In Defense of Defense
O'Rourke, P. J.
P. J. O'Rourke IN DEFENSE OF DEFENSE U.S. military spending is the best (and cheapest) life insurance the taxpayer can buy. A uthor's note: The following analy- sis of our country's defense...
...It is now the middle of February 1991...
...The February 1990 issue of the U.S...
...Of course, more important than having brilliant new weapons and proven old weapons is having lots of weapons...
...It buys complexity...
...artillery strength without unnecessary killing of Panamanians, by shelling the Comandancia's dining hall at 1:00 a.m., when it was empty except for some dead snackers...
...The top speed is so top that it's top secret...
...I couldn't even find a kind word for Noriega in his old stronghold, the Chorrillo slum where the Panamanian Defense Force was headquartered and the Dignity Battalions were recruited...
...Each of these items is also numbered...
...Defense spending also gives people with military-type personalities jobs in the military rather than in other fields of endeavor, such as psychotherapy, to which they might be less well-suited: LIGHTS ON IN YOUR HEAD, YOU NEURASTHENIC MAGGOT...
...The CIC is so complex that it moves the uninitiated beyond confusion to catatonic awe...
...The Mobile Bay "Welcome Aboard" pamphlet was full of Statue-of-Libertyon-its-side-style information...
...Panamanians were complaining, too...
...The captain had to have one custom-fitted in his stateroom so he could keep an eye on the foredeck without going to his battle command post and watching it on TV...
...To call something public is to define it as dirty, insufficient, and hazardous...
...Snell made sure there were Spanish-speaking soldiers, including a number of Panamanian-born GIs, in every platoon and squad...
...When those jobs and contracts disappear, others will be demanded in their place...
...They wanted to know how many phone calls home they would be able to afford per month and details of health care and housing allowances for dependents...
...Does it work...
...No inordinate number of candles were burning at any church shrines, nor did I see any of the "Have You Seen 9" and "You Will Find Us At " graffiti that normally appears after episodes of urban chaos...
...Without helicopters the battle for Panama City would have been fought building-to-building with terrible casualties, like the Battle of Stalingrad...
...Edward McCrane of C Co...
...Members of such wild-eyed subversive groups as the Panama City Chamber of Commerce were being heaved into jail...
...The girls in our particular bar might have looked okay in the middle of a real war, when a man's blood was running hot and every experience was seasoned with fear's piquant relish and heaven knew what the morrow might bring, etc...
...But will an American defense budget from which, like the liver of Prometheus, a peace dividend is regularly torn be sufficient to guard us against all eventualities...
...Here, at least, was some of the noise and excitement that practicing for war should have...
...The Mobile Bay is unnaturally clean, cleaner than anything ever is in civilian life...
...David Bill III...
...And the whole thing only cost a billion dollars, less than half of our annual foreign aid to Egypt...
...The Army didn't get around to securing our own embassy for two days because it saw no threat to the peace in there (which shows how little the Army knows about the State Department...
...It takes a wire-guided TOW missile to knock out a modern tank...
...But we ought to do at least a little thinking for ourselves...
...Recoilless rifles have been made obsolete by improvements in armor plate...
...The mess was not a very martial place...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...America has the money to oust 150 tin-pot dictators a year (if there are that many dictators left) and restore democracy and human rights to 150 countries per annum (if there are that many countries that want any...
...The night I arrived in Panama City, some political terrorist chucked a grenade into a bar full of young women and off-duty GIs...
...The Mobile Bay is also linked, by satellite, to computers in the Pentagon...
...One American soldier was killed and all the others were restricted to base...
...That is, in less time than it takes to count the dollars in the U.S...
...Panama City's best shopping district, a mileand-a-half stretch of the Via Espana, was destroyed, and none of it by military action, all of it by looting...
...The Mobile Bay is 567 feet long, almost four times as long as the Statue of Liberty would be if the Statue of Liberty were lying on its side and floating in the water (which makes no sense, but there are journalistic bylaws requiring comparisons of this type whenever anything very large is being described...
