, if our Navy (or others) want to become involved, is for them to take charge of arming the merchant vessels at no cost to the corporations deploying them. It would be far cheaper for them to put contingents of men and weapons on tankers and freight carriers than to deploy warships.

You wouldn't have to equip all the ships either. Much as we've created the air marshall service where we put armed undercover agents on random jets, we could do the same thing with the cargo ships and freighters. Some of the weapons could just be dummies but every so often they're fully armed and manned.

Art