Sooner or later, it'll have to become the new standard to put a couple of CIWS on every large tanker or container ship. Something like a remote-controlled and/or automatic 20mm auto cannon with an attached FLIR and radar.

The era of blithely sailing around with $200M in oil or $1B of manufactured goods on a slow, totally defenseless cargo vessel out in the middle of nowhere and crewed by poorly compensated crews with nothing to gain for being heroic was a short-lived fantasy.

Imagine leaving a billion dollars in cash (or whatever) undefended in the middle of a desert, already conveniently placed in a mobile vehicle ready for you to drive off with. Maybe overseen by a couple of unarmed people you hired for minimum wage that aren't even trained security guards, they're just "staff".

What we're doing now globally is the direct equivalent, which worked for a while under the umbrella of Pax Americana, but that era is over, mostly thanks to one person deciding it's somehow "unfair" to the nation that benefited from it the most.

That kind of armament, and the staff needed to operate it, is incredibly expensive. Even if scaled down to commercial-audience models. Even when compared to the cost of huge-displacement cargoes.

Not saying it’ll never happen, just that it’s a much more costly proposition than some might think.

And that’s before we get into the numerous second order issues. Crewing an armed ship suddenly requires very different HR practices. Parties interested in stealing one may now include much more developed military actors. Mooring a container ship across from an LNG terminal is low-risk. Mooring that same ship with medium range weapons may be outside the risk envelope of lots of ports.