled by drones that cost less than ten thousand USD. As such, US ship movement in the area is limited by both Yemen and Iran.
  - echelon 6mo ago
    The world before WWII was chaos. It has never been peaceful to be a human for much of our species' existence. America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen. Now that everyone wants to displace America, we're pluging back into chaos. America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power. There's going to be an increase in war as countries try to claim territory and resources. Piracy and blockades will come back. Trading alliances and trading blocs will form. The world will turn into a powder keg. This time with nukes. The vacuum left behind as America shuts itself off will create lots of power struggles. There will be a lot of trade disruption to energy, goods, and food inputs. It's also going to be incredibly violent.
    - Avicebron 6mo ago
      > America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen. > ...America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power. Good thing America is one singular entity with everyone living in it both equally benefiting from it and also responsible for it's current state. What we are seeing is neoliberalism gone rancid and the predictable fallout.
    - kjkjadksj 6mo ago
- icegreentea2 6mo ago
  As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/ https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/) These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen. And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned. So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.
- bmitch3020 6mo ago
  The response will need to come from the country where the tanker is registered/flagged. Liberia and Panama aren't exactly known for their Navy fleets. Without that, it's up to the ship's commercial owner to resolve, or more likely, their insurance company. The crew are rarely trained and equip to respond to an armed attack. If they have anyone to defend the ship, at most it's a handful of mercenaries hired for the high risk part of the trip.
  - wrboyce 6mo ago
    I have friends who have been those mercenaries, and I think your comment underplays it a bit… they are all ex-SBS and not somebody I’d want to fuck with!
    - bmitch3020 6mo ago
      In direct combat, you're absolutely right. Most of my point is that they aren't hired to defend most ships if companies do the math and assume the risk isn't worth the cost. The crew that's left are trained to fix the engine, cook some food, and control the auto pilot, not to fire guns. That said, when mercenaries are defending a ship, it's often trying to stop a small runaway boat loaded with explosives. It's a very small moving target they have to hit with little time. Meanwhile the small boat just needs to be pointed somewhere in the direction of the oil tanker.
  - kjkjadksj 6mo ago
    So you can just steal any ship registered to some nation with little naval presence and no one knows how to handle it? It just becomes the spiderman meme of insurance and corporate and nations pointing at each other and meanwhile you’ve successfully stolen a ship in 2026? Crazy world we live in. The modern age is strange.
    - bmitch3020 6mo ago
      They know exactly how to handle it, which is why it's such an effective business model. The crew do what they can to avoid being boarded, then get to the safest location possible. Once the ship is captured, it's held for ransom, the insurance company gets their negotiators to minimize the price, they eventually pay the negotiated ransom, and insurance rates go up. If you're expecting someone to prevent piracy, you need to first run the financial cost/benefit analysis. How much would need to be spent on a military operation, and what's the return that would be seen from the country sending their military to rescue a private ship registered to a foreign country, staffed by foreign crew, with cargo destined for a foreign country?
- MithrilTuxedo 6mo ago
