GWOT and Pirates

While the US media spills endless ink and fells acres of trees on what Bush said or did not say four years ago, Der Spiegel describes the futuristic weapons in last week's pirate attack of a cruise ship:

Most of the luxury liner's 151 passengers were still asleep, as the pirates began to open fire with machine guns from two motor boats. With bullets bouncing off the hull, the Norwegian Captain Sven Erik Pedersen warned his guests over the intercom: "Stay inside, we are under attack."

Charles Supple, a 78-year-old passenger, pulled his camera just as one of the pirates only 40 meters away steadied a rocket propelled grenade and fired. Supple saw a flash and quickly threw himself on the deck before the shot exploded just overhead. "It was extremely frightening," he said.

The Spirit was in extreme danger and a few of the ship's crew tried to wash the attackers into the sea with fire hoses. But it was a new high-tech weapon that allowed Captain Pedersen to escape the floating villains with only minimal damage to his vessel. In charge of ship security was a fearless former Gurkha -- the elite soldiers from Nepal in the British army. It was he who used a futuristic sonic cannon developed by the Pentagon to send the pirates packing.

Until now, it wasn't widely known that the US Defense Department was sharing the so-called Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) with commercial cruise ships. The weapon is essentially a small dish that beams hellishly loud noise that is deafening but not lethal. Weighing 20 kilograms and as big as a TV satellite dish, the device looks deceptively harmless. But once trained on its target, it blasts a tight beam of painful siren-like sound.

It's not known how the grinning pirates 160 kilometers off the coast of the Horn of Africa reacted as they suddenly were hit by the LRAD. But they were close, and the closer one is to the sonic cannon, the worse the effect is. It's possible they received permanent hearing damage, but at the very least they experienced an excruciating headache and ear pain to the point that they could no longer see or hear. They also quickly lost the desire to board the ship.

If pirates have missiles and pleasure boats have LRAD, what must Al Qaeda have?--and what do US warships need?

(via reader Ken Robinson)