Just Another Arms Deal
25 Apr
Here is the text from yesterday’s Moment of Truth:
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the island that foils the two countries fighting over it by pulling an Atlantis.
Does McInerny sound like a Pakistani name to you? Me neither. That’s why my ears twitched when I heard something about Pakistan adding an anti-submarine ship named McInerny to its navy. And the initials USS in front of its name made me even more suspicious. Because USS, that’s almost USA, and I wondered if the two were related.
Turns out my hunch was right. The USS McInerny is a United States Navy Anti-Submarine Perry Class Battleship. It’s as American as can be. The Perry Class ships were commissioned by Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry during his feud with lead singer Steve Tyler and his submarine fleet. They were called the Oliver Hazard Perry class of guided missile frigates because Tyler’s meanest submarine was named Oliver and she was a hazard. The McInerny was named after Perry’s favorite novelist, Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City.
If I were a ship with such a red white and blue pedigree, I’d be saying to myself, “What the hell am I doing in the Pakistani navy?” And if I were the Pakistani navy I’d say, “George W. Bush sold you to us. The deal was made back when Bush was still Dick Cheney’s First Lady, in October of 2008, but we don’t expect delivery of you until this coming September. After that you’ll be flying our flag.”
“The green and white one with the star and the crescent moon?” I would ask, horrified at the atrocious fashion statement I was condemned to become.
Pakistan is paying us 78 million bucks for this Joe Perry Class anti-submarine vessel. But we’re sprucing it up for them with even cooler anti-submarine systems and updated everything, even one of those espresso makers with the pods. That rehab is supposed to cost us 65 million bucks, but adjusting for inflation, and you know how it is with contractors, they’re always over budget, especially defense contractors, I’d say we’ll be lucky to break even. The United States isn’t going to make a dime. But the defense contractors are going to make a mint, and that’s what defense is really about. It’s all about contracts. Social contracts and business contracts.
Back in the 1980s, the McInerny was first used to test new systems, and won an award for being the best Perry Class anti-submarine frigate testing new systems. Then she was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea where she zoomed around North Africa and Italy and Lebanon and didn’t win any awards. Then she cruised around the Indian Ocean for a while, which was where she and Pakistan first met. But she didn’t win any awards there either.
Then she got sent to the Caribbean, and won a law enforcement award for patrolling around Central America. Then came a mission to the Persian Gulf to help defend Iran and Iraq from each other. She didn’t get any awards for this, but she got a brand new anti-submarine suite, which sounds like a large adjoining addition to her anti-submarine bedroom, and it may very well have been.
Then it was back to the Mediterranean, and another award for being a great anti-submarine warfare vessel. Then to the Arctic Ocean to defend Superman and Santa Claus from Russian submarines.
She went back to the Persian Gulf to help liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. For this she won not one but TWO Kuwait Liberation awards, one from Saudi Arabia and one from Kuwait. She won several awards from the US Navy, too. Then she went to Florida for a vacation and more awards where she was named the best Anti-Submarine Warfare vessel of her particular configuration on the entire East Coast of the USA.
But in everything I looked at, a brief naval history, a brief history of the Perry frigates, a brief history of McInerney, I didn’t read anything about her actually beating up any submarines.
By now she was so loaded down with trophies and weaponry that she could barely move. So the awards were put in a display case, and she was deployed again to Latin American waters to fight the war on drugs. Then began McInerny’s greatest adventure of all. She was tasked with busting coke smugglers. She busted fishing boats and speed boats – every kind of boat that could carry cocaine, she busted it.
And then came the day. It was in the wee hours of September 13, 2008. The sun had not yet risen, and the seas off the coast of Guatemala were calm but tense with surface tension. A radio call came in from the naval base, making the little paper sound-vibrating thing in the earpiece crackle with urgency: an unidentified vessel had been spotted by the crew of a patrolling PC-36 Orion airplane. McInerney was then spoken to directly by the crew of the plane, who pointed her in the direction of the suspicious vessel. What happened next is best told in the words of Lt. Kelly Chufo, USS McInerny Public Affairs Officer:
“In the early morning hours, McInerney… successfully interdicted a [59-foot-long steel and fiberglass-hulled] self-propelled semi-submersible vessel carrying [seven tons of cocaine,] an estimated $107 million worth… McInerney launched two rigid-hulled inflatable boats with members of [its]… visit, board, search and seizure teams.” [With their respective systems.]
Yes, after thirty years, the greatest Anti-Submarine War vessel of its particular configuration on the East Coast of the United States had finally bagged herself something like a submarine.
Less than a month later, George W. Bush signed a deal to sell her to Pakistan.
Now we all know Pakistan’s our ally in the war formally known as “on terror.” They’re supposed to help us kill the Taliban and al Qaeda along their border with Afghanistan. So it makes perfect sense for us to sell them an anti-submarine ship. We all remember when Osama bin Laden slipped through our grasp into the undersea mountains of Tora Bora. And of course the Taliban are notoriously dreaded submariners.
Or maybe it has to do with this headline from the Times of India: “India-made Stealth Submarine to Be Tested.”
“The AUV [autonomous underwater vehicle] will leapfrog India to a select group of nations, like the US, Australia, Germany, Russia, Korea and Japan, which are vigorously pursuing autonomous underwater technology and underwater robotics. “The institute had been working on the project since 2003, but with the stress being on indigenization, it was bound to be time consuming,” said S Nandy, a scientist associated with the project.”
He means when Indians make submarine robots without the help of other countries, they take their time. Still, they’re going to leapfrog into the company of the US, Russia and Japan, so it’s no wonder Pakistan wants at least one anti-submarine frigate. And Joe Perry’s are the best.
I’m sure everyone who served on the McInerney worked very hard, and I’m sure she deserved all her awards. But other than her award-winning status, her sale to Pakistan is not a particularly noteworthy transaction. McInerney isn’t going to be killing submarines anytime soon, this was just one of those arms sales to a country with a neighbor they don’t like who is also stockpiling weapons, presumably both preparing for the day when they can use them all against each other.
The US Navy has thirty active Perry Class frigates. They at one time they had fifty but gave away or sold a lot of them, one or two to Poland, several to Turkey and Egypt, a couple to Bahrain. China has eight that they built themselves, Australia has two, Spain has six.
Those are just the Perry Class war ships. The US Navy has over 250 active war ships of various kinds, including submarines.
I remember hearing about a filmmaker who followed a handgun from its manufacture to the final time it defended an American family from an intruder. Or maybe the filmmaker followed a dollar bill around. Or maybe it was one of those handgun-dollar bill hybrids. Weapons and dollars switch places so often it’s sometimes hard to tell which you’re looking at. I imagine it’s even more difficult if you’re actually in the arms trading business. Every day millions of weapons are bought and sold. Handguns, shotguns, shoulder-held rocket launchers, surface-to-air weapons, tanks, tank munitions, various amounts of explosive material, automatic weapons, grenades.
There are even more weapons that are not in the process of being sold at the moment, waiting until the day someone uses them or decides it’s time to clean out the garage and make room for new weapons.
The USS McInerney, soon to be the PNS Almagir, with its anti-submarine warfare systems and helicopter systems and sea-to-land systems, anti-aircraft systems and guided missile systems, is just another one of those weapons. After the McInerney there are plans to provide Pakistan with seven more Perry Class frigates.
The closest I’ve come to an arms trade was renting a nail gun, but evidentally they go on all the time, all around us, and if the sale of something as big as a Perry Class frigate escapes our notice, we are living on a secluded island of imaginary peace. And maybe we are even if we do notice.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
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