  Coalition navy ships (US, England, France, Germany, etc.) are supposed to protect commercial vessels transiting through the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC). Either this ship left the IRTC or the IRTC isn't being protected. Ships coming through the Gulf of Aden to reach African ports south of it are advised to head east until they were south of India (past the Maldives) before heading south, and then head due west to reach their destination. It's really expensive advice though, and not everyone follows it. I was on the USS Momsen's VBSS team in the Gulf of Aden back in 2010-2012. We showed up with overwhelming force and they knew they'd survive if they didn't fight back. It was relatively safe and boring. We had protection from our reputation. I think the US Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year and I've worried it would make VBSS a lot more dangerous. Edit: we also didn't hear much from the Houthis while I was there. Things got worse in Yemen after my time. https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-mandeb-strait-gulf-aden-arabian-sea-persian-gulf-and-somali-basin https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-ma...
  - browsingonly 6mo ago
    > Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year I don't understand how anything that has occurred in the last year would make a Somali pirate think it's less likely they would be killed if they chose to resist an American boarding party. If anything, they would think it's more likely they'd be killed and that there might be unpredictably severe reprisals against their clan, supporters, etc. What events were you thinking of?
    - he0001 6mo ago
      It’s generally a evaluation of risk and reward. Guess they are counting on US being busy elsewhere. What I hear, the chain of command is in disarray.
    - estimator7292 6mo ago
      On the other hand, Somali pirates have attacked fully loaded warships dozens of times, apparently not realizing that small arms and a dinghy can't take down a goddamn battleship
jeffbee 6mo ago
The whole global just-in-time supply chain depended on at least the illusion of the freedom of the seas guaranteed by the United States, which the US unambiguously spoiled this year. Piracy never went away altogether but a multi-polar world where regional powers sanction piracy and provide the pirates with sophisticated weapons isn't going to underpin the same kind of global economy.
- slim 6mo ago
  US navy doing piracy does not help either
- dylan604 6mo ago
  > which the US unambiguously spoiled this year. Didn't the Evergiven do this years ago showing that blocking one highly trafficked route would cause chaos?
  - kjkjadksj 6mo ago
    If it wasn’t for the news coverage I’m not sure I would have noticed that happening in my day to day life.
  - marcosdumay 6mo ago
    Nah, it was already destroyed at the 80s during the Iran war. The GP's comment is a well repeated piece of propaganda, but it was never true. We have freedom of navigation because every country everywhere wants it. Change that situation and the freedom goes away, the US's position is irrelevant.
vrganj 6mo ago
Related: Trump on US Navy Seizing Ships: > It’s a very profitable business. We’re like pirates. https://xcancel.com/Acyn/status/2050368660360032561 https://xcancel.com/Acyn/status/2050368660360032561
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
3eb7988a1663 6mo ago
1. Steal oil tanker 2. ?? 3. Profit What is step 2? Normally, I would assume you try to minimize the incentives in buying stolen goods. In this market, nobody is above buying dubiously sourced oil, but what is the likely destination? Do the pirates patiently sit at the oil depot while the ship gets pumped dry, hoping the check clears and nobody shoots them on sight? Once you have an empty $100MM tanker, how do you unload that vessel? Is it possible the Indian/Japanese/other-petroleum desperate government strike a deal with the pirates?
- manquer 6mo ago
  Typically insurance companies pay ransoms for crew and cargo . The economics of Somalian piracy is well documented. How the money is distributed, how they finance the operations and the hostage costs etc
- onemoresoop 6mo ago
  Either used internally or sold off on the black market at a huge discount maybe?
  - robocat 6mo ago
    The The M/T EUREKA is designed to carry petroleum products rather than crude oil. Products like Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, Light Distillates, Fuel Oils. I would guess if it were crude oil, then that would have a limited market of buyers.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- explorigin 6mo ago
  2. Ransom
- gpm 6mo ago
  Step 2. is (or has usually been) hold ship and crew hostage for ransom payment from the ships owner.
bmitch3020 6mo ago
Considering Saudi Arabia was bypassing the blockade of the Hormuz Strait by piping as much oil as they could to the Red Sea, this is going to cut that off (or significantly increase the insurance costs). Things just keep getting worse in the oil supply chain. It's a shame we didn't focus more on increasing the supply from renewable alternatives.
