"...privately waged open war..."

I think that is an exact description of what the US is up against, and has been up against, since 9/11. The enemy is not, and never has been, any other nation-state, and the effort to fight back in terms of old-fashioned conventional nation-vs-nation warfare was completely wrong-headed and doomed from the start.

Maybe we need to take on these pirates as an exercise in learning how to deal with all the other kinds of terrorists.