Monday Reading

Fred Fry has some cold weather ship photos and bunches of links to allow you to pretend to be working at Maritime Monday 157.

Also at gCaptain, a call for more UAV's to fight the Somali pirates.

Admiral Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard on the World's Pirate Threat.

Credit to the Commander in Chief for the Capt. Phillips rescue. I am not an Obama supporter, but after days of him being bashed for "not taking action" - he should get credit when due when action happened.

UPDATE: One of the best lines of the weekend as a Naval Academy midshipman writing at the U.S. Naval Institute Blog sees through the veil:

“Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding the Greek ship anchored in the Somali town of Gaan, said: ‘Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying,’ he told The Associated Press. ‘We will retaliate (for) the killings of our men.’”

Taken from here. This is an interesting quotation to me as it relays the pirate’s sense of entitlement. For some reason, he thinks that they have a right to seize property and detain foreign citizens. The man quoted above seems to be as sure of his right to rob as we are sure of our right to freedom on the high seas. I wonder what led him to think this? Perhaps they’ve been conditioned to consider it a right given that payment of ransom is the standard procedure of dealing with pirates.

Time to change that attitude of entitlement.