EDITORIAL - Warships are not sardine cans

One local newspaper screamed: "Troops and 3 warships for Mindanao." The initial reaction of the reader would be to ask himself if the United States Navy would now be helping Filipino troops battle Muslim terrorists by deploying some of its warships to the area.

The self-directed question is fair. Everybody knows the Philippine Navy does not have any warship, or at least any floating asset that can be understood within that context. So it is only natural for thoughts to immediately drift to the only possibility -- US involvement.

But a quick look at the newspaper story showed that in fact the reference was to the Philippine Navy and not its American counterpart, and that it was in fact sending "warships" to Mindanao.

The Philippine "warships" were described in the newspaper story as "new multipurpose attack craft." The temptation to laugh was hard to resist, but eventually stifled only because it seemed "unnationalistic" to demean our own national defense assets.

But as anybody who knows a little about warships would swear, the word would conjure up images of real warships, those large hulking gray-colored seacraft that can actually go to war and engage in real battles.

When somebody says "multipurpose attack craft," the phrase in all likelihood means nothing more than a small speedboat with light armaments that can be used in hit-and-run skirmishes, raids, or on rescue missions.

A "multipurpose attack craft" cannot be a warship in the true sense of the word. A warship is a dedicated machine built to perform specific duties in accordance with its type and class. It can go to war by itself or in tandem with others, as the name suggests.

As far as we know, our only "real" warships are frigates, one of the smallest warships in most Western Navy arsenals. "Multipurpose attack craft" do not belong to the category of warships. The problem is that nobody knows the condition our frigates are in.

To put things in perspective about what a real warship is, a single US guided missile cruiser, like the USS Lake Champlain that visited Cebu a few years ago, can bring this nation to its knees by its lonesome. It had 120 Cruise missiles. Just one can destroy Malacañang.