Somali Piracy is on the Wane—and Here's Why

In April 2009, pirates off the coast of Somalia hijacked the Maersk Alabama, an American merchant vessel, taking its captain hostage. The incident made maritime banditry infamous, later becoming the basis of the movie Captain Phillips. The image of piracy instantly transformed from buccaneers with eye patches, peg legs and parrots to African men in little skiffs with RPGs and nothing to lose. The hijacking also set into motion a raft of changes in shipping tactics and technology meant to curtail what had become a veritable crisis.

And these changes seem to be working. From 2010, when pirates around the Horn of Africa hijacked 44 ships, took 1,090 sailors hostage, and fetched $238 million in ransom, the decline has been startling. In 2014, there were 18 attacks in the region. Not one merchant vessel was successfully hijacked. This success has many authors. Warships from just about every world power have been deployed to the region. Task forces were created and national laws were amended. Seeing as 90% of world trade is carried by sea—making piracy a truly global menace—a concerted, international crackdown was inevitable.

But the raw brawn of a battleship is only so useful in hunting tiny, swift skiffs in an area vast as the Mediterranean. The onus of defense lay on merchants themselves. Captains have taken to cruising faster, though fuel inefficient and costly. Some place dummy sentinels and phony "electric fence" signs around the deck, or install a real 9,000-volt electric fence. Or, even better, one can buy Vessel Protection Systems' Anti Boarding Device (ABD-1): a series of large canisters fastened at intervals around the ship's rail, each of which, when activated, "jettison 20 metres of razor wire, which is swept aft by the ship's speed through the water …. [forming] parallel diagonal moving barriers, stretching from the rail on the main deck to the waterline," shredding anything they come in contact with. The ABD-1 can also be outfitted to release teargas at the same time.

The Somali menace created a cottage industry of non-lethal, anti-piracy technology. The NYK Group's Anti-Piracy Curtain features dangling hoses with high-pressure nozzles that thrash wildly alongside the ship, blasting away even the most adept climber and flooding a skiff in minutes. Even cooler is the Triton Shield Anti-Piracy System, which uses an impenetrable water forcefield that can be modified to spray a green, slick fluid that burns the skin and smells terrible.

The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a sonic cannon developed for the military by the LRAD Corporation, has been used successfully, and famously, to rebuff an attack on

a cruise ship in 2005

. It works by projecting an intolerably loud and high-pitched wall of noise, basically annoying someone until they go away. In addition to being used against pirates, LRADs have recently become a standard tool for police to disperse protestors.

"Dazzler guns"—a deceptively fabulous name for a laser that temporarily blinds people—use a crystal called Neodymium Yttrium Aluminum Garnet to emit a concentrated light beam that can strobe and modulate to blind and nauseate through closed eyes, in day or night, from as far as 1.5 miles. The light is green so as to fall within the parameters of the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which banned weapons that cause permanent blindness—the first time a weapon has been outlawed before it was invented. Models the size of a flashlight or handgun have been trialed by US police departments, and a larger, more powerful version was designed by BAE Systems specifically for anti-piracy, which can be integrated with a ship's existing radar system so as it be semi-autonomous.

The most sci-fi, and alarming, of these anti-piracy gadgets is the Active Denial System, or "pain ray": guns that shoot microwaves that penetrate the top layer of the skin from as far as 750 meters, creating the sensation of heat without actually burning. In tests on human subject, no one could bear the ray for more than five seconds. ADS was invented by the Air Force and taken to Iraq and Afghanistan, but never used; no one knows why, exactly. The defense manufacturer Raytheon developed a smaller version, the "Silent Guardian," which costs $3 million and has been marketed to police and anti-piracy security contractors. Doubts remain about the efficacy of ADS; fog or rain might disperse the heat wave, and reflective surfaces can create "hotspots" that double the ray's energy, which, if reflected again off water, could be especially severe. And, perhaps most concerning, is the pain ray's awesome potential for torture.

Using deadly force at sea is legal—kinda. The rash of hijackings encouraged many countries, including the U.S., to change their laws to allow merchant vessels to carry firearms in peacetime. This led to a proliferation of Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel (PCASP), usually ex-military or Special Forces, who, for around $25,000, will escort a ship through perilous waters. More than any gadget, PCASPs are credited with the waning number of hijackings. The private security industry is now worth $500 million a year. It's estimated around 40% of ships in the waters around Somali contract PCASP groups. To date, not a single one has been hijacked. [JN1]

Despite their prevalence, PCASPs remain controversial in the shipping industry. Their legality depends on the ship's Flag State, so every country, and every port, has its own rules. No industry-wide standard for training or certification exists; captains really have no idea who they're bringing aboard. And there is no obligation to file public reports of incidents at sea, or the means to really investigate crimes, which creates the potential for rogue guards to do terrible things with no consequences. But being so cheap and effective, the use of PCASPs will likely only increase. Armed civilians in gunfights with starving, desperate pirates is, for better or worse, the real future of shipping.

Whether it's the technology or tactics, piracy is on the decline around the Horn of Africa. But elsewhere it thrives. In recent years, the Strait of Malacca—a bottleneck in Indonesia, 1.7 miles at its narrowest, through which a third of the world's trade passes—has emerged as piracy's most dangerous locus. Half of the world's attacks now take place in these waters, according to Oceans beyond Piracy. 93% of attacks result in successful boarding.

Unlike Somalis, the bandits in Southeast Asia aren't interested in kidnapping or ransom, so they have little regard for the life of seafarers. They want the cargo: specifically, oil moving from the Persian Gulf to China, Japan and South Korea. These pirates aren't from small clans in impoverished villages; they're often part of international crime syndicates, with connections and capital. They work on leaked intelligence telling which ship to rob and when, a network to distribute the crude oil to refineries, and then on to foreign, often pre-arranged, buyers.

The traffic at the Strait of Malacca is such that all ships must slow to a crawl. Unlike the Somalis who ply the sprawling Gulf of Aden, the pirates of Southeast Asia don't have to chase. They just slide up to an oil tanker they already know everything about, quietly board, put guns to everyone's heads and siphon the cargo. And then they disappear into the crowd, disguised by their ordinariness. It remains to be seen how useful the sonic cannons or pain rays can be on an enemy who attacks with such stealth.

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