This hijacking shouldn’t surprise anyone, and that’s the part that bothers me most. When the world treats ocean security like a spotlight—bright in one place, dark everywhere else—someone eventually steps into the dark and takes what they can. The tanker Honour 25 didn’t get grabbed because pirates suddenly got brave. It got grabbed because the map of “protected waters” has holes in it, and everybody knows it.
Based on what’s been shared publicly, Somali pirates hijacked the oil tanker Honour 25 with 17 crew members onboard. The ship was carrying 18,500 barrels of oil. And the bigger worry isn’t even the oil. It’s the crew. Seventeen people whose day probably started like every other day at sea, and then turned into a hostage situation.
The scary part is how familiar this pattern is. We’ve seen piracy rise, then fall when navies show up, then rise again when attention moves on. It’s not mysterious. It’s a business model. If the risk goes down for the pirates and up for the ships, piracy comes back. And right now, public reporting says international naval forces have been stretched thin because so much focus is on other hotspots—like the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea—leaving the Gulf of Aden less watched.
That’s the real headline to me: not “pirates hijack tanker,” but “gaps in security are now predictable.” If you’re running a pirate network, you don’t need to beat the world. You just need to wait until the world looks away.
There’s also an uglier layer here. Reports are linking Somali pirate groups to al-Shabaab and the Houthis, with claims that the Houthis provide weapons and support. If that’s true—and it’s hard to fully confirm these chains from the outside—then piracy isn’t just robbery anymore. It becomes a tool in a wider conflict, funded and fed by groups that benefit from disorder. That raises the stakes fast, because it means hijackings aren’t only about ransom. They can become leverage, messaging, or a way to strain opponents without firing a missile.
And that’s where I think a lot of people get this wrong: they treat piracy like a “crime problem,” like shoplifting on water. It’s not. It’s a pressure point. It hits shipping costs, insurance, delivery schedules, and the nerves of every crew member who has to cross those lanes. It’s one of the cleanest ways to cause chaos with a small team and a fast boat.
Imagine you’re a shipping company deciding routes this week. You can take a longer route and burn more fuel, or you can take the faster lane and accept higher risk. Either way you pay. If you reroute, prices creep up and deliveries slow down. If you don’t, you’re betting that your ship won’t be the one that gets boarded. That’s not a business decision; it’s a moral one, because it’s not the executives who get a gun waved in their face. It’s the crew.
Now imagine you’re one of the 17 on Honour 25. You’re not thinking about geopolitics. You’re thinking about whether your company trained you for this, whether anyone is coming, and whether “under-patrolled” means “on your own.” People argue about trade lanes like they’re lines on a screen. But on the ship, it’s a hallway, a door, a voice outside, a decision to hide or comply.
So what happens next? If the pattern holds, you’ll see more private security on ships, more hardened procedures, more money spent on protection that used to be optional. That’s good for security contractors and insurance companies. It’s bad for smaller operators that can’t afford the upgrades. It may also push ships into routes that change where business flows—quietly reshaping ports, supply chains, and prices.
And if the reported links to militant groups are real, the consequences can spread beyond shipping. Because then any response becomes political. Naval patrols aren’t just “anti-crime” anymore. They’re part of a wider standoff. That increases the chance of missteps: a rescue attempt that goes wrong, an escalation at sea, a bigger cycle of retaliation.
There is a serious counterpoint, and it matters: navies can’t be everywhere. Resources are finite. If there are active threats in the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz, it’s rational to focus there. You protect the most immediate danger first. I get that.
But here’s my pushback: when you “temporarily” thin out a patrol zone, you’re not pausing risk—you’re inviting it to compound. Criminal groups learn faster than bureaucracies. They adapt, copy tactics, recruit, and expand. And once piracy becomes reliable again, you don’t turn it off like a switch. You have to grind it down, slowly and at real cost.
What I don’t know is whether this hijacking is a one-off or the start of a new run. One successful seizure can be an outlier—or it can be a signal to every armed group watching that the Gulf of Aden is open again. The next few weeks will tell us which.
The choice in front of governments and shipping firms isn’t “stop piracy” versus “ignore it.” It’s whether they accept a world where crews become bargaining chips whenever attention shifts elsewhere, or whether they treat sea security like basic infrastructure that doesn’t get turned down just because another fire is burning.
How many hijackings will it take before the world decides the Gulf of Aden is worth steady protection again?