Piracy never really disappeared; it plagues maritime commerce as much today as it did in the Caribbean in the 18th century and on the Barbary Coast in the 19th century. But until recently, modern-day pirates mostly rustled some cargo and let their captives continue, leaving the crew unharmed.
That's changed. Pirates in the waters off Somalia, and from the Gulf of Aden to south of the equator, are no longer simply interested in seizing ships and cargo. Now they are out for the multimillion dollar ransoms paid by ship operators to rescue their crews. They've come up with a good business model, too, with a low cost of entry: a fishing trawler to serve as a mother ship, a few high-speed inflatable boats, weapons and crews to seize their targets. Very few of these thieves have paid for their crimes despite the presence of a small fleet of warships in the region. One way to deal with the threat is to revive convoys.
To be sure, in different circumstances naval patrols have worked. Towards the end of the 20th century, pirates in the Strait of Malacca, which links the Indian and Pacific Oceans, not only captured ships, but crews that resisted were often murdered and their ships renamed and reflagged. Gradually, naval patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore made life more dangerous for the pirates and safer for mariners. In 2007, the Strait was declared "piracy free." But those patrols were feasible because the Strait is a long, narrow passage never more than 150 miles wide.
Down by the Horn of Africa, however, patrolling one million square miles of ocean with the 60 vessels on station is an impossibility. A radar mounted on the top mast of a destroyer is unlikely to "see" a small rubber boat 25 miles away and can search only about 2,000 square miles -- about one-fifth of 1% -- of the sea in which pirates prowl. The rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by naval Special Forces operating from the USS Bainbridge, and the recent rescue by French commandos of a captured yacht, demonstrate that aggressive maritime policing can thwart pirate goals. But it is far better to prevent attacks in the first place.
Pirates, like the Nazi submarines of World War II, do not hunt for their targets; they lie across the sea lanes where ships are likely to travel and simply wait for a victim to come over the horizon. And the same tactic which defeated the U-boats can put an end to the majority of pirate attacks. Merchant ships can be ordered to form convoys for their own protection.
Thirty thousand ships a year, roughly 100 a day, 50 in each direction, transit the waters off the coast of Somalia. One convoy in each direction, each day, alternating between fast ships and slower ones, and each accompanied by four or five escort vessels, would do the job. There would then be only two targets a day in each area of coast for the pirates to find, instead of 100. When marauders approach a convoy, they could be warned off by the escorts or destroyed if they attack.
Convoys have historically been the antidote to piracy on the open seas, and they can defend against these attacks once again. Modern naval escorts, equipped with helicopters, have the ability to establish a perimeter around the merchant ships, the firepower to stop a pirate, the legal jurisdiction to do so under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the ability to deliver their prisoners for trial.
Shipping companies will protest that it is more economical for ships to travel alone and not be held to the speed of the slowest vessel in a convoy. And certainly the odds of any given vessel being attacked and captured are less than 1% per voyage. At that rate, a $10,000,000 ransom is only an extra $100,000 tacked on per voyage.
But this ignores the fate of those sailors who are captured. And it ignores the corrosion of the international maritime system as pirates are seen to kidnap, and even kill, with impunity. It's time to convoy again.
Mr. Zimmerman is professor emeritus at King's College London and a former chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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