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  > It's a shame we didn't focus more on increasing the supply from renewable alternatives. I don’t that was going to happen without a supply crisis. It turns out cost is more motivating than the planet cooking.
- cromka 6mo ago
  My hot take: if there's one thing one could wish US would use their military for, is fixing the piracy in this region once and forever, mostly by forcing Somali to do so.
  - acdha 6mo ago
    If that was a military problem, they’d have done it. Unfortunately, it’s a societal problem and you can’t bomb governments into functioning or people out of poverty.
    - cromka 6mo ago
      Terrorism is also a societal problem, not a military one. This was never a problem for them.
      - acdha 6mo ago
        Terrorism comes in two flavors: you have small groups where a pure assassination strikes can work (e.g. Bin Laden) and larger groups backed by an actual social faction (e.g. the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS), where they don’t. The Somali pirates fall into the latter territory: desperately poor people with a dysfunctional national government see money floating by daily. You can’t bomb that dynamic out of existence unless you’re willing to commit mass murder or occupy the territory and make a Marshall Plan-level investment in the local society.
Simulacra 6mo ago
Why can't these ships be fully autonomous by now, or at the very least, remotely disabled and piloted in such emergencies??
- nradov 6mo ago
  Outside of short coastal routes, the notion of autonomous merchant vessels is so silly. While there is maybe a little more opportunity to automate some watch standing duties, autonomous systems (including sensors) are not even remotely capable of safely navigating a ship in congested waters. You still need guys looking out the windows with binoculars and talking to other vessels on the radio. Plus on a ship everything is constantly corroding and breaking. If nothing else you need trained crew on board to do preventive maintenance and repair. When a ship loses power in some remote area it's tough to bring in technicians before the ship ends up on the rocks.
jiggawatts 6mo ago
Sooner or later, it'll have to become the new standard to put a couple of CIWS on every large tanker or container ship. Something like a remote-controlled and/or automatic 20mm auto cannon with an attached FLIR and radar. The era of blithely sailing around with $200M in oil or $1B of manufactured goods on a slow, totally defenseless cargo vessel out in the middle of nowhere and crewed by poorly compensated crews with nothing to gain for being heroic was a short-lived fantasy. Imagine leaving a billion dollars in cash (or whatever) undefended in the middle of a desert, already conveniently placed in a mobile vehicle ready for you to drive off with. Maybe overseen by a couple of unarmed people you hired for minimum wage that aren't even trained security guards, they're just "staff". What we're doing now globally is the direct equivalent, which worked for a while under the umbrella of Pax Americana, but that era is over, mostly thanks to one person deciding it's somehow "unfair" to the nation that benefited from it the most.
- zbentley 6mo ago
  That kind of armament, and the staff needed to operate it, is incredibly expensive. Even if scaled down to commercial-audience models. Even when compared to the cost of huge-displacement cargoes. Not saying it’ll never happen, just that it’s a much more costly proposition than some might think. And that’s before we get into the numerous second order issues. Crewing an armed ship suddenly requires very different HR practices. Parties interested in stealing one may now include much more developed military actors. Mooring a container ship across from an LNG terminal is low-risk. Mooring that same ship with medium range weapons may be outside the risk envelope of lots of ports.
  - jiggawatts 6mo ago
    Costly is relative. I’m sure Samsung could adapt the border-protection auto cannon turrets that they’re already producing in the thousands to ward off invasion by NK. It’s a gun, on a turret, with some electronics. It’ll be a thousand times cheaper than losing the cargo. It’ll reduce insurance costs and “pay for itself” after just a few trips. Speaking of which, a turret isn’t single use! It can sit there with minimal maintenance for dozens of trips, protecting tens of billions in cargo over its lifetime.