...That is, they didn't soften up positions with mile-wide artillery barrages or huge air strikes...
...My budget calculations are wrong...
...But if a bunch of lambada dancers get hurt in a terrorist attack, this usually indicates peacetime...
...So am I, for that matter...
...Friendly aircraft are indicated on the screens with the top half of a circle, friendly undersea objects with the bottom half of a circle, and friendly surface ships with a circle itself...
...And my book has to go to press...
...The military strength-in-depth needed for an Operation Just Cause, a continuing strategic threat from the dark corners of the globe—these are rational arguments against cutting the defense budget...
...I tagged along with the executive officer, the ship's secondin-command, when he went to brief a group of enlisted men in the crew mess...
...Still the RAST, and the helicopters too, seemed more ingenious than bellicose...
...Besides civilians, 314 Panamanian Defense Force soldiers and twenty-three members of the U.S...
...There isn't...
...And most important of all is having enough trained men-26,000 in this case—to use those weapons...
...The Combat Information Center is the command post for the Aegis weapons system...
...Here, in front of these screens, seated like four judges on the bench, are the captain of the Mobile Bay, the admiral of the fleet, and their respective aides...
...I couldn't talk the captain into firing a missile for me, but he gave me a videotape of a test firing, and I watched this in the VCR-equipped fleet admiral's stateroom...
...But no question I could think of seemed big enough to do the Aegis justice...
...The departure was so smoothly effected and the engines so quiet in their puissance that I was having breakfast in the officers' mess and didn't know I was gone...
...The Mobile Bay can launch all 122 of its missiles in two minutes, though sixteen in the air at one time is really the practical limit," said the lieutenant, mild and pleasant again...
...The popularity of "low-intensity conflicts" can make it hard to tell war from peace in the late twentieth century...
...Social-program spending is spending done directly on the public rather than for the public's benefit...
...From what I can see of modern kids, the M-1 Abrams tank is well suited to providing day-care needs...
...The ultimate paradigm of social spending is the public restroom...
...The crew of the Mobile Bay lives in tiny and drab (but clean and organized) quarters...
...Flory Saltzman, an elderly woman with a little shop selling mola embroideries made by the Cuna Indians, wasn't insured...
...on Wednesday, December 20, 1989...
...And, in 1990, there were about to be a lot fewer American soldiers and weapons doing that nothing...
...Call this a peace dividend if you like, or call it turning the pork barrel over and starting to eat from the other end...
...Note the mental image evoked by the very word "public": public school, public park, public health, public housing...
...How do we go about conducting brief, highly specific military operations in minor trouble spots...
...The non-destruction of Panama and the unslaughter of its inhabitants was the result of the United States's fighting a "non-linear battle"--concentrating on pre-assigned military objectives and not bothering to conquer territory...
...A variety of equipment that had not been tried in combat got tried in Panama, including the iimmwv High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle or "Hum-V," which looks like a giant malevolent basement dehumidifier, the AH-64 Apache and UH-60 Blackhawk attack and utility helicopters, the new Kevlar flak jacket and the Kaiser Billish Kevlar helmet...
...Jesse Jackson wasn't the only one complaining about civilian casualties during the U.S...
...There was no sign in Panama City of that kind of wild firing which has left every window, doorway, and building corner in Beirut chipped concave...
...We got rid of a crazy guy," said a street vendor...
...All this armament is tactically integrated—guided, informed, managed, and targeted by the electronic wonders of the Aegis weapons system...
...The flip-lid whips open and for a moment you see the bald top of something emerging in light and smoke, a high burlesque of a jack-in-the-box, then the ship's deck is covered by a tower of blast and dazzle, blanketing one bright, rising, white, fiery column—this is the way to waste government money...
...Congress, or until the entire fabric of American society was torn asunder by clashes between ACT-UP and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals...
