Rush Makes An Odd Argument

As if that's a surprise! But it is an interesting question:

Now, a lot of people ask, "Rush, how come these ships aren't armed?" Everybody says just give some machine guns to the crew when you see the pirates showing up, wipe 'em out. You maritime captains out there can back me up on this, but the historical reason why you don't arm the crew on a cargo vessel is to guard against mutiny against the captain and the ship, 'cause you know how CEOs are hated today, and the captain of the ship is a CEO, and employees resent and they're being told to resent the boss.

So the boss makes you do some things on board, if you've got machine guns ostensibly to gun down the Somali pirates, you could conduct a mutiny. So that's one of the reasons that they aren't armed.

Well, I don't know why the merchant vessels aren't armed. Worrying about mutinies on these merchant vessels seems silly, however.

But I can think of one plausible reason why crews aren't armed: a substantial chunk of the traffic involves the transport of petroleum, and in that trade you do not want anyone, anywhere near the ship, to possess arms, for any reason, whatsoever. A second reason may be that, whether ships carry petroleum or not, carrying arms is guaranteed to escalate confrontations. To date, it's been cheaper and safer to ransom vessels and crews.

But of course, appeasement guarantees that piracy will continue, and will escalate. And so we are approaching armed confrontation anyway. There are dozens of merchant vessel crewmen already held hostage (Russians and Filipinos and others) and escalation of the conflict appears inevitable.

So far, the U.S. navy has been so involved with its Middle East adventures that it hasn't cared about the decay of maritime law right under its nose. The Indian navy has been most pro-active in pushing back against the Somali pirates. Whether the U.S. takes the lead now is unclear. Probably not, unless the pirates get cocky.