60 points by delichon 6mo ago

I still don't get how this works. My world image must be pretty off at this point if this kind of thing is possible. A tanker is big, expensive, and not exactly easy to misplace. And for a nation to be able to send this kind of expeditions it must be both dysfunctional enough to allow this, but competent enough to be able to mount it. And other countries allow it? Why? Again with the "expensive and hard to misplace".

OutOfHere 6mo ago
[flagged]
- mcphage 6mo ago
  > the US will probably take action against Yemen and Somalia So we’re losing 1 war, and your solution is to start 2 more?
  - OutOfHere 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - afiori 6mo ago
      Naval blockades are an act of war even according to US own laws.
    - vel0city 6mo ago
      > Firstly, there is no ongoing war with Iran Talk about mischaracterization. The head of the Department of ~~Defense~~War has called it a war many times. The President has called it a war many times. Members of Congress of both parties have called it a war many times. It's a war my dude.
    - tokai 6mo ago
      A ceasefire dictates by definition that a war is on.
  - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
    It's the neocon version of "you wanna supersize dat?"
- afiori 6mo ago
  The US and its allies are likely the biggest sponsor of terrorism and genocide worldwide
  - _DeadFred_ 6mo ago
    Maybe maybe not. But doesn't change what Iran does. The Iranian embassy in the UK just encouraged violence in the UK. Then next day random jews were stabbed.
toasty228 6mo ago
All you need is a dude with a small boat, an rpg and some kind of short range radio really.
- OutOfHere 6mo ago
  Many but not all tankers these days do have defensive equipment, e.g. jet sprays, but these probably can't stop too many boats, or if the tanker doesn't have such protection.
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    If I have a hose and the other guy has an RPG I’m probably not starting shit.
    - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
      If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might. See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship. So they can't kill the crew, or at least can't kill very many of them.
      - tokai 6mo ago
        >See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship Its pretty dumb to assume that. Somali commercial sailors and merchant mariners do exist. Information and simulator software is available also in Somalia.
      - bayarearefugee 6mo ago
        > If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might. In this scenario you are standing on a ship that is full of highly flammable oil. There are more outcomes than just the hijackers gain control of the ship or they leave you alone. If gaining control is no longer an option they could decide "fuck it" and just fire into the side of your hull.
dgellow 6mo ago
For the « how », you can watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) to get an idea of the pirate logistics
fredoralive 6mo ago
Oil tankers only have like 20-30 crew on board, you’re not going to need that many men with AK47s to take over. Navies do patrol piracy hotspots like Somalia, freedom of navigation is kinda important to world trade, but they can’t exactly be everywhere at once.
- nradov 6mo ago
  Which navies though? The reality is that very few countries still have the expeditionary navies capable of doing that. The US Navy (plus Coast Guard) can do it. A few others like China, Japan, India, and France can do it on a limited basis. The remaining countries can maybe send a token frigate on a temporary basis. That's about it. Even the UK, Russia, and Germany no longer have functioning expeditionary navies.
SanjayMehta 6mo ago
It's very simple. "Pirates" use small arms and small boats. The US navy uses helicopters and ship mounted canons. Occasionally they double tap "drug smugglers" with missiles. Or sink inadequately armed "enemy" ships with a torpedo, followed by a second one after 19 minutes. The difference is minor between piracy and war crimes: "δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν"
- echelon_musk 6mo ago
  Trump was quoted in the last day as saying "We’re like pirates" in reference to the US Navy.
  - doodlebugging 6mo ago
    It wouldn't be surprising to find that Trump or some Trump-aligned group had contracted Somali pirates to commandeer tankers, guaranteeing them riches that will never be paid. The ships would find their way to friendly refineries where the oil can be laundered into a legitimate stream. Without even including his children, there are so many individuals associating with him who would have the pieces to make something like this happen.
- doodlebugging 6mo ago
  >"δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν" That's all Greek to me so I had to translate. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Very appropriate. Thanks.
  - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
    It's from the Melian Dialogue. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-historian https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-histor...
dmitrygr 6mo ago
All it takes is a world which has convinced itself that it is “time to be tolerant of all and punish none — all misbehavior is not a fault of the actor but instead the world at large is responsible” Start dealing with pirates like they did in the 18th century, and watch how fast it ends. It would only take a few dozen publicly hung pirates to make the point.
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  You know that various navies have conducted operations that have killed many more Somali pirates than that, right? No idea what you’re quoting there, but it’s a bizarre caricature of the world we live in.
  - dmitrygr 6mo ago
    Yes, it takes time. It took the British navy decades to rid the seas of most pirates. When a random somalian considers piracy and realizes that the RoI is very negative, hr job will have been accomplished.
- mlyle 6mo ago
  Did that work in the 18th century? Hanging a few pirates eliminated piracy? It's my understanding it was more about the loss of favorable basing and the reduction in Spanish shipments of treasure that caused the decline. We've killed plenty of would-be pirates recently. Doesn't seem to have ended the problem.
  - delichon 6mo ago
    > Did that work in the 18th century? It did in the early 19th century. Check out the first and second Barbary Wars. They were not permanent solutions but they had lasting effects. The real blow was the French conquest of Algeria after that.
    - mlyle 6mo ago