...Who cares...
...The Mobile Bay is fifty-five feet wide, displaces 9,516 tons of sea water, is manned by a crew of 409, and has four 80,000-horsepower gas-turbine engines, essentially the same kind that power a DC-10...
...The Mobile Bay is also armed with fully automated 5-inch guns, quad-canister harpoon missile launchers, torpedo tubes, four 50-caliber machine guns, two Phalanx close-range anti-missile miniguns, and two SH6OB helicopters hangared on board, with torpedoes and guns of their own...
...The Mobile Bay is the most complex thing I've ever been in, not counting love...
...The captains had books with everything about their targets, even down to what windows to shoot through for fire demonstrations...
...What made Snell so happy, however, was not the brave fighting his troops had done or the modest casualties they'd suffered doing it, but something it never occurred to me a professional soldier would prize...
...Believe me, Operation Just Cause was just that...
...Every crease of every corner of the ship is tended every day...
...was] standing in the back of a five-ton truck, surrounded by about 200 Panamanian civilians...
...And I assume it will meet with the same quick success...
...deaths from friendly fire, and listened to enough Jesse Jackson on the subject of civilian casualties, you might not realize that Operation Just Cause was a success...
...It is that excitement in the gut, that swelling of the chest, the involuntary smile that comes across the face of every male when he has a weapon to hand...
...Even in the heat of combat, he said—and the fight for the Comandancia had lasted the whole first night of the Operation—his troops had used "proportional response...
...I don't know that there's another country in the world that can do that...
...All kinds of missiles are in there: anti-aircraft missiles, ship attack missiles, and, no doubt—though the Navy is always coy on this point—Tomahawk cruise missiles with nuclear warheads...
...For this reason, defense spending in America is not so much a matter of Americans sacrificing to keep their country safe as it is a matter of Americans telling their government to give them defense contracts and defense industry jobs...
...On these maps are shown every airplane, surface ship, and submarine within the Aegis bubble—ultra-lights, cabin cruisers, Jacques Cousteau and all...
...rr his post-modern, neural-net, simul-fought,, multiphasic info-vasion kind of war is as dependent as the rest of contemporary life on expensive technology...
...A fter the briefing I went to the aft deck to watch the helicopters land and take off...
...And not only is there incessant scrubbing and mopping but eternal chipping and brushing besides, so that, in the course of a two-year cycle, all surfaces, however inaccessible, and every rivet, nut, and bolthead will have been repainted...
...incursion...
...But the best and final argument against cutting defense cannot be put into words...
...military were killed...
...People applauded and the truck moved on to the next intersection...
...But let's apply a rule of thumb that is perhaps too unsophisticated for use by the national media, and call something a sucTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 17 cess if it succeeds...
...Even in slow motion there was nothing slow about the launch...
...But the Panamanians didn't have any modern tanks...
...What if some large country that is experiencing extreme national turmoil degenerates into a mad dictatorship the way Germany did in the 1930s...
...I WANT THAT OEDIPAL CONFLICT RESOLVED BY OH NINE HUNDRED HOURS...
...Thus Task Force Bravo was able to "demonstrate" U.S...
...It had a cute name—Patriot's Landing —a salad bar, hanging plants, and fake carriage lamps over fast-food-restaurant-style tables for four...
...The 3,000 soldiers under Snell's command were in some of the worst fighting of the Operation, but only sixty-four were wounded and only five killed...
...Mike Snell who commanded Task Force Bravo in Panama, but I'm sure he's over here someplace, and I'm sure the Iraqis will soon wish he weren't...
...Like the fighting in Panama, the operation of the Mobile Bay has more to do with intelligence, training, and technology than with plain, straightforward killing...
...Then there are the beneficial spinoffs from defense research to be considered, all the wonderful products that we use every day which were originally developed for military applications—guns, for instance...
