Petraeus to maritime industry: Get serious about piracy

Petraeus to maritime industry: Get serious about piracy    Partnering with nations to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia is one of the top priorities for U.S. Central Command in the next year, but merchant shipping companies ultimately must do more to protect themselves from capture, Gen. David H. Petraeus told a House Appropriations subcommittee on Friday.   
   Vessel operators should consider hiring armed guards, stringing up concertina wire along railings and unbolting boarding ladders because there are not enough naval forces in the area to guarantee their safety, Petraeus said, according to coverage from Bloomberg.
   The U.S. military uses armed guards on many commercial ships carrying military cargo to fend off would-be pirates, who have proliferated during the past year as hijacking ships and demanding ransom has become a lucrative industry.
   'It is important for the maritime industry to get more serious about this problem,' Petraeus said.
   As if on cue, an Italian cruise ship repulsed a pirate attack when an onboard security crew fired back, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. It said six armed pirates in a speedboat attacked the ship, which had 1,500 people onboard.
   The hearing touched on a range of threats that CENTCOM is dealing with in Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East.
   The number of piracy attacks in the Gulf of Aden and eastward increased almost 10-fold in the first quarter of the year compared to 2008, the International Maritime Bureau reported last week. the IMB reported 61 incidents during the first three months of the year, compared to six a year ago. Some question whether all the reports of piracy incidents are credible threats, but even accounting for some false alarms from ship captains the numbers have grown considerably, although they are still small in percentage terms compared to the volume of ship traffic through the area.
   But Petraeus warned ocean carriers to stop treating piracy as a manageable cost of doing business that can be dealt with through higher insurance rates and affordable ransoms to recover ships and crews.
   'Well, that price is going up, and, of course, the violence is going up,' he said. ' Eric Kulisch