      1. Doesn't seem like this quite fits under "hanging a few pirates" 2. One of the big problems here is there's no real counterparty to negotiate with/cow like the Algerian Dey. That's not to say that I'm against increased anti-pirate action. I just don't think it's as straightforward as you all say.
BirAdam 6mo ago
Much of the current state of the world is coasting on things done in prior eras, and this is always the case. A country needn’t be able to build a large boat now to have built one in the past. They can send that boat around the world until someone realizes that the US guarantee of safe water ways too is something it can no longer enforce. The world behaves as if the USA were its older self, but it isn’t. Also, a large navy isn’t very useful when ships that cost more than a billion USD can be disabled by drones that cost less than ten thousand USD. As such, US ship movement in the area is limited by both Yemen and Iran.
- echelon 6mo ago
  The world before WWII was chaos. It has never been peaceful to be a human for much of our species' existence. America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen. Now that everyone wants to displace America, we're pluging back into chaos. America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power. There's going to be an increase in war as countries try to claim territory and resources. Piracy and blockades will come back. Trading alliances and trading blocs will form. The world will turn into a powder keg. This time with nukes. The vacuum left behind as America shuts itself off will create lots of power struggles. There will be a lot of trade disruption to energy, goods, and food inputs. It's also going to be incredibly violent.
  - Avicebron 6mo ago
    > America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen. > ...America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power. Good thing America is one singular entity with everyone living in it both equally benefiting from it and also responsible for it's current state. What we are seeing is neoliberalism gone rancid and the predictable fallout.
  - kjkjadksj 6mo ago
icegreentea2 6mo ago
As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/ https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/) These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen. And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned. So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.
bmitch3020 6mo ago
The response will need to come from the country where the tanker is registered/flagged. Liberia and Panama aren't exactly known for their Navy fleets. Without that, it's up to the ship's commercial owner to resolve, or more likely, their insurance company. The crew are rarely trained and equip to respond to an armed attack. If they have anyone to defend the ship, at most it's a handful of mercenaries hired for the high risk part of the trip.
- wrboyce 6mo ago
  I have friends who have been those mercenaries, and I think your comment underplays it a bit… they are all ex-SBS and not somebody I’d want to fuck with!
  - bmitch3020 6mo ago
    In direct combat, you're absolutely right. Most of my point is that they aren't hired to defend most ships if companies do the math and assume the risk isn't worth the cost. The crew that's left are trained to fix the engine, cook some food, and control the auto pilot, not to fire guns. That said, when mercenaries are defending a ship, it's often trying to stop a small runaway boat loaded with explosives. It's a very small moving target they have to hit with little time. Meanwhile the small boat just needs to be pointed somewhere in the direction of the oil tanker.
- kjkjadksj 6mo ago
  So you can just steal any ship registered to some nation with little naval presence and no one knows how to handle it? It just becomes the spiderman meme of insurance and corporate and nations pointing at each other and meanwhile you’ve successfully stolen a ship in 2026? Crazy world we live in. The modern age is strange.
  - bmitch3020 6mo ago
    They know exactly how to handle it, which is why it's such an effective business model. The crew do what they can to avoid being boarded, then get to the safest location possible. Once the ship is captured, it's held for ransom, the insurance company gets their negotiators to minimize the price, they eventually pay the negotiated ransom, and insurance rates go up. If you're expecting someone to prevent piracy, you need to first run the financial cost/benefit analysis. How much would need to be spent on a military operation, and what's the return that would be seen from the country sending their military to rescue a private ship registered to a foreign country, staffed by foreign crew, with cargo destined for a foreign country?
MithrilTuxedo 6mo ago
Coalition navy ships (US, England, France, Germany, etc.) are supposed to protect commercial vessels transiting through the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC). Either this ship left the IRTC or the IRTC isn't being protected. Ships coming through the Gulf of Aden to reach African ports south of it are advised to head east until they were south of India (past the Maldives) before heading south, and then head due west to reach their destination. It's really expensive advice though, and not everyone follows it. I was on the USS Momsen's VBSS team in the Gulf of Aden back in 2010-2012. We showed up with overwhelming force and they knew they'd survive if they didn't fight back. It was relatively safe and boring. We had protection from our reputation. I think the US Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year and I've worried it would make VBSS a lot more dangerous. Edit: we also didn't hear much from the Houthis while I was there. Things got worse in Yemen after my time. https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-mandeb-strait-gulf-aden-arabian-sea-persian-gulf-and-somali-basin https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-ma...
- browsingonly 6mo ago
  > Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year I don't understand how anything that has occurred in the last year would make a Somali pirate think it's less likely they would be killed if they chose to resist an American boarding party. If anything, they would think it's more likely they'd be killed and that there might be unpredictably severe reprisals against their clan, supporters, etc. What events were you thinking of?
  - he0001 6mo ago
    It’s generally a evaluation of risk and reward. Guess they are counting on US being busy elsewhere. What I hear, the chain of command is in disarray.
  - estimator7292 6mo ago
    On the other hand, Somali pirates have attacked fully loaded warships dozens of times, apparently not realizing that small arms and a dinghy can't take down a goddamn battleship