...No science fiction movie-set design can capture the sheer inexplicability of science fact—which partly can't be explained for security's sake and partly just can't be explained to someone who was a college English major...
...And Snell followed each firefight with a pause to allow bullhorn-carrying psy-op specialists to make eloquent arguments for surrender...
...And Egypt can't even blow itself up, let alone anything else...
...Some anti-American activists, such as the Ramsey Clark-led "Independent Commission of Inquiry on the United States Invasion of Panama," claimed that more than 3,000 Panamanian civilians died in the fighting...
...The point is not whether people want to kill us...
...If we don't need them, no harm is done...
...I don't know the whereabouts of Col...
...If you watched enough network TV reporting about security snafus and Stealth fighters missing their targets, read enough Newsweek exposes about U.S...
...The Navy will admit to "in excess of 30 knots" (341 mph), but crewmen told me that at full power the Mobile Bay stands up out of the water like a cigarette boat, maneuvers like a windsurfer, and can come to a dead stop from full throttle in two ship lengths...
...The weapons lie around in warehouses somewhere, emitting just enough radioactivity to keep life interesting for the Friends of the Earth...
...It is the huge, flat, octagonal Aegis radar antennae that determine the missile cruiser's chest-of-drawers shape...
...Adding up the cash contributions we are receiving from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates Germany, Japan, and elsewhem I see thai if we play our cards right in the Gulf War, we might even make a profit...
...Then two brave, or anyway dutiful, sailors run out and hook this cable to another cable, which is attached to what is basically an enormous motor-driven spin-casting reel...
...The phased-array radar is combined with sonar, magnetic detection devices and various other types of sensors to create a 500-mile-wide bubble of electronic protection around the ship...
...McCrane stood on the left side of the truck with a raised AK-47, speaking in Spanish...
...Army Southern Command's count of 202...
...In the morning, the Mobile Bay left the Mayport Naval Station and steamed —that is, gas-turbined--out to sea...
...But I suspect the Soviets never did want to use those bombs...
...It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy...
...And so forth...
...I went to see Col...
...The resulting monstrous in-pouring of real-time data is filtered, distilled, and channeled at the individual video monitors in the Combat Information Center and then flashed up on four bay window-sized green LED displays arrayed along the CIC's port side...
...After Operation Just Cause, Panama City was filled with trash, disorder, devastated housing, human suffering—and the parts of the city that had been fought in looked pretty bad, too...
...What do we do with elaborate and expensive weapons systems designed for a geopolitical reality that no longer exists...
...We would send fewer soldiers with worse equipment and less training to Panama and the only difference would be more dead people, mostly Panamanians...
...Naval officer and sexual molestation of his wife] occurred on Saturday...
...Then, if we need the weapons, we have them...
...And we're still only spending about a quarter of our federal budget on guns, leaving three-quarters for all that butter that isn't good for us...
...She lost her stock and furnishings and had just used all her savings to start over...
...Snell went on to describe how his soldiers had been trained in low-intensity conflict, using live ammunition and firing on ranges dotted not only with "enemy positions" but also with "religious monuments," "non-combatants seeking cover," and "surrendering opposition forces...
...A uthor's note: The following analy- sis of our country's defense policy has been—to use a favorite government phrase-07BE'ed (overtaken by events...
...Not only would you —add up your car insurance, life insurance, and homeowner's insurance premiums—you do...
...There's only one glaring error that I find in rereading this chapter...
...It works as advertised," he said with an evil grin...
...Operation Just Cause was launched at 1:00 a.m...
...The Mobile Bay was soon to head out on an extended tour of duty in the Pacific, and the executive officer was telling the men what to expect...
...Defense is the traditional whipping boy for budget cutters, and understandably so...
...Only the Stealth fighter and the Air Force's stealthy manner of not reporting how it missed a target got any coverage in the American press...
...Half a million American troops are in the Mideast for the duration...
...This weapon is used by PDF . . ." He continued for about ten minutes, urging the crowd to turn in PDF members and weapons...
