EDITORIAL - Oh no, not another “warship”

Here we go again, brandishing the Philippine's “newest” Navy vessel as a warship when in truth and in fact it is not. We need to educate ourselves that just because a seacraft happens to be of the Navy does not automatically make it a warship.

It is important to make this distinction because for a country like ours that never had any real warship, acquiring a vessel being mislabeled as a warship can send our seaboys into a needless and foolhardy sense of bravado that we will all regret later.

Remember the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, a decommissioned  50-year-old US Coast Guard cutter that was resurrected by the United States as a gift to us? We were so thrilled by the cutter's size (we never had one so big) we started calling it a warship.

Well, the Gregorio del Pilar did have a small forward gun and a few machineguns. But that normally does not, by any stretch of the imagination, make it a warship. But to have a ship that size made things abnormal in the Philippines.

So, when even the president started calling it a warship, what did anyone expect our seaboys to do but believe their commander-in-chief. And that was their frame of mind when some stupid soul sent a “warship” to accost Chinese poachers in our territorial waters.

The “warship” militarized a situation that was civilian in nature, a job that was the mandate of our Coast Guard and maritime police. But we were so gung-ho about our “warship” that we had to send in the Gregorio del Pilar.

As everyone knows by now, China responded by sending in a few of its modern ships, which were not even Navy ships but maritime enforcement vessels. The Gregorio del Pilar naturally beat a hasty retreat.

And now the twin sister of the Gregorio del Pilar, the BRP Ramon Alcaraz, is to arrive in July from the United States. Like its twin, the Ramon Alcaraz is a Hamilton class cutter first commissioned by the USCG in 1968 and decommissioned until the US decided to give it to us.

Cutters are fine patrol and rescue vessels. Owing to their law-enforcement duties, they naturally come with a few armaments. But an 8mm forward gun and a few machineguns do not make them warships. With added tensions brewing with Taiwan, let us not repeat the del Pilar mistake.