Question: Are you not a pacifist? Did you want to be responsible for machinery that could effectively end lives and cause such grief to thousands of people when you were younger? The pirates have families, too. They did not ask to enter into this circle of crime, for which they are so ruthlessly persecuted. Do you not think that by targeting them you are becoming one of them? Shouldn't you be promoting peace to young people like us, who are more susceptible to influence? If you won the money would you spend it on more killing machines? Thanks! :)

Emma Bould answered on 16 Mar 2012:

I’m not more a fan of war than anyone else. By joining the armed forces and doing the job I do, I am volunteering to put myself in harms way, if necessary, to defend our lifestyle, peace and retain the free country we live in.

Without the armed forces, which are there as a last resort when diplomatic measures fail, we might not be privileged to live in a country where you can have an opinion that you can share publicly (like here), where you don’t live in constant fear of the government. You only have to read the papers to learn about some of the terrible activities happening in Syria…. How else do you solve problems like that if you don’t have a last resort to fall back on?

There are plenty of countries that have an almost never ending list of problems from poverty to lawlessness.

Let me make one thing very clear – we uphold international law in what we do in maintaining security on the high seas. This is so that you can go to the petrol station or supermarket and buy what you want when you want it. Without safe sea lanes and free trade routes around the world, the whole country would suffer.