...We can guess, but not know, how the Gulf War will turn out...
...At another punch of the keyboard the Aegis system can be left to think for itself, and all the little diamond shapes will be automatically blown to no shape at all...
...Even some usually sensible politicians thought this made sense...
...This left the whole J Street red-light district and all of its nudie bars—full of procurers, pickpockets, b-girls, strippers, drug pushers, bilko artists, and fat, tattooed Colombian prostitutes—with a paying clientele of me and one drunk wire-service reporter...
...The director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt...
...Mike Snell, who commanded Task Force Bravo, one of the Operation's four ground combat groups and the one detailed to take Noriega's Comandancia (headquarters) and seize control of the central Canal Zone...
...Even the people at Americas Watch, who are so firmly convinced that America bears watching, conceded their estimate of civilian deaths was only slightly higher than the U.S...
...I was wrong, though not as wrong as Saddam...
...The scale of the maps can be changed at the touch of a keyboard from continent-wide to 6 inches = 1 mile...
...Another revision would be pointless, so I'll leave the chapter as it is...
...Given the history of the Middle East, it's possible...
...I was in Panama in 1987, during Noriega's blossom days...
...The largest part of the Mobile Bay is given over not to guns or men but to electronics...
...All forms of defense—national, personal, and even biological—are wasteful...
...Building the ship "required enough steel to fabricate 4,000 cars, aluminum sufficient to produce 26 million soft drink cans, over 200 miles of electrical cable . . . " There is enough fuel on board, the pamphlet said, "to run the family car nearly 25 million miles...
...I went down to the foredeck and meditated on the thoroughly uninteresting visible part of the vertical launching system...
...The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners—Stalin, for example—must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after...
...I always wish the people who figure these things out would just keep going: "The ship's bilge pumps could drain all'the ecologically significant wetlands in Oregon in 24 hours...
...The room glows with the graveyard light of cathode tubes beaming data blips at the solemn faces of military technicians, and the only sounds are the snicking of computer keyboards and the low buzz of speech into headset microphones...
...None of the fire was friendly then...
...I assume that a "non-linear" battle, such as Operation Just Cause was, will be fought—on a much larger scale—in Kuwait and Iraq...
...Each missile has its own corrugated-metal canister within the magazine and each canister has a square lid on the ship's deck, a sort of yard-wide, solid-steel version of the lid marked "sift" on a can of Durkee's ground black pepper...
...The helicopters were trying out their RAST (Recovery Assist Security Transfer) systems, which can bring a chopper down in one piece in the worst of weather...
...Once off the deck in the Mobile Bay, you might as well be in a submarine or a factory basement...
...W hich brings us to the real secret behind the success of Operation Just Cause—money...
...From these great seats of authority (actually government-issue padded Naugahyde swivel chairs), war can be fought across a large portion of the earth and large parts of that large portion can be destroyed by nuclear attack...
...This article is adapted with permission from his new book Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S...
...But this was peacetime, as I pointed out, and no, graciag sefiorita, I don't care to see how the Last Supper is illustrated across your bottom...
...This is not impossible when a large country has a citizenry half-crazed from standing in line for six months at the only McDonald's in Moscow...
...Government, a Morgan Entrekin Book to be published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in June...
...And more important than that is having enough transport to get any weapons anywhere...
...Nor were the sailors traditional...
...I have seen the well-trained, well-motivated `31oung clean-cut and polite sailors" of the USS Mobile Bay duplicated thousands of times in every branch of the service here in Saudi Arabia...
...But I was unable to find anyone in Chorrillo or J Street or the Via Espana or any other neighborhood, with a missing friend or relation...
...Then there are those countries, some run by complete lunatics, which have a bomb or two or could make one or will be able to make one soon: Pakistan, India, Libya, South Africa, Brazil, both Koreas . . . The need for technologically advanced defense programs does not end with Russia throwing in the towel...
