Naval_Gazer said:
wanabedoc - A protected corridor would need to be 2,000 nm long and that's just for the east African coastal route, irrespective of traffic bound elsewhere. This would require an unrealistic number of warships to provide any effective security, i.e. be within a few minutes dash of any threatened vessel to exploit the brief window of opportunity you mention.
Until the pirates' nest is eradicated at source, a convoy system is the only reasonable alternative but, as ctfairway has indicated, the costs and delays involved in participating in such a scheme still outweigh the risk of being hijacked.
Forgive me for failing to make myself clear. I am not suggesting physical protection, but rather a change in law & philosophy to afford commercial ships legal protection. The idea was not that warships should patrol the whole corridor, I am suggesting that it should be legal to unleash the fury of whatever arsenal the commercial ships fancy carrying onto anybody who approaches them within this corridor. Everybody would have to know the rules and once they did they would know that if they toyed around they would get shot at. In a small arms fight between a massive container ship and a shitty wooden dhow, you wouldn't even have to be well trained to see the pirates off.
The advantage would be that you wouldn't have to wait until you were fired upon before firing back, because merely coming within, say, 2 miles of a commercial ship could be seen as a hostile act.