Payback with interest

First off, we have two former US Coast Guard cutters that are being passed off as warships. Fine. If that is how we wish to call the primarily law-enforcement vessels that are several decades old, I am willing to go along with the fun. So we have two warships.

Next, we have placed orders for 12 South Korean trainer jets that, as with the Navy cutters, are being advertised as warplanes. Ok. Fine. I can go along with that too. Anyway, if we have the ordnance, we can fit the planes with the armaments necessary to qualify them as warplanes.

Now there is talk of another planned acquisition -- two anti-submarine helicopters. Now, this is the real thing, meaning these aircraft are really meant for war. Unlike the cutters and trainer jets, the name anti-submarine helicopter explicitly specifies a clear and unambiguous purpose.

This harping by the government about warships and warplanes and anti-submarine helicopters is not lost on me, and I cannot help but wonder if we are now about to go to war, what with China now aggressively banging on the door.

War is a terrible thing and I would not wish it for my children. But I can see no logic in all this talk about warships and warplanes and anti-submarine helicopters if all they would amount to is the equivalent of thrusting out a defiant jaw.

Having decided to squander billions of pesos in inflation-rapped taxpayers' money in this manner, I think I have the right, as a citizen who gets taxed at source, to ask my government if it intends to use the acquisitions for the purpose by which it has been bragging, or are these acquisitions just for show.

I would like to know because if they are only meant for show, then they are very expensive but useless props indeed. If we have no intention of using the expensive acquisitions for the purpose they were made, then why make the expensive acquisitions at all.

Since we intend to just watch the enemy crash through the door, might as well save us the billions for some other, more gainful, purpose. Again, I have no stomach for war. But I cannot swallow either the proposition that we overspend on deterrence in face of an enemy that cannot be deterred.

I have actually written previously that if we truly needed some semblance of deterrence, as opposed to capability for long-term conflict which is simply out of our grasp, then the heck let us buy one or two fourth or fifth generation fighter jets, instead of a squadron of useless trainer jets.

I say useless because trainer jets are, well, for training, unless you refit them with the weaponry that we simply do not have or can afford to buy. But with one or two humdinger fighters, at least you can guarantee the enemy will lose a tooth or two in a fray. And that should send him thinking. That is deterrence.

When, in the latest incident of harassment, large Chinese Coast Guard vessels were photographed trying to block a small Philippine fishing vessel trying to resupply a Marine contingent on a purposely aground Navy derelict on Ayungin shoal, I almost cried at the utterly pathetic sight.

And when a news team that was on the fishing boat managed to take video footages of the Marines on the derelict, all long-haired and unshaven and unkempt, I cannot help but wonder why they were posted there in the first place while their military bosses gorge themselves in meetings discussing new acquisitions.

By the way, why is it that all we ever see or read in the news are reports and pictures of Chinese ships accosting our vessels? Where are our Navy cutters cum warships? Why are we no longer so gung-ho about them when it was one of them that was actually responsible for the fine mess we are now in.

Remember the first cutter we renamed the Gregorio del Pilar and bragged as our new warship? Weren't we so beside ourselves with our new warship that we sent it to interdict illegal Chinese fishers? Wasn't that the alibi China was precisely itching for to justify its move into our territories?

We have been arresting illegal Chinese fishers for years but China never had reason to complain because we used civilian law enforcement personnel and tactics. But by sending a "warship" in a moment of foolhardy humbug, we gave the interdiction an air of warfare. Now China is paying us back, with high interest.