Piracy's dramatic resurgence has accelerated a profound change of heart among the shipping companies whose vessels ply East African waters. No longer content to entrust their safety to naval forces, shippers are mulling the wide adoption of seaborne private soldiers -- in a word, mercenaries, either sailing aboard targeted ships or riding shotgun in their own armed escort vessels. Mercenaries are a potentially more effective, but politically risky, short-term solution to an escalating crisis.

There was just one hijacking in the Gulf of Aden between July and September last year, compared to 17 during the same period in 2008. That led NATO Commodore Steve Chick to label the piracy decline "a fact" last September. At the time Chick, a British navy officer, led one of several international flotillas assigned to interdict pirates.

But the lull in hijackings was deceptive, as the January attacks proved. There are around 40 warships from more than a dozen nations in the region. But they must patrol some 2 million square miles of ocean teeming with thousands of commercial vessels and perhaps hundreds of bandits, many disguised as fishermen. The window of opportunity for responding to a pirate attack is just a few minutes; the chances are slim that a warship will be close enough to help before pirates gain control of the targeted vessel.

The January hijackings underscored this reality and perhaps represented a tipping point for shipping companies. "Initially ship owners seemed to concur that they would do what they've always done and have navies patrol the region," Claude Berube, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, told World Politics Review. "I think we're on the cusp of the next threshold, in which privately owned escort vessels are more acceptable."

Ship guards and private escorts are potentially more effective because they remain with a vessel at all times, ready to repel pirates at the attackers' most vulnerable moment: as they approach the heaving vessel and attempt to scale its sheer sides. "Every ship transiting the area should have four [security] professionals on board," John Dalby, founder of Spain-based maritime security company Marine Risk, told World Politics Review.

Guards have proved effective in the past. In April last year, a six-man security team on the passenger liner Melody fired water hoses and pistols to beat back Somali boarders. In December, guards aboard a Spanish fishing vessel fired weapons and repelled what they described as two pirate boats. Today many Spanish vessels carry armed men in international waters, after Madrid officially authorized the practice.

Mercenaries are also cheaper compared to the expense of maintaining high-tech warships in African waters. Dalby said that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to maintain the naval patrols have saved perhaps a few million dollars in ransoms. He argued that even putting guards on every commercial vessel in East Africa would be less costly than the current naval approach.

Maersk Lines, a Danish shipper that has had several vessels attacked and seized, was one of the first to experiment with mercenaries when it hired a Tanzanian navy crew as escorts in 2008. The Yemeni coast guard also makes its vessels available for hire. "Renting" a cash-strapped regional navy represents a "hybrid" approach to vessel-protection, Berube said. The downside is that African navies, meant to be public agencies, could become dependent on private employment.

A strictly commercial solution is better, but not without its own risks. For one, shippers must contend with the poor image many mercenary firms project. The U.S. security company Xe -- formerly known as Blackwater -- launched a for-hire ship-protection business in 2007, but shut it down just two years later after failing to win a single contract. Blackwater "had strikes against it," Berube explained, because of its involvement in several alleged killings in Iraq.

The wide employment of ship guards would also require an international consensus on the legal regime governing the guards' potentially lethal actions. Many nations are uncomfortable allowing vessels with armed escorts to enter their ports. "The capability is there if the will is there," Dalby said. "Governments and owners can authorize the carrying on board of professional maritime security teams who are fully trained."

Dalby emphasized the "fully trained" caveat. He pointed to the first contingent of Spanish guards as examples of sea mercenaries who weren't always prepared for their dangerous and politically sensitive roles. "They were ex-supermarket security guards. They happened to have gun licenses . . . and had been on a one-week training course in a swimming pool. That was the extent of it." Dalby said Spanish ship captains accused their guards of being "incompetent."

Sea mercenaries might be the best defense against pirates. "But they must be fully and professionally trained," Dalby stressed. "The professionals are not there to do a 'Blackwater.'"

**David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of "War Bots." He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.