October 8, 2026:
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have agreed to do whatever it takes to keep the Strait of Malacca safe and available for international shipping. Currently, the Straits are safe to use, but it wasn’t always that way. Twelve years ago, the international effort to suppress Somali piracy halted and reversed the increased piracy off the coast of Somalia, but at the same time there was a major increase in attacks in the Straits of Malacca. Big as in a sevenfold increase from 2009 to 2013 (when there were 150 attacks). There was also a jump (to 50 attacks a year) off Nigeria. The big difference is that it was only off Somalia that ships and crews were taken and held for ransom for long periods. Everywhere else, the pirates were usually only interested in robbing the crew and stealing anything portable that they could get into their small boats. Off the Nigerian coast, pirates occasionally take some ship officers with them to hold for ransom. Another tactic is to turn off tracking devices and force the crew to move small tankers to remote locations, where most of the cargo (oil) can be transferred to another ship and later sold on the black market. But that sort of thing requires a lot of organization, nerve, and luck. So, most attacks are armed robbery. Given the amount of portable electronics on a seagoing ship (both company and personal), a half dozen armed pirates can get several thousand dollars per ship hit. Fences on shore pay cash for this stuff and quickly move it out of the country. In the last year there has been a minor resurgence of piracy off the Somali coast.
What worries shipping companies using the Malacca Strait isn't the theft; it’s the possibility of terrorists using pirates, or pirates causing an accident that blocks these vital straits. Piracy in the vital Strait of Malacca (where most of the world's oil exports pass through) has worsened and so has the risk of catastrophe.
For the pirates, there are lots of targets, with over 50,000 large ships moving through the Strait of Malacca each year. That’s 120-150 a day. Lots of targets. The 800-kilometer-long strait runs between Malaysia and Indonesia, is 65 kilometers wide at its narrowest, and is generally 27-37 meters deep. The strait's shallow, tricky waters force large ships to slow down (under 30 kilometers an hour) so speedboats can catch them. But if there’s a collision, especially one involving a loaded oil tanker, the oil spill could be huge, and a large ship sinking in the strait could block or throttle traffic for months.
There’s no easy solution to piracy in the Strait of Malacca. Pirates usually operate on the margins of society, trying to get a cut of the good life when options are limited. This is usually in areas where state control is weakest or absent, in failing and flailed states. A flailing state is something like Nigeria, Indonesia, or the Philippines, where the government manages to keep things together but faces serious problems in regions that are sometimes out of control. In a failed state, areas have little government, and pirates can do whatever they want most of the time. In the Strait of Malacca, the problem is that many poor (or not so poor but very ambitious) people have access to boats and experience using them at sea. Speeding next to a huge tanker or container ship at night in the Strait of Malacca and using a grappling hook or very tall ladder to get aboard is not for the faint of heart or anyone with no experience on the water. But as more of these attacks succeed, more people are tempted to try, and more are doing so.
James F Dunnigan