True, however I'm fairly sure most pirates have their own traders/miners to make money at least in some form in order to buy a ship to use as a pirate.
In an ideal world an escort would be needed though most escorts these days are more akin to scouts since the time it takes a fighter to kill a bomber is usually higher than it is for a bomber to kill a transport. Then we enter the murky underworld that is teamwork and as we know from the old mining changes, forced teamwork tends to make folks quite unhappy, even more so considering the server population as of late.