Commentary —

Connecticut Could Use A Good Old-Fashioned War

By William A. Collins

War and profits,

Hand in hand;

In our Steady

Habits Land.

The Gulf and Afghan wars have not been good to Connecticut. Our enemies own no jet planes, naval armadas, or roving armored units. They seem to make do with AK-47s, rocket grenades, and car bombs. These are not convenient targets against which to deploy our state’s jet engines, nuclear subs, or helicopters.

It all started out well enough with the helicopters, since they kept either crashing or getting shot down. This created a terrific replacement business for Sikorsky, but soon the Army recoiled from all the bad publicity of those losses. Helicopter use was then sharply curtailed. Bye-bye overtime.

In its turn, the Navy gave a good try to pushing submarines. In both wars, it had them fire off cruise missiles at distant targets in a lame attempt to enhance their deflated value. But cruise missiles work best when launched from airplanes much nearer to the target. And submarines, worse luck, don’t function all that well in the desert. Then in October, the Navy sent the sub Albuquerque off to the Gulf, along with the carrier Harry S. Truman, ostensibly to fend off imaginary Sunni warships.

Worse still, here at home Sikorsky suffered a double setback more damaging than anything inflicted by Muqtada al-Sadr. After years of development, the Army finally decided that the long-awaited Comanche helicopter simply wasn’t worth its cost. It proved to be too vulnerable to ground fire, and the nature of war by then had fundamentally changed. Instead, some of the Comanche’s functions will be shifted to the upgraded Apache, manufactured — insult of insults — by Boeing. (You’ll notice that we often honor Indian tribes by giving their names to prestigious weapons systems, while simultaneously cheating them personally out of land and treasure.)

Sikorsky’s other blow came from the Marines. They ferry the president around in fancy helicopters long purchased almost automatically from the Stratford plant. But this year when the time came to order a new batch, the Marines opened the competition to Europe. More insult. The ensuing battle has waxed ferocious. For the short term anyway, Sikorsky will remain busy building those replacement Black Hawks for Iraq, but the future looks shaky.

Fighter planes have also run into turbulence. Their next generation, epitomized by the Pratt & Whitney-powered F-22, is receiving a lot of Comanche-style flak. Critics call it a big waste.

Indeed my own modest syndicate recently got a taste of this infighting. We innocently distributed a column by Jim Hightower castigating the F-22 as pork. Hardly had the ink dried when a call came from Northrop Grumman, its maker, asking for equal time. But when their column arrived, it was not by the corporate PR office or the Air Force, but a “scholar” at the Lexington Institute. Lexington is one of the many corporate-funded pseudo-think tanks that fill our opinion pages with right-wing pap. That’s how various useless weapons get promoted.

Connecticut certainly has its share of those useless weapons. And around here, they needn’t depend on phony think tanks for support. Our local press is happy to do the job for free. Reports on the ever-shifting defense budget judiciously ignore the relative merit and practicality of these arms. Articles instead concentrate only on how much money they might bring to our state manufacturers.

In any event, Sikorsky is now beefing up its own defensive capability. It has announced plans to create “engineering centers” in several other states. Although its public rationale for this move has been murky, the politics is clear. Every additional state where it operates brings two more senators to the company’s cause at budget time. That’s smart.

For the longer run though, Sikorsky might want to think about getting into windmills.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)