The frightening increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia since the turn of the present century demonstrates just how fast this kind of threat can emerge and how severe the difficulties involved in understanding and subduing it can be. Since 1992, in fact, there have been 3,583 piratical attacks worldwide. According to the United Kingdom's House of Commons Transport Committee: "This represents an increase from 1993 to 2005 of 168%. In the same period, 340 crew members and passengers died at the hands of pirates, and 464 received injuries. In 2005 alone piracy resulted in over 150 injuries and assaults and over 650 crew members were taken hostage or kidnapped." (1) Recent assaults on Japanese and French vessels near Somalia and the military response by the latter in April 2008 demonstrate the lasting significance of this problem and the complexity of its roots. (2)

Given the definition of piracy crafted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS), most activity characterized by that name over the past decade actually comes far closer to armed robbery than actual piracy. (3) In Malaysia and Indochina, traditional hotbeds of this practice, most incidents reported by the International Maritime Bureau (or IMB, a division of the International Chamber of Commerce, or ICC) actually take place at the pier, while the ship rests at anchor, or in territorial waters, a distinction often not made in gathering the statistics.

The nature of this definitional problem in its Somali form presents a contrast with the historical Asian paradigm. Pursuit, seizure, and deprivation at sea in waters bordering the Gulf of Aden and in the Indian Ocean fall more clearly than the Asian events into the UNCLOS definition of piracy. This kind of lawlessness has always presented political and international complexities, made more difficult by national jurisdictions, corporate motives, and the scattered geography of the broader Asian region. In the Horn of Africa, part of the considerable expanse patrolled by U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command and Combined Task Force 150, the geography and the jurisdictional difficulties, while not simple, do not present the same level of complexity.

The proximity of politically unstable nations or territories has regularly emerged as both cause of and permission for armed robbery or piracy at sea. (4) The northeast and eastern coasts of Somalia, at the Horn of Africa, have caught the attention of the IMB, which reported a very "alarming rise" in what it called piracy beginning in midsummer 2005. Somalia's internal unrest, its lack of government control, and the authority of local clan warlords have created a favorable climate for maritime crime, one that often gives thieves and pirates permission to act freely.

The IMB has called for a combined response and solution--that is, international naval assistance, especially along the Somali coast. It also initially encouraged merchant masters and navigators to observe a coastal approach limit of at least fifty nautical miles. The threat to international commerce extends to cargo and container ships, oil tankers,...