jeffbee 6mo ago

The whole global just-in-time supply chain depended on at least the illusion of the freedom of the seas guaranteed by the United States, which the US unambiguously spoiled this year. Piracy never went away altogether but a multi-polar world where regional powers sanction piracy and provide the pirates with sophisticated weapons isn't going to underpin the same kind of global economy.

slim 6mo ago
US navy doing piracy does not help either
dylan604 6mo ago
> which the US unambiguously spoiled this year. Didn't the Evergiven do this years ago showing that blocking one highly trafficked route would cause chaos?
- kjkjadksj 6mo ago
  If it wasn’t for the news coverage I’m not sure I would have noticed that happening in my day to day life.
- marcosdumay 6mo ago
  Nah, it was already destroyed at the 80s during the Iran war. The GP's comment is a well repeated piece of propaganda, but it was never true. We have freedom of navigation because every country everywhere wants it. Change that situation and the freedom goes away, the US's position is irrelevant.

vrganj 6mo ago

Related: Trump on US Navy Seizing Ships: > It’s a very profitable business. We’re like pirates. https://xcancel.com/Acyn/status/2050368660360032561 https://xcancel.com/Acyn/status/2050368660360032561

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3eb7988a1663 6mo ago

1. Steal oil tanker 2. ?? 3. Profit What is step 2? Normally, I would assume you try to minimize the incentives in buying stolen goods. In this market, nobody is above buying dubiously sourced oil, but what is the likely destination? Do the pirates patiently sit at the oil depot while the ship gets pumped dry, hoping the check clears and nobody shoots them on sight? Once you have an empty $100MM tanker, how do you unload that vessel? Is it possible the Indian/Japanese/other-petroleum desperate government strike a deal with the pirates?

manquer 6mo ago
Typically insurance companies pay ransoms for crew and cargo . The economics of Somalian piracy is well documented. How the money is distributed, how they finance the operations and the hostage costs etc
onemoresoop 6mo ago
Either used internally or sold off on the black market at a huge discount maybe?
- robocat 6mo ago
  The The M/T EUREKA is designed to carry petroleum products rather than crude oil. Products like Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, Light Distillates, Fuel Oils. I would guess if it were crude oil, then that would have a limited market of buyers.
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explorigin 6mo ago
2. Ransom
gpm 6mo ago
Step 2. is (or has usually been) hold ship and crew hostage for ransom payment from the ships owner.

