[OldDeckHand]

"Has there ever been a actual successful opposed boarding of a ship on the high seas in the face of armed resistance since World War II, or even since the 19th century? "

Oh yeah. In these very waters, and in the last 12-months. The French just did it a few weeks ago. What's problematic is those vessels were large container ships or oil tankers. This was a 60-ft sailing yacht, that provided our special operators no room to maneuver. Scale, in this instance, would have worked very much against the aggressors.

[The Pack Knight]

Ah, ok. I'd heard about those captures, but I wasn't certain whether the French faced active resistance or whether they just caught the pirates napping. I certainly knew of some other famous hostile boardings over the last several decades, but they were mostly events like the Pueblo Incident where no real defense was mounted.

I'd mostly been thinking about this issue in connection with the Iranian ships in the eastern Med. Specifically, I was considering the scenario whereby the Iranian warships would be used to escort another "relief flotilla" to Gaza, with the flotilla loaded with both volunteer Westerners as human shields and "volunteer marines" such as Iran threatened to send last summer.

I figured that it would be almost impossible for the Israelis to attempt to board the flotilla ships due to the early warning provided by the warships. Even Alvand's rudimentary AA capabilities would have to be neutralized before any assault could be attempted, and her destruction would give a pretty clear signal to the "volunteer marines" that it's time to drop their [edit] and grab their socks. That would probably have forced the Israelis to either sink the flotilla ships, human shields and all, or let them put in at Gaza - a definite Sophie's Choice for Israel.

[PapaBear3625]

The real, underlying problem is that we are treating the piracy as crime, rather than as acts of war by Somalis against the rest of the world.