Pirate eye patch outwits 21st Century technology?

As school boys we were excited to learn that Western spies could now read number plates in Moscow’s Red Square – that was well over three decades ago. How come then, as the freed kidnap victims Paul and Rachel Chandler return home, a bunch of crude Somali pirates are able to run rings around the most sophisticated navies the world has ever known?

As drones wander about the border areas of Pakistan picking off alleged al-Qaeda leaders at will, these men are able to wander the high seas at will, snaring super tankers the size of several football pitches. How come?

Currently there are still dozens of ships held hostage, and some 400 sea-farers held hostage by Somali pirates. The EU/NATO fleet that is tasked with battling the pirates costs half a billion pounds a year to run. Sure, a good number of pirate vessels are frustrated by the force, but the Indian Ocean between Somalia and India remains the most dangerous maritime area the world has known since the North Atlantic came under fire from Germany’s U-boats.

Drones, satellites, high flying spy planes, radar, high powered computing, you name it, the world has it in abundance. Yet the pirates are not yet losing. Saudi Arabia has just seen a vast multi-million pound ransom paid to free one of her super tankers.

Will not history judge that in the early 21st Century humankind, at the pinnacle of technological achievement, in a time of war, the international community failed against some of the most primitive criminal forces deploying methods of the Middle Ages?

So what’s the problem? Is it that the world, despite spending half a billion a year, doesn’t really take Somali piracy seriously? Or is it that all that brilliant 21st Century technology proves close to useless when it comes to such a test on the high seas?

In those far off school days we used to be taught about quarantine – fixing a maritime boundary beyond which the “enemy” would not be allowed to venture. We were told how useful aircraft carriers were in policing such a zone with their fast flying harrier jump jets.

There is no full-time air craft carrier off Somalia. At the last count there were three naval reconnaissance aircraft in the region. Never mind, at least, if the pirates sport a number plate, we can still presumably read it from a very long way away.