...I'm glad to hear them say they don't want to use the atomic bombs on us anymore...
...The Mobile Bay is armed with the MK-41 vertical launching system, a pair of magazines—one in the forward deck and one aft—in which a total of 122 missiles are standing on their ends like bottles in cartons of booze...
...It has a tall, boxed-in, blank-sided superstructure that gives it a floating car-barn look...
...All the spaces of the ship are filled with nests of valves and switches, and transversed by ganglia of pipes and wires...
...Then, in the fall of 1989, the Soviet bloc collapsed, and we were left truly confused about what to do with our guns...
...If all else fails and something out there is still alive, there are two small, pulpit-like structures on either side of the main deck, where sailors can stand and fire hand-held Stinger missiles...
...He also warned children not to play with duds or toy guns or taunt the soldiers...
...And what the Aegis is is the shield of Zeus, for which it was named...
...In a democracy, if we don't spend an enormous amount of money on defense, we will have to spend it on vice, bad smells, and alarming graffiti...
...Giving Manuel Noriega the bum's rush cost about $2 billion...
...We got to know the targets," said Snell...
...To attempt any real understanding of how it all works is to slide into that mood of childish despair at having taken the alarm clock apart...
...But the rest of the stuff worked fine, especially the Kevlar, though the helmet is as heavy and awkward as a sack of grass seed and the flak jacket is like wearing your own sauna...
...The MK-41 vertical launch missiles can then destroy anything within that bubble...
...Colonel Snell was my age, 42, but with much better posture, and he emitted a glow of pride in Operation Just Cause...
...He and two other soldiers had stopped in the middle of an intersection...
...They were young, clean-cut, and polite...
...It was revised in the fall of that year, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait...
...Even if defense spending were managed by honest, clairvoyant geniuses, it would still be immensely wasteful...
...There's been a lot of squeaking and belching among journalists and other members of America's professional bedwetting class over what happened in Panama...
...The American Army needed not only its new equipment but its old equipment, too...
...I was right about Russia getting horrible again...
...To take out individuals firing at them, they relied on snipers instead of M-16 fusillades...
...Wouldn't you be willing to spend 5.5 percent of your income to guarantee the safety of your spouse, kids, house, car, savings, investments, and sports and hobby equipment...
...In the first place, we're not going to save money or eliminate the deficit by reducing defense expenditures...
...T he night before we sailed, I went 1 for a drink with the Mobile Bay commander, Capt...
...military removed Manuel Noriega from power, and found a country at peace...
...When the time came for questions, the sailors didn't ask about the strip joints of Thailand or what kind of tattoos to get or how many Hong Kong wharf rats a Yankee swab could be expected to whip in a fair fight after consuming fifty beers on shore liberty...
...If we do our deficit spending onweapons, at least we get weapons...
...And the French, for that matter...
...Defense spending is immensely wasteful...
...And maybe they were right...
...The Soviets, or Russians, or whoever they are these days, still have atomic bombs...
...The helicopter hovers above the ship and dangles a cable onto the deck...
...O peration Just Cause was well fought...
...They used 90-millimeter recoilless rifles to punch holes, right where they wanted them, in cinderblock buildings...
...The 1989 press hysteria about the usefulness of the Stealth fighter was, indeed hysterical...
...Can we count on Saddam Hussein to come along every year and resolve our defense policy debates...
...The men, petty officers, and junior officers sleep in triple-deck bunk beds that look like something you'd organize your CDs in...
...By the same token, soldiers and weapons do nothing unless there's a war...
...We're not interested in whether they want to kill us, we're interested in whether they can...
...Minimum collateral damage—minimum injury or death of innocents," said Snell with the smack of satisfaction a Mongol Khan might have used on the words, "Killed the men and sold the women into slavery...
...The body's immune system is a real waste—big, sprawling old white blood corpuscles floating around all over the place doing absolutely nothing to earn their keep, not even lending paper cuts a festive hue—until the body gets sick...
