U.S. Navy officer monitors captured Ukrainian merchant ship off Somali coast.

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AT THIS TIME EVERY YEAR, the media have a field day declaring various people, groups and things to be Man of the Year, Charity of the Year, and so forth. And years will be deemed famous for this or that. One possibility for honoring 2008 would be as “the Year of the Pirate.”

Until recently, most Americans probably thought of pirates either as characters from the distant past or subjects from popular Hollywood movies. Unfortunately, events in the Middle East last year have revived piracy as a serious threat to maritime commerce and a problem for all seagoing nations.

Operating out of Somalia, a country that has no functioning government, pirates using small, fast boats attacked more than 100 ships in 2008, captured 42, and are still holding 14 and their crews and cargoes hostage. Estimates on the amount of ransom paid run as high as $150 million. The small risk associated with such enormous payoffs caused Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, to comment, “There’s no downside to being a pirate right now.”

Because American ships have largely avoided the threat, U.S. taxpayers might understandably wonder why their navy is involved. Those who wonder should consider the following.

First, piracy is an evil that needs to be eliminated. The idea of fighting evil isn’t popular right now, but that hasn’t always been the case. At one time, pirates were considered to be hostis humani generis, enemies of mankind, who could be hunted down and killed or captured by any nation. In the words of the famed jurist William Blackstone, piracy “is an offense against the universal law of society.”

A more pragmatic answer is that piracy increases the cost of transporting goods on the high seas regardless of whose ships are being used. Ultimately, Americans will pay the increased price for those goods.

Following the War of Independence, some Americans proposed an economic approach to dealing with pirates along the Barbary Coast of North Africa, who began preying on American merchant ships in the Mediterranean. The United States had disbanded its navy and was operating on the naïve belief that no one would interfere with our trade because we presented no military threat. Americans who held that view argued that the cost of building a navy would be greater than that of paying tribute to the pirates.

The government tried both methods and found that paying tribute might work in the short run, but the pirates invariably upped the ante. Once that lesson sunk in, Congress created the Department of the Navy, in 1798, authorized the construction of powerful warships, and sent them off to take on the pirates. The results weren’t perfect, but they were better than those produced by submitting to the pirates, and a lot more honorable.

Another reason to take on the pirates is that they will eventually kill innocent Americans if we don’t. Those Americans might be merchant marine sailors, or they might be passengers on cruise ships such as Leon Klinghoffer, who, in 1985, was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. They pushed him overboard in his wheelchair.

Finally, such Islamist terrorist groups as al-Qaida will inevitably join forces with the largely Islamic pirates operating from Somalia if they haven’t already done so. Such cooperation would provide the terrorists with another source of funds as well as access to military supplies and weapons, such as those on board one of the ships currently being held by the pirates.

In response to the piracy, a loosely constructed coalition of naval forces has been gathering in the Gulf of Aden, where much of today’s piracy has been taking place, and the U.N. Security Council has passed resolutions authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to deal with the problem.

The question remains, however, whether such efforts will succeed.

The typical Security Council reaction to flagrant disregard for its resolutions is to issue more resolutions. Actions by navies on the scene haven’t been much more effective. In November, an Indian Navy frigate sank a suspected pirate ship, and Royal Marines from a British boarding party killed several pirates in a gunfight. Other than that, the authorization to use “all necessary means” has been interpreted rather timidly.

In several cases, pirates have been captured only to be taken to a beach and let go. Does anyone really believe that those pirates weren’t back at their nefarious work the next day? The same can be said about pirates in small boats who are scared off by helicopters but neither captured nor killed.

Unfortunately, members of the coalition keep raising issues that must be researched, debated and resolved before they will take more aggressive action. Those issues range from establishing rules of engagement and determining how to deal with any pirates that are captured to what measures should be taken to establish a functioning government in Somalia. Resolving those issues could take a long time. In the meantime the pirates will operate with relative impunity.

Unless those issues are resolved and decisive action taken rapidly, 2009 could well become the real Year of the Pirate.

Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (U.S.M.C. Ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor emeritus of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.