Another market failure?

A week or so ago we took the film 'Captain Phillips', over two sittings, as I found the loud, throbbing music a bit much after getting on for an hour of it.

A good enough film, about a large US registered container vessel - the Maersk Alabama - being attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia in 2009. But it left me rather cross. You had say £50 million's worth of container vessel being captured by four men operating from something scarcely bigger than a rowing boat and then being rescued by a massive US naval deployment, probably hundreds of millions worth. A capture which could easily have been seen off by a few ex-servicemen with heavy machine guns, cost piffling compared to that actually incurred. So why did the ship owners not do it?

Was it as simple as the marine carrying trade being very competitive and owners preferring to dump the costs of seeing off pirates on the worlds' navies and insurance companies rather than taking some elementary precautions themselves?

I am reminded that lots of merchant vessels carry flags of convenience, that is to say that they operate out of the marine equivalent of tax havens. With the owners not even paying any tax in support of the services they are expecting. To be fair, not the case in this particular case.

One argument against machine guns is suggested by the Wikipedia article on the subject which suggests there were thousands and thousands of passages in the seas in question - which means that putting guards on all of them would have been expensive. Convoys better VFM (to use an acronym which was on the tips of all civil service tongues at one stage in my career there).

PS 1: I am also reminded that I find western governments inappropriately squeamish when it comes to just shooting pirates or sinking their boats out of hand. Not sure that I am too bothered about such people getting a free and fair trial. Although that said, we used to have a place called execution dock in east London, so presumably at least some of the pirates infesting the eighteenth century seas got brought back for trial, fair or otherwise.

PS 2: and it just so happened that at about the same time as we watched this film, a Somali who had taken one of the smaller roles in it was convicted of a rather nasty assault, I think in a fast food outlet, in the Manchester area.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/market-failure.html.

Reference 2: Captain Phillips - Greengrass, Hanks and Abdi - 2013.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/06/marine-engineering.html.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=execution+dock. Not very close encounters with Execution Dock.

Reference 5: https://www.maersk.com/. A Danish company. No idea what its tax arrangements are.