"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."Santayana's quote is almost a cliché by now, but it seems every week brings another instance of it. The latest is the attack by Somalian pirates on the Maersk Alabama, the sixth such attack in the last week. Attorney General Eric Holder (why not the Secretary of Defense?) is quoted by the AP as saying that the the United States will take whatever steps are needed to protect U.S. shipping interests against pirates.
Well, there's one quite obvious step -- obvious, that is, to anyone who remembers the past. Convoys have been used to deter pirates as well as military attacks on merchant shipping at least since the Spanish treasure fleets of the 16th century, and have proved very effective. When the US entered the Second World War, 609 ships were sunk by German submarines before the Navy got around to setting up a convoy system, after which losses fell sharply.
The Navy now argues that they don't have enough resources to protect all the shipping in the waters off Somalia. They have set up a "Maritime Security Patrol Area" 1000 km by 10 km which commercial traffic is advised to stick to. But with 10 or fewer ships, they can't be everywhere even in this narrow corridor. So -- group merchant ships at the ends of the corridor under the protection of one-third of the force each while the remaining third escorts a group along the corridor and then brings the next group back.
No doubt merchant shippers will complain, as they did during the First World War, about the loss of productivity involved in having their ships wait for the next convoy. As Wikipedia points out in a rare display of irony, "The loss of productivity due to convoy delays was small compared with the loss of productivity due to ships being sunk."
