The real reason we are buying new frigates – Peace Action Wellington

On Tuesday this week, the NZ initiative is hosting a webinar, “What is a Frigate? And why does New Zealand need one?” that purports to be asking the hard questions about why New Zealand should spend $4-6 billion to buy two new warships.

This webinar is the next phase of a hard push by the military-industrial complex to entangle New Zealand in a US-led Pacific war, and to funnel almost unimaginable sums of public money to weapons dealers.

The webinar will serve as the ‘launch’ of a report by a New Zealand Initiative’s senior fellow. His bio reads:

Major General (Ret) John G. Howard, MNZM, Senior Fellow, The New Zealand Initiative. John…served more than four decades in the New Zealand Defence Force, including as the first-ever Chief of Defence Intelligence. While posted to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, he was the only non-American to serve as an executive officer across all 18 United States intelligence agencies.

Uh, wait. Let’s just rewind a minute. This guy was a senior executive at the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA that recommended interrogation techniques for US ‘war on terror’ detainees? That forced subjects to watch gay porn, draping them with the Israeli flag, and interrogating them in rooms lit by strobe lights for 16–18 hours? The DIA that ran Afghanistan’s notorious Bagram ‘Black jail’ where agents stand accused of beating and sexually humiliating prisoners? The DIA is perhaps the most dangerous and disturbing part of the US security apparatus being a combined intelligence agency and combat support agency.

Major John is obviously proud of his time there as a standout kiwi.

But wait, the NZ Initiative says that Major John’s case for new frigates will be ‘put to the test’ by Major (Ret) Tim Ewing-Jarvie, suggesting that there will be some critical review of it. Let’s look at Major Tim’s bio:

Tim Ewing-Jarvie brings experience spanning commercial and national security strategy, including executive advisory roles within the Pentagon, US Defense Intelligence Agency, US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, New Zealand Defence Intelligence, and the Five Eyes Special Operations community.

 

So Major John and Major Tim are both deeply implicated in the US intelligence community. These roles and experience should not be glossed over or taken as some expression of their competence for the task of dispassionately evaluating if New Zealand should buy new warships. Instead, they should be seen for what they are, salesmen. Salesmen for the US view of the world, salesmen for weapons and salesmen for war.

Their views and values will have been deeply shaped by their time in the heart of the US empire, an empire that views China as the biggest threat to the US economic dominance.

The frigate project – which involves the purchase of not one, but two frigates –  is being sold to New Zealanders as utterly necessary for the country’s defence against China. The pundits will point to the Chinese warships that travelled in the South Pacific in early 2025, and the recent testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile in the South Pacific nuclear-free zone as evidence of China’s aggressive posturing in the region.

Their argument boils down to saying that we need frigates to ‘control our seas’ and protect our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from the Chinese navy.

What these two men are unlikely to say is the truth: that spending billions of dollars on warships is insane. It is insane because it signifies New Zealand’s acceptance of the US invitation to wage war on China, the country that is currently our largest trading partner. It is an acceptance to wage common cause with a country that is currently involved in an illegal war of aggression, funding a genocide, and rapidly descending into a fascist dictatorship.

This is the choice we are being asked to make. Not if we want to “defend New Zealand.”

Because frigates, unlike offshore patrol vessels, are specifically made for very long range combat operations as part of a combined maritime force.

The NZDF’s own description of the frigates Te Mana and Te Kaha tell us: they are for “maritime security patrols and surveillance operations to protect our sea lines of communication or trade routes.” What that means is they exist to be part of the US Navy surface fleet doing training and patrols in places like the Red Sea and the South China Sea. This is exactly what the frigate is doing at RIMPAC: it is practicing being part of the US Navy.

Frigates are not made for protection of New Zealand’s EEZ or any of the many jobs that are often touted by the military to justify their existence like maritime surveillance, search and rescue and illegal fishing. These jobs are done by offshore patrol vessels, the Otago and Wellington, which are also slated for replacement.

The insanity, though, is not simply signing up for a horrific and utterly avoidable war. It is that we are being asked to pay dearly for that privilege. The cost of two frigates is estimated to be $4-6 billion. If the cost overrun of the recent upgrade to the existing frigates are anything to go by (the original estimate was $448 million, the actual cost was closer to $700 million), we should anticipate a bill closer to $7-9 billion.

It is really hard to understand just exactly how much money that is. One really useful comparison is the new Dunedin Hospital, expected to costapproximately $2 billion. The hospital is the major provider of services to a population catchment of around 330,000 people. For more than a decade, the entire Otago region has been fighting for a new hospital. Each step of the way has been beset by political opposition to giving the community the facility it needs.

Imagine: a new hospital for the Hutt Valley which is in a shocking state, but which Minister Chris Bishop recently admitted wasn’t even the worst. How about a new hospital for Gisborne – it is apparently 116 years old.

We have real security needs – right now – across the country with exploding poverty, homelessness and essential medical care. We have people dying in hospitals, sleeping in the streets and struggling to eat more than one meal a day.

These catastrophes, these realities, these are the things we should be dealing with. These frigates cost us the healthcare futures of three or four Dunedin-sized catchments, up to a million New Zealanders. Every single person in Aotearoa NZ will pay the real cost of upwards of $8000 for these frigates.

This ‘serious’ discussion by men with big titles and long service records about ‘urgent’ needs for new warships is a manufactured crisis from organisations like the ones hosting this webinar: the NZ Initiative and its umbrella, the Atlas Network.

Shilling for the arms industry

Over the last two plus years, the work of the NZ Initiative, and the wider aligned Atlas Network, a global assemblage of far right, libertarian lobbyists and policy writers who seek to normalise the brutal transfer of wealth upwards, all in the name of freedom (for the rich), has become much more well known. David Seymour has been an Atlas student, and has certainly tried – and largely succeeded –  at ramming through their agenda of deregulation, privatisation and wealth concentration.

That the NZI is now shilling for the “defence industry” is hardly a surprise. It isn’t just that the revolving door of soldier-cum-lobbyist is a lucrative beat to be on. It is that the entire architecture of US empire requires fighting forever wars on behalf of capital – and New Zealand continues to be an obedient servant of that empire.

It’s up to us to trade that obedience for an ethical and independent foreign policy. And forget about buying frigates.