Professor Elam

A summary of the story to date including the resuce appears here.

Management strategy outlines the overall goals of a company and how to get there. The same holds true for foreign policy for a country. It seems to me that the Pirates learned quite a bit at a relatively cheap cost to them, pirates after all are somewhat expendable in that line of work, not to be callous but….

Most of you are too young to recall the Evil Empire (Peggy Noonan, Reagan speechwriter's phrase) of the old Soviet Union. Say what you will, they never had a pirate problem. Yes they finally made a big mistake in Afghanistan, and we seem to be follwoing their example there. 

The big problem here is that the pirates have no real reason to fear anyone.  After all they only asked for $2 M dollars, pretty cheap considering an entire, ship, cargo, crew, and other ships are held hostage. Why would they be afraid, no nation has done anything to stop them and the cheap ransom is priced on I think, the theory that it is just cheaper to pay than fight. this is precisely the same thing that happened two hundred years ago with the Barbary Pirates. Ransoms were demanded from British and French ships and kidnappings were in vogue. It finally got to be too much and the US and Britain finally took action (to the shores of Tripoli, Marine Hymn) forming the basis for the modern US Navy.  Google wikipedia.org on barbary pirates

What do you suppose it cost us sending multiple warships, having people up 24/7 watching satellite images, burning up phone lines about negotiations with Pirates, now there is an oxymoron, and not to mention the testosterone charged parachute drop at night from an airplane into the ocean which miraculously worked, ie, this is not a movie, the military is usually not this lucky in real life. And then the great Tom Clancy ending, shooting from a rolling ship, and again, they hit the pirates not the Captain. Absurdly I am sure the permission to fire had to come from the White House. Lyndon Johnson tried to run the Viet Nam war that way, it did not work.

A strategic policy would be that massive retaliation occurs if pirates even think about trying to take our ships. Our ships are armed and ready. If boarded  the ships  are armed and ready. I read that the pirates come abord with knves in each hand and another between their teeth, a ferocious image to be sure. Funny, for all our high tech stuff, isn't this the way pirates have always boarded ships. 

Anyway, there should be no comments about we are trying to negotiate to avoid the loss of life. I mean , how reassuring do we need to be to the pirates?  No Hillary, we are proceeding in such a fashion to make sure no one very thinks about trying this again,Trust me, in the larger issue, all this has not been lost on Vladimir Putin, a KGB trained pirate himself, with eyes on re acquiring his former Republics….not to mention dominating Europe by control of their sole energy sources.

Do you think any of this scares that chap in North Korea who just launched his own missle?

But I digress. the lesson here aside from international diplomacy, is that a company needs to proceed in the same manner. I see that today MSFT is again trying to buy Yahoo or someone else. MSFT has to buy the competition, the never are THE competition…..