What “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’” Can Teach Us About Piracy

I don’t know how many of you have played the game “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’”—either the old computer game or the newer XBox version—but for a while I was a devotée of the XBox game and I think it illustrates some key points about pirate policy that endure for the modern day. The main one is that anti-pirate military patrols are pretty much a lost cause. The ocean is just too big. A pirate only gets taken down this way because of hubris—you might deliberately try to attack and seize a military ship and wind up biting off more than you can chew. But the risks of actually getting caught are tiny relative to the rewards of successful piracy.

The only countermeasure that really works well is to escort a dedicated merchant vessel with small anti-pirate military craft. This, however, is rarely done for the exact same reason that we’re hesitant to do it today—it’s expensive. Arming the merchant vessels themselves is a geopolitically and legally dicey move in today’s environment. But “Pirates!” illustrates that this is inherently problematic as there are serious tradeoffs between cargo capacity, speed, turning performance, and cargo capacity that give dedicated pirate ships an intrinsic advantage against any kind of economically reasonable hybrid vessel.

So how can the pirates be stopped? Well, fundamentally the viability of your enterprise is “Pirates!” rests on the geopolitical chaos on land. The Caribbean islands are politically fragmented between Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonies with possessions of different nationalities mixed together and everyone always at war with someone else. Consequently, out by the main range of islands you’re never far from a friendly port where you can duck in to resupply, to sell your wares, to recruit more crew, to fix your ship, whatever. When things can get problematic is if you start spending time in the parts of the mainland that are uniformly under Spanish control. Here, if the Spanish get hostile enough that they won’t let you dock in their cities you can get in real trouble. Not because the Spanish ships are so militarily formidable, but simply because the sheer distance to safe harbor reduces your options. If your pirate crew is actually strong enough to defeat the Spanish garrison on land, you’re fine. But if not, you might be done for.

To make a long story short, to curb the Somali pirate problem you need to fight them on land. This was recognized by everyone back in December but it hasn’t materialized since nobody really wants to try to mount a serious operation to bring Somali territory under control. And far be it from me to question that decision. I don’t want to either. But given that reality, while we can try to mitigate the pirate problem at sea, we’re never going to resolve it and suggestions that the Obama administration should snap its fingers and make this problem go away are absurd. What we need to do is wait until such time as someone or other establishes some kind of coherent control over Somali territory and then deal with piracy issues as part of our relationship with that person / group / organization or whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, the last time it appeared that a coherent de facto government was emerging in Somalia—the Islamic Courts Movement—we helped sponsor an Ethiopian invasion that plunged the country back into chaos. We need to stop doing that! You can read about Somalia in greater detail on the ENOUGH Project’s website, but the baseline point I would make is that we could start helping in Somalia by resolving to not do things that make the situation worse anymore.