Q Ships!
By Kenneth Anderson proposes Q-ships to solve the problem of piracy:
There are many legal questions here, of course. But I had a conversation with a US Navy officer, not a lawyer, but someone with operational duties, who suggested that the best military course of action would be to equip some number of civilian vessels as decoys – heavily armed and carrying marines. The best thing, he said, would be for Somali pirates to attack, and then be aggressively counterattacked, in a battle, not the serving of an arrest warrant – sink their vessel and kill as many pirates as possible. It would send a message to pirates that they could not know which apparently civilian vessels might instead instead counterattack.
The original Q ships were civilian steamers equipped with sufficient weapons to fight off U-boat attacks. They were designed to lure U-boats into surfacing, then to destroy the offending submarines with their guns. The project was mildly unsuccessful in World War I (14 submarines killed at a cost of 20 Q ships, with no notable deterrent effect on U-boat attacks), and extremely unsuccessful in World War II (4 Q ships lost with no known U-boat kills). I’ve also seen the argument that the World War I numbers rely on Admiralty juking of the stats, and that the actual impact of the Q ships was much smaller. That said, while a U-boat could usually kill a Q ship even when it fell for the disguise, pirates are probably going to suffer badly at the hands of a well armed crew. Anderson further argues that this is a good thing:
Moreover, the use of overwhelming force aimed at killing them at the very moment the attack is commenced is most useful, before they can board and take hostages, and killing them rather than taking them prisoner and turning them over to local justice systems that do not impose great risks on them. The greatest risk posed by pirates is once they have boarded – that is when their firepower is maximized by having hostages; they are at their weakest when still in their own vessel, and that is the moment to strike – as they commence their attack and can be sunk in their vessel yet have no hostages for bargaining.
Dead men make no amnesty requests. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except for the reluctance of some countries to take the responsibility for prosecuting captured pirates.