According to Politico, Ron Paul and various other "national security experts" are calling on the US to revive the practice of granting Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private citizens, which would allow them to hire ships of war to hunt down the pirates plaguing the Somali coast and the Gulf of Aden:
In a YouTube video earlier this week, Paul suggested lawmakers consider issuing letters, which could relieve American naval ships from being the nation’s primary pirate responders — a free-market solution to make the high seas safer for cargo ships. “I think if every potential pirate knew this would be the case, they would have second thoughts because they could probably be blown out of the water rather easily if those were the conditions,” Paul said. Theoretically, hiring bounty hunters would also be a cheaper option.
National security experts estimate that this week’s ship captain rescue by Navy SEALs cost tens of millions, although a Navy spokesman says the military cannot confirm the exact cost of the mission. Instead, privateers would be incentivized to patrol the ocean looking for key targets — and money would be paid only to the contractor who completed the job.
“If we have 100 American wanna-be Rambos patrolling the seas, it’s probably a good way of getting the job done,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow and security expert Eli Lehrer. “Right now we have a Navy designed mostly to fight other navies. The weapons we have are all excellent, but they may not be the best ones to fight these kinds of pirates. The only cost under letters of marque would be some sort of bounty for the pirates.”
Look, as a naval history geek I'm as excited about a revival of letters of marque as anybody. However, I think in this case it's a situation of way too much faith that the free market is the way to go. First of all, the situation described by Paul would not really be letters of marque and reprisal, because those authorize people to sieze enemy ships. Nobody wants some pirate's leaky fishing raft- basically he's suggesting putting bounties on the pirates.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is that we no longer have the bureaucracy of "Prize Courts," which were used by Western navies from the 1500s through the late 1800s, and had administrative judges that determined whether a seized ship was actually an enemy's ship- and if it wasn't it would be given back. These institutions were around for a long time, and had experienced judges and lots of credibility, which would be hard to duplicate with some kind of jury-rigged office in the Navy Department. The second, more critical problem, is that they would have to operate without even a ship as evidence. If some modern-day buccaneer shows up at the Navy Department or wherever with bits of a sunken boat and the scalp of some Somali teenager, how do we figure out if he killed a pirate or a fisherman?
I'm sure the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow meant it to sound like a good idea, but does the concept of "100 American would-be Rambos" ramming around the Somali shore sound like something that would actually help? Sure, piracy might fall, but at what cost? What Paul is describing seems somewhat more like the bounties-for-Indian-scalps policies of colonial America and Mexico... and we know how that worked out:
Sonora was the first state to enact a scalp bounty law; in 1835, offering 100 pesos for the scalps of braves (with a peso roughly equal to an American silver dollar). An American named James Johnson sparked the boom period in 1837 when he fired a concealed canon at close range on unarmed Apaches. The blast tore into Apache warriors as well as women and children, and Johnson and his troops swarmed into the mass of natives, killing and scalping. While this event occurred in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, the scalps were cashed in Sonora, and the entire incident proved how profitable scalp hunting could be. It also flamed native animosity towards both Mexicans and Anglos, encouraging more raids and greater violence (a cycle that continued throughout this era). Soon afterward, Chihuahua enacted a similar law offering a graded bounty: $100 for braves; $50 for squaws; $25 for children under fourteen (although the latter two were ostensibly for live captives).
No comments:
Post a Comment