...Chorrillo caught fire during the fighting—was probably set on fire by the Dignity Battalions and most of it burned, leaving thousands of people without homes...
...The hawsers and bowlines carried aboard the Mobile Bay are long enough to hang every Democrat elected to Congress since Roosevelt's second term...
...And the nation's drunks and thugs had been given guns and formed into "Dignity Battalions" to scare hell out of anybody who wore a necktie or owned two pairs of shoes...
...Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things...
...And I know the Navy has changed for certain because, after a couple of beers, Captain Bill turned to me and said, "This is one of the best chiefs I ever had on the Mobile Bay—you ought to see what this man can do with a computer...
...Think of all the people who want to kill us—people we used to be married to, people we're married to now, children we just grounded for using our MasterCard to call the Naked Chat Line 900 number, the next-door neighbor whose azaleas we crushed trying to back the boat trailer into our driveway...
...4 Any questions...
...There's no place in Panama City where you can get 300 yards away from anything...
...asked the junior lieutenant who was showing me around...
...The Mobile Bay uses a kind of radarphased-array—that sends out multiple pulses capable of tracking hundreds of targets at once...
...The Defense section of my new book was originally written in the spring of 1990...
...There are almost no portholes on the Mobile Bay...
...But to debate government policy using only reason is to ignore a number of important irrational aspects of government...
...And what makes us in America the big-dog, double-barreled, don't-tellmother nation that we are is not how much money that was but how little...
...In a bar by the docks we ran into a former chief petty officer of Captain Bill's, now retired, a big man with an important gut, a variety of tattoos, and graying hair cut the length of toothbrush bristles...
...Of the 438 Kevlar-less Panamanians hit by our fire, 314 died...
...Defense spending also buys cleanliness...
...Colonel Snell said his most valuable weapon was that 90-millimeter recoilless rifle, which dates back to the Korean War...
...We made a decision, and in almost no time at all we were putting our paratroopers and Rangers on airplanes and send18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 ing them down there...
...I rest my case...
...My father was a chief petty officer and so was my uncle, and I know the type...
...blowing immense holes in Iraqi defenses in Kuwait...
...So can the Chinese...
...I spent the next two days wandering through this repository of my tax dollars trying to discover what defense spending buys...
...And in the upper middle part of that chest of drawers, about where the dress shirts and good handkerchiefs would be, is the Mobile Bay's reason for being...
...Six different kinds of helicopters were needed for Operation Just Cause...
...Only on the bridge—with the helmsmen, look-outs, and officers bent over navigational charts—is there any sense of being at sea...
...They were complaining that there weren't enough civilian casualties—because American soldiers wouldn't shoot looters...
...The deficit won't be affected because the same citizens who can tell their government to give them things can tell that government "No new taxes...
...The Mobile Bay is not, however, very impressive to see...
...For a while in 1990 there was talk about a "peace dividend...
...I traveled from the Mayport Naval Station in Florida to Charleston, South Carolina, on board the Ticonderoga Class Aegis guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay...
...Snell had to order the recoilless rifles out of mothballs five weeks before Operation Just Cause, and only a few old lifer sergeants knew how to use them...
...The streets were filled with rioting riot police...
...My pride in American technology, as exemplified by the Aegis Missile Cruiser USS Mobile Bay, proved to be better-founded than I ever could have hoped...
...An America with a peace-dividend defense budget could still mount an Operation Just Cause...
...But," said Mrs...
...Of the 347 Americans hit by enemy fire, only 23 died...
...There are places on this earth where you can't hold a soccer match with so few casualties...
...About 5.5 percent of America's gross national product goes to defense...
...Like modern war and peace, modern success and failure can be hard to distinguish...
...And the only immediately discernible weapons, the two dinky 5-incher gun turrets, are not the kind of thing that would make for dramatic Liberty Bond poster art...
