- Joined
- Sep 20, 2016
Navy brass are seriously examining the possibility of pulling seven or eight of its Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates out of retirement as the service works to surge its numbers.
Speaking Tuesday morning at a current strategy forum hosted by the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said the move was under consideration, though it would likely entail significant effort to modernize the older ships.
"We've got to be thoughtful about this," he said. " ... Those are some old ships and the technology on those ships is old. And in this exponential type of environment, a lot has changed since we last modernized those. So it will be a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how we do that.
There are now 12 Perry-class frigates listed in the holdings of the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, which maintains "mothball fleets" in Pearl Harbor; Philadelphia; and Bremerton, Washington.
What is clear, however, is that relying on laid-up ships alone won't be enough to bring the Navy close to its goal of a 355-ship fleet. Richardson reiterated his goal to extend the service life of currently serving ships and making existing platforms more capable, using technologies such as directed energy weapons to get more than a ship's worth of capability out of every ship in the fleet.
"There are many types of those technologies that are out there, imaging radars, those sorts of things, to make each of these platforms more capable, delivering more naval power," he said.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/06/13/navy-taking-hard-look-pulling-frigates-out-mothballs.html
Speaking Tuesday morning at a current strategy forum hosted by the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said the move was under consideration, though it would likely entail significant effort to modernize the older ships.
"We've got to be thoughtful about this," he said. " ... Those are some old ships and the technology on those ships is old. And in this exponential type of environment, a lot has changed since we last modernized those. So it will be a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how we do that.
There are now 12 Perry-class frigates listed in the holdings of the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, which maintains "mothball fleets" in Pearl Harbor; Philadelphia; and Bremerton, Washington.
What is clear, however, is that relying on laid-up ships alone won't be enough to bring the Navy close to its goal of a 355-ship fleet. Richardson reiterated his goal to extend the service life of currently serving ships and making existing platforms more capable, using technologies such as directed energy weapons to get more than a ship's worth of capability out of every ship in the fleet.
"There are many types of those technologies that are out there, imaging radars, those sorts of things, to make each of these platