Armada International - magazine

National Review, April 20, 1984 by D. Keith Mano

YOU MIGHT CALL it the Gentleman's Quaterly of bloodshed. Armada International is four-colour lush as a mescaline jag. Sleek, glib, upscale advertising on just about every other page: instead of Campari or Chivas, 30-mm. cannon; rather than Ralph Lauren wraparounds, an anti-tank weapon. For the man who has everything and would like to blow it all up. Armada is published out of Zurich in English, French, and German editions: $10 per bi-monthly issue. I don't know why, but we've been receiving it free at our cement plant since 1981. Now and then my elegant pipe-joint compound will be requisitioned for a B-52 or the Columbia space shuttle, but as warmongers go, I'm hardly Alfred Krupp--X-Pando Corp. is more fit to attack loose bathroom tile. Still, I wouldn't do without Armada. It seems like some special fallout, some angel hair, precipitated from the thick, colloidal left-wing stereotype of militarism. Armada is so perfect a liberal bogey, even feiffer couldn't satirize it.

Scope this battleship grey flannel ad copy. For a rocket launcher: "Plaster the target with thousands of specific mission submunitions--grenades and shaped charges. . . . MLRS can launch a tidal wave of defensive fire." Or this for the AT-4 expendable anti-tank weapon: "In addition to armor penetration you will have beyond-armor effects such as pressure rise, blinding light, and incendiary effect. This means a total kill of the vehicle and its crew." Nice soft-sell touch there. Or, for a portable, turreted foxhole: SO THE CREW MAY HOSE OFF WITHOUT TAKING ALL THE LEAD. You can buy field kitchens and barbed wire through Armada. Anything from camouflage and smokescreen powder to a full anti-missile escort ship. The photographs are awesome: an Arc de Triomphe-sized bridge-layer that could draw Leviathan up by its hook or scare him back to Job. Most all are named for some animal. Perhaps we'll have disarmament by default when they've gone right through the bestiary. After a British Dormouse Tank or a USAF Frog Fighter, say.

The terrain here is European. War materiel in an average issue will be about 27 per cent German, 12 per cent French, 9 per cent Swiss, 8 per cent British. America passes only 15 per cent of the ammunition. Israel has an aggressive 5 per cent. There are, naturally, no reader-response cards for the SS-20. Armada is anti-communist: both in spirit and because, I guess, publisher Carl Hollinger doesn't anticipate Soviet free-market arms sales. I did wonder just who the customer is meant to be. In a Sidewinder Missile ad it says, "For more information, please write on your letterhead to Raytheon Co. . . ." On what letterhead? F. A. O. Schwarz? Neiman-Marcus? Or Qaddafi Enterprises, un-Ltd.?

Hollinger, who did time at an American news agency and a Zurich paper, went to the warpath with armada in 1977. It is, with that ad revenue, doing megaton business, I guess. There are excellent, well-documented (though somewhat technical) articles. On an Israeli Merkava tank v. the T-72 Soviet tank in Lebanon. On air defense against air power during that Falkland skirmish. On the U.S. OPFOR program, which has built a replica Soviet ground force (1,200 men in Fort Irwin, California) so that American units can practice strategy. Up front, though, Hollinger will tend to write as if his brain were at parade rest. (He might say, "United States are," or "ingratiating," when he meant "ungrateful," task.) Thrice translated, his editorial position is about as hard to get at as the start of a Scotch-tape roll when you have no fingernail left. Certain ambivalences inhere by nature. Hollinger, who isn't your forthright Andrew Undershaft type, has to deplore war a whole lot. About as often as the sanitation department has to deplore garbage.

Deplore nuclear conflict in particular. After all (the horror of melted human crayons quite aside), camouflage paint and M-30 ammunition are obsolete as Polaroid fixative when an SS-20 is blamming down. America will be scolded often in Armada: we're soft, short of vision, and very materialistic--we consider nuclear ordnance to be cost-effective. During 1983, when the U.S. economy seemed hit in a tread, Hollinger was especially anixous. Reagan might sell Europe out. America was "in search of new and less-involved relations which suit her broadscale export economy rather than the finely meshed economic policies pursued by the Europeans." He was afraid there would be some new U.S.-USSR trade involvement because we were "a society whose notions of liberty rest, in the main, on material things." Unemployment, stagnation, high interest: Hollinger, by implication, was suggesting broad statist social-welfare remedies. "The one thing all people are prepared to defend is a healthy nation."

That simplistic formulation--ritual as salutes are--can be, nevertheless, instructive. In his next issue Hollinger afforded me this marvelously similar philosophical contract for a relationship between socialism and high-explosive manufacture: "The recurring socialist rationale has been: We must have something worthwhile to defend in the first place." You grasp, no? These baby-on-bayonet cartoon warmongers in armada are socialist, not capitalist are all. That isn't such a big-deal paradox, of course. The phrase"military-industrial complex" implies broad, never-weaned dependence by competitive war business on state planning. One editorial slogan is continuous throughout Armada--an insistence on inter-European governmental coordination. R&D has become too expensive. Competition is hell. A shame that bomb doesn't rhyme with womb and tomb: Europeans should have even their warfare doled out by socialism.