...Now show me the insurance company that will come over to your house with AH-64 Apache helicopters, M-551 Sheridan light tanks, and 90-millimeter recoilless rifles if the Bahamas invades Fort Lauderdale...
...Dhahran, Saudi Arabia A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense, but for much of the post-Vietnam era we haven't had that, either...
...Every hatch, pipe, bulkhead, gangway, locker, compartment, and nameless do-funny has a number stenciled on it, and that number tells an adept just what the object is and where, exactly, its proper place is within the ship...
...General T. W. Kelly, said afterward, "Recall that the so-called war status was declared by Noriega on Friday, the marine was killed on Saturday, the [beating of a U.S...
...This is a single windowless space, huge by shipboard standards, maybe thirty feet deep by forty feet wide, called the "Combat Information Center...
...There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait last August 2 and set everyone to gearing up for World War 2 1/2...
...The Soviets can...
...My host aboard the Mobile Bay, Captain David Bill III, is now an admiral and the commander of the battleship USS Wisconsin, whose guns are as I write, P J. O'Rourke heads the foreign affairs desk for Rolling Stone magazine...
...The Aegis computers receive information not only from the Mobile Bay's own sensors but also from those carried on its helicopters and on board all the other ships in its fleet...
...Iwent to Panama two months after the U.S...
...There were fewer bullet holes visible in Panama than in downtown Manila or parts of Washington, D.C...
...In the future, with any luck, these will be more important questions than whether to carpet-bomb Baghdad...
...I said at last, and a strange expression came across the mild and pleasant features of the young lieutenant...
...Saltzman, "if they told me today that they were going to come take Noriega and loot my store again, I'd say it was worth it...
...It's visceral, hormonal...
...The high school-educated Navy enlisted men who run all this, however, understand it completely...
...The helicopter is then hauled down and landed like a giant air bass...
...Army's Soldiers magazine gave a vivid—if not very action-packed—description of fighting the way it was done in Panama: SSgt...
...Similarly, diamond shapes indicate hostiles and squares indicate unknowns...
...defense budget by billions, this one boat can loose more military power on the world than mankind used in all its history from the first australopithecine flint-tossing spat in the Olduvai Gorge until Hiroshima...
...The 1960s-era Sheridan light tank is still the only tank we have that can be dropped by parachute and the only tank small enough to fight in the narrow streets around the Presidential Palace and government buildings in Old Panama City...
...TWo-billion dollars was two-thirds of one percent of our 1990 defense budget...
...The Mobile Bay is so clean andorganized as to mock God for the frowzy quantum-physics universe he created...
...The Aegis radar can detect a basketball 150 miles away and a high-altitude bomber a thousand miles off...
...And I can understand how some people might want to retarget our Polaris missiles at the high-crime areas of America's cities —the mayors' offices, for instance...
...It was a lousy neighborhood anyway," said one woman with a shrug...
...And wire-guided missiles need 300 yards to get level before they can be accurately aimed...
...But, if we do our deficit spending on social programs, we create things that are far more dangerous and terrifying than Friends of the Earth...
...Where my soldiers fought," said Snell, "their restraint was remarkable...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 19 Modern naval warfare is an indoorsy thing...
...But at that time I assumed Saddam Hussein would turn tail and scuttle back to Baghdad...
...Even in their most warlike frame of mind the Soviets preferred to wait until the likes of Ramsey Clark and the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the United States Invasion of Panama won a majority in the U.S...
...only injecting here a few addenda and I-told-you-so's : • The extreme concern about limiting civilian casualties and "collateral damage" in Iraq is prefigured in the fight for Panama City described below...
...This being more, you'll note, than the President can do...
...The screens show schematic maps centered upon the position of the Mobile Bay...
...Well, let's not overstate the case —like a laid-back, disorganized, tropical Battle of Stalingrad...
...We were going to take our war-making resources and turn them to tranquil ends...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
