You might call it the Gentleman’s Quarterly of bloodshed. Armada International is four-color 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 bimonthly 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 leftwing 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.
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