FLOATING ARMORIES AROUND THE WORLD

Time for a unified approach to managing or running these floating armories. Who can impose?

Just imagine if there are floating armories all around the world, purportedly being used to save merchant shipping from Pirates! Actually they are ALL EXTRA JUDICIAL as they are not even technically controlled or answerable to the Country to which the armory is flagged. IN SHORT PRIVATEERS.

In this case the GOSL was sucked in to lend its own arms to our sole privateer, Avant Garde for which it received a certain amount of money! Whether the amount received was reasonable when compared to the risk taken is debatable and a moot point at present.

It is apparent that floating armories are NOT regulated, and under no international jurisdiction, and no treaty (with signatories) has been signed regulating what is permissible here. They were set up to counter acts of piracy to protect Merchant Shipping, and NO country was willing to take over responsibility of policing the high seas, so the shippers had to pay to do it.

Floating Armories was the resulting compromise, and the UN would rather forget about their existence, as they are unable to enforce any regulation, as no one is willing to pay for a fleet of ships for the UN!!!!!  

Considering the Shipping companies are paying over US$2B a year for protection, this big time protection racket could be run by the shipping companies themselves, after all they have their own ships!

They would however rather contract this work to third parties, as they believe it will cost them much more, as the pirates themselves run the floating armories. Their risk advisers have informed them that if they try to do it alone, all the current floating armories will become the pirates to threaten them!

I trust the reader now realizes what a highly sophisticated protection racket it has turned out to be. It is the largest such business, bigger than the Mafia that the world has ever seen due to the trillions of dollars of shipping that straddles the world trade. 

With just in time production, and logistics, ships cannot delay even one day, as the production lines of car assembly plants or I phone production lines depend on the logistics of the movement of parts and products around the world.

With increasing international terrorism, it is most likely that the US will use its Navy to threaten the destruction of any ship thought to assist terrorists and thereby keep them in check. The US Spy Satellites keep a close check on their movement on a daily and hourly basis, to monitor all arms movements of any significance. 

Given all of the above it is better for the SL Navy to manage this business through a private subsidiary such as Rakna Lanka in preference to subcontracting it out to privateers due to the sensitive nature of the work at hand, how it is done is the question  for another day.