Thanks! Nick can chime in here once he's up - I'm the night owl (we're on SGT) and he's up in a few hours.

But the way I see it, most of the problems around piracy are systemic. I'll skip going into too much detail, but when economies are set up to benefit from a rise in pirate activity in their borders, you've created a loop that removes incentives to find a long-term solution.

The solutions have been exactly what you've suggested. One option for highly trafficked routes (like the Gulf of Aden) is to control a narrow part of the route well, so ships can use it. The IRTC[1] is a good example.

The other option is security. However, security may not always be possible. One reason is price (when we started Greywing, the per day cost of a security vessel sometimes exceed that of the tanker it was guarding!). The other is that security is still a volatile market, especially since suppliers always have to be located in the countries you're closest to. Security companies can pop in and out of existence, and the service is often a far cry from what you pay for.

There has been some work in the technology on the vessels - better training for the crew, better citadels, nonlethal deterrents, etc. However, these can only go so far when you're comparing the resolve of a pirate vessel to that of the crew on a tanker to survive.

From a software standpoint, routing makes a difference, but not as much as you might think. If a vessel needs to call at a port, there are often unavoidable routes that need to be taken. However, some of the early work we were doing focused on making sure that the captains and crew had a good idea of high and low alert days, as well as an idea of the mitigation measures to undertake to prepare for them.

Some of the products that were serving the security market when we started have since gone out of service, and I'm not personally aware of any yet that focus on operators, rather than nation-states and intelligence agencies. There's still open demand for services that focus on establishing trust and reputation around suppliers, aggregating good services, and enforcing due diligence.

This took me down a rabbit hole of our videos, but [2] is an example of what CRY4 looked like in the early days, when it was just piracy!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Recommended_Tran... [2] - https://vimeo.com/393361342

Ah, that's super interesting. The systemic issues make sense but I do wonder about incursions from foreign powers (e.g. Chinese fishing trawlers in W. Africa) but maybe these belong to a different category of issue.

RE Security & Pricing - that's fascinating. I would have expected this to be a standard business affiliated with the big insurers and run out of the big private contracting companies (e.g. Academi). Most of the tech I've seen is also for close proximity to the boat (e.g. water cannons, slippery mesh, stun grenades), is it because the ships can't engage until the pirates are very obviously going to attack? In my head I'm imagining patrols of swarm drones that drop boat trap nets before the boats can get very close to the ship

But all this is really cool, thanks for the response!

It is a space Academi have never operated in. Control Risks used to be in the maritime security space but assessed it as not having the right level of risk/reward because the prices became so commoditised. Running security for organisations like that in High Risk Areas like Iraq and Afghanistan still generates good margins but they don't experience those returns in the maritime space so they exited the market.

The cheapest and simplest solutions to piracy are avoidance and armed security. Many non-lethal methods have been trialled over the years but nothing seems to be as cheap and effective as a human with a weapon. The link between unlicensed fishing and piracy is clear. If you take away a persons livelihood they are going to look for alternatives. It would be interesting to look at how organisations like Sea Shepherd could use technology to augment illegal fishing detection and disruption. Right now they sometimes augment local government forces to give them an interdiction capability but it may be in future they provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance using tech and leave host nation forces to interdict illegal operators.

Got it, that makes sense. If you're able to hire private security from developing nations that still have good military programs (e.g. S. Africa, Philippines, Russia) then it's probably not all that expensive (if you can get them). Hmm, when I was thinking about unlicensed fishing I was more thinking about foreign nations taking advantage of poorer ones that can't control their maritime zones but the causal chain of what you described is quite clear.

1) https://chinaafricaproject.com/podcasts/out-of-control-china...