Q-Ships and Convoys

[Ultimo Tiger]

The simple answer to this problem is this........

Get the damn navy to protect the convoys. It surely cna't be that hard to have a DDG or two protecting them with the odd support ship?

[Lesforan]

With all the international armada of ships off Somalia now, it didn't stop the pirates from hijacking an Indian ship yesterday with 13 crew.

Maybe if actual convoys were formed up, with ships arranged to mutually support each other with covering fire.
Something like the Allied bomber formations in WWII.

[chuck]

The simple answer to this problem is this........

Get the damn navy to protect the convoys. It surely cna't be that hard to have a DDG or two protecting them with the odd support ship?

It will take a lot more than a DDG or two to effectively protect such heavy volume of traffic over such an extensive area. Convoy is not practiceable because:

1. There arn't enough naval forces on hand even to protect the convoys.

2. There is a compelling reason why merchant ships don't form convoys just for the hell of it. Convoying is very expensive and create huge inefficiencies in the shipping business. Convoying merchant ships would force majority of the participants to operate at convoy speed, which is the speed of the slowest ship and altogether difference from most ship's own most economic speed. Thus convoying would hugely increase the fuel cost of shipping. To form convoys loaded ships must wait around for all participants to arrive. A ship waiting around is a ship that's not making money. But the crew still eats and need to be paid. Thus assembling convoys increase cost while decreasing the effective carrying capacity of the merchant fleet. With convoying ships must strive to depart their ports more or less at the same time, and arrive at their destination more or less at the same time, thus creating huge bottlenecks in the ports at both ends, thus further delaying loading and unloading, and creating further instances of ships sitting around not making money. All these also combined to make transportation slower, which reduces the rates that people with goods to ship would be inclined to pay, thus furthering crimping the profit in the shipping business. Taken all together, effective convoying would probably cost the shipping industry all together many times more than just paying off an odd pirate or two once every few weeks and accept a increase in insurance premiums. This doesn't even touch the question of who is to pay for the naval escorts? Tax payers or the shipping industry?

[chuck]

In the end, the most effective, not to mention cost effective, way of dealing with piracy issue is undoubtedly to substantially improve the governance and administration of the land from which the pirates came.

[Jack Ray]

The simple answer to this problem is this........

Get the damn navy to protect the convoys. It surely cna't be that hard to have a DDG or two protecting them with the odd support ship?

It will take a lot more than a DDG or two to effectively protect such heavy volume of traffic over such an extensive area. Convoy is not practiceable because:

1. There arn't enough naval forces on hand even to protect the convoys.

2. There is a compelling reason why merchant ships don't form convoys just for the hell of it. Convoying is very expensive and create huge inefficiencies in the shipping business. Convoying merchant ships would force majority of the participants to operate at convoy speed, which is the speed of the slowest ship and altogether difference from most ship's own most economic speed. Thus convoying would hugely increase the fuel cost of shipping. To form convoys loaded ships must wait around for all participants to arrive. A ship waiting around is a ship that's not making money. But the crew still eats and need to be paid. Thus assembling convoys increase cost while decreasing the effective carrying capacity of the merchant fleet. With convoying ships must strive to depart their ports more or less at the same time, and arrive at their destination more or less at the same time, thus creating huge bottlenecks in the ports at both ends, thus further delaying loading and unloading, and creating further instances of ships sitting around not making money. All these also combined to make transportation slower, which reduces the rates that people with goods to ship would be inclined to pay, thus furthering crimping the profit in the shipping business. Taken all together, effective convoying would probably cost the shipping industry all together many times more than just paying off an odd pirate or two once every few weeks and accept a increase in insurance premiums. This doesn't even touch the question of who is to pay for the naval escorts? Tax payers or the shipping industry?

I thought that convoys were commonly used in the South China Sea to protect against the pirates there.

Jack

[chuck]

Only near strait of Malacca, where the "convoy" is ad hoc, two or three ships than chance together travel together over the very short sea way. Nothing like an organized open sea convoy exists in South China Sea. The last time when real systematic convoys were seen, it was in the Persian Gulf during the late 1980s, when it took a substantial portion of Reagan's 600 ship navy to protect the tanker traffic.