240 Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos Núm. 1 / 2013 not always guarantee the desired result, because collecting evidence and witness statements means that part of the military officers concerned have to deal with these task and they even have to go back to their countries to give a testimony. In quite a few countries, the legislation requires an arrested person to be placed at the disposal of the court in a very short period (24 or 48 hours) with the logistics problems that such an obligation causes in a maritime context in which a warship is thousands of miles from the nearest coast. These facts help the pirates to get released when they are on land, after their ships have been destroyed and their weapons decommissioned, with the underlying message that this sends to the pirates. All of the facts mean that very often it is not possible to obtain the best performance from the military capabilities of the international air and sea deployment, despite their obvious technological and weapons superiority. In short, the conflict that the Somali maritime piracy generates does not seem to have a short-term solution and therefore, unless the security situation on land gets significantly better, we can predict that this is going to last for some time. The greater degree of coordination of the attacks amongst diverse pirate groups or the development of a more complex tactic of coordinated actions by a pirate group are symptoms that we may consider in making a qualitative leap in the pirates’ combat techniques. To some extent, the stages of the classic outline of guerrillas-fighting procedures, states that when an insurgent manages to go from simply occupying a piece of land that barely has any surveillance, and then moves to fighting with tactics using simultaneous strikes at different points, some of these serving as a distraction, is a way of successfully taking on a conventional army that is much more superior in terms of resources and weapons. In the classic outline of fighting against insurgency, taking on the insurgent in its own terrain in response to its attacks within action-reaction dynamic, is usually less effective than taking initiatives and directly attacking its bases, as was confirmed by the elimination of the pirate bases by the Islamic Courts in 2006. However, the withdrawal of the United States (and subsequently of the UNO) from Somalia in the 1990’s entailed a significant reminder for the international community about the risks of multi-national intervention in Somali terrain. 5. Conclusions We consider that the methodology that is based on identifying and analysing Somali pirate incidents, in accordance with the proposed categories, has proved useful in understanding the modus operandi of Somali piracy. This enables us to suggest that this methodology should be used to study other cases of maritime piracy that have appeared in recent years, for example in the Gulf of Aden. This would facilitate the undertaking of comparative studies that would make it possible to make progress in understanding modern sea piracy. As regards the study of the evolution of Somali piracy, it is very interesting to look
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