Combating piracy in the Sulu-Celebes Sea | The Strategist

A couple of items - primary one is that the ASG is using it to raise funds for building up their terror network and with IS support. It changed it from bandit operations to something very different. The other is the lack of cooperation in an area overlapped by three or four countries and the need for one nation to facilitate the discussions and get the joint patrols into real time effort. One of the biggest roles PACOM and 7th Fleet could be playing is one to support a regional navy initiative (and not to lead it..)

LTC (Join to see) The main reason it is gaining traction is somebody is paying the ransom and the word has got out to desperate people with nothing to lose. It has made fishermen into pirates.

While I don't know if this is the case in Sulu-Celebes my experience has been that everybody is quick to mislabel criminal activity as terrorism. In Afghanistan it was the "Taliban" that was committing crimes, only it was really just criminals. The same thing in Iraq. It is just a label for organized crime and it benefits the terrorist organization to claim a crime as it gets them exposure.

When I worked in Africa every pirate was labeled as a "Somali pirate". Most of the people we dealt with did not even speak Somali. They were just locals that grabbed an AK and boat and headed out for the big pay off. Where I was it was Japanese fishing trawlers.