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Comment by bmitch3020 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The response can, and historically has, come from any nation, not just the one the ship is registered in.

For instance in the last (Somali) attack before this, a Maltese flagged tanker was boarded, and a Spanish warship arrived the next day and retook the ship.

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.

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?

There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".

UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.

> CTF-151 via UN

And Operation Atalanta by the EU.

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!

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.

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