What's with the warship thingy?

Somebody from the Philippine Navy wrote a newspaper to insist the two 46-year-old former US Coast Guard cutters recently acquired by the Philippines were indeed warships, contrary to criticism that the Philippines was exaggerating the mere law enforcement capabilities of the cutters.

According to the Navy official, the fact that the cutters are armed makes the BRP Gregorio del Pilar and the BRP Ramon Alcaraz warships. I, of course, pity the poor Navy officer because he has no recourse but to mouth the official line that the two Hamilton class cutters are indeed warships.

Actually, it is no skin off my back if the Philippines, led by no less than its commander-in-chief, insists on calling former Coast Guard cutters as warships. The matter of categorizing our ships is probably a matter of sovereign right that if we start calling them galactic voyagers, we should owe nobody an explanation.

The reason I always insisted that the cutters be called for what they are, which is "not warships," is because that is precisely what they are. The Gregorio delPilar and the Ramon Alcaraz are "not warships" just because they each have a single forward gun.

If having arms is the only qualification for making a ship a warship, as the hapless Navy officer insists, then every gun owner in the Philippines, including every criminal and streetcorner toughie, must be a soldier.

Another reason why I always insisted on calling a spade a spade is because I do not want to get it into our heads that we already have warships. I want us, the Philippines, the region's worst equipped military, to put our feet on the ground. I don't want us to get into a shooting war just because we have something to shoot.

How quickly we have forgotten the very reason why we got into this current situation with China. We got into this situation because we forced the hand of China by sending the "warship" Gregorio delPilar to perform what was supposed to be a purely law enforcement function -- apprehending illegal Chinese fishers.

Before that incident, Philippine law enforcers have been arresting not just Chinese but other foreign nationals caught poaching inside our waters. In none of those previous arrests has China been provoked into doing what it is now aggressively doing with impunity -- grabbing our territory.

Not that China has no grand design of grabbing our territory. But it saw no pretext to do so previously. Every previous arrest of Chinese nationals had always been done by Philippine law enforcers, for clear violations of Philippine maritime laws.

But suddenly the Philippines acquired a half-century-old cutter from the US Coast Guard (it is instructive that the USCG never branded any of its ships as warships). It was the biggest ship we ever laid our hands on. All of a sudden we were filled with bravado. The adrenalin rush went to our heads.

And so the next time some Chinese fishers strayed into our waters, our gung-ho officials, with martial tunes humming in their ears, sent our first "warship" to make the arrests. This gave the Chinese the excuse they have been waiting for so long. Now they had the pretext to retaliate.

And retaliate they did by grabbing our islands, sending "real warships" to do the job. Of course, our own "warship" thingy was all in our head so that despite repeated Chinese provocations, we never dared send the "warship" Gregorio delPilar and the "warship" Ramon Alcaraz to stop the Chinese aggression.

But of course we will never send the Gregorio delPilar and the Ramon Alcaraz to any confrontation with the Chinese because we know deep in our hearts that both ships are not what our officials have cracked them up to be.

The single forward guns on the Gregorio delPilar and the Ramon Alcaraz are no match against the real warships of the Chinese which, even if they are drydocked in some navy yard in mainland China, can still sink both our "warships" with missiles. That is why, despite having two "warships" we still look to the US for help.

If I may be allowed a little frivolity, the Black Pearl in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series is more apt as a warship than our two BRPs. The Black Pearl, says movie literature, is "moderately armed with 32 twelve-pound cannons: 18 on the gun deck and 14 on the upper deck. Its full broadside contains 16 cannonballs."

The next time our officials get tempted to call the Gregorio delPilar and the Ramon Alcaraz as warships, they better think of the Black Pearl first, and that had that fictional ship existed, it probably would have beaten either or both our BRPs in a real war at sea.