bmitch3020 6mo ago

Considering Saudi Arabia was bypassing the blockade of the Hormuz Strait by piping as much oil as they could to the Red Sea, this is going to cut that off (or significantly increase the insurance costs). Things just keep getting worse in the oil supply chain. It's a shame we didn't focus more on increasing the supply from renewable alternatives.

lostlogin 6mo ago
> It's a shame we didn't focus more on increasing the supply from renewable alternatives. I don’t that was going to happen without a supply crisis. It turns out cost is more motivating than the planet cooking.
cromka 6mo ago
My hot take: if there's one thing one could wish US would use their military for, is fixing the piracy in this region once and forever, mostly by forcing Somali to do so.
- acdha 6mo ago
  If that was a military problem, they’d have done it. Unfortunately, it’s a societal problem and you can’t bomb governments into functioning or people out of poverty.
  - cromka 6mo ago
    Terrorism is also a societal problem, not a military one. This was never a problem for them.
    - acdha 6mo ago
      Terrorism comes in two flavors: you have small groups where a pure assassination strikes can work (e.g. Bin Laden) and larger groups backed by an actual social faction (e.g. the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS), where they don’t. The Somali pirates fall into the latter territory: desperately poor people with a dysfunctional national government see money floating by daily. You can’t bomb that dynamic out of existence unless you’re willing to commit mass murder or occupy the territory and make a Marshall Plan-level investment in the local society.

Simulacra 6mo ago

Why can't these ships be fully autonomous by now, or at the very least, remotely disabled and piloted in such emergencies??

nradov 6mo ago
Outside of short coastal routes, the notion of autonomous merchant vessels is so silly. While there is maybe a little more opportunity to automate some watch standing duties, autonomous systems (including sensors) are not even remotely capable of safely navigating a ship in congested waters. You still need guys looking out the windows with binoculars and talking to other vessels on the radio. Plus on a ship everything is constantly corroding and breaking. If nothing else you need trained crew on board to do preventive maintenance and repair. When a ship loses power in some remote area it's tough to bring in technicians before the ship ends up on the rocks.

jiggawatts 6mo ago

Sooner or later, it'll have to become the new standard to put a couple of CIWS on every large tanker or container ship. Something like a remote-controlled and/or automatic 20mm auto cannon with an attached FLIR and radar. The era of blithely sailing around with $200M in oil or $1B of manufactured goods on a slow, totally defenseless cargo vessel out in the middle of nowhere and crewed by poorly compensated crews with nothing to gain for being heroic was a short-lived fantasy. Imagine leaving a billion dollars in cash (or whatever) undefended in the middle of a desert, already conveniently placed in a mobile vehicle ready for you to drive off with. Maybe overseen by a couple of unarmed people you hired for minimum wage that aren't even trained security guards, they're just "staff". What we're doing now globally is the direct equivalent, which worked for a while under the umbrella of Pax Americana, but that era is over, mostly thanks to one person deciding it's somehow "unfair" to the nation that benefited from it the most.

zbentley 6mo ago
That kind of armament, and the staff needed to operate it, is incredibly expensive. Even if scaled down to commercial-audience models. Even when compared to the cost of huge-displacement cargoes. Not saying it’ll never happen, just that it’s a much more costly proposition than some might think. And that’s before we get into the numerous second order issues. Crewing an armed ship suddenly requires very different HR practices. Parties interested in stealing one may now include much more developed military actors. Mooring a container ship across from an LNG terminal is low-risk. Mooring that same ship with medium range weapons may be outside the risk envelope of lots of ports.
- jiggawatts 6mo ago
  Costly is relative. I’m sure Samsung could adapt the border-protection auto cannon turrets that they’re already producing in the thousands to ward off invasion by NK. It’s a gun, on a turret, with some electronics. It’ll be a thousand times cheaper than losing the cargo. It’ll reduce insurance costs and “pay for itself” after just a few trips. Speaking of which, a turret isn’t single use! It can sit there with minimal maintenance for dozens of trips, protecting tens of billions in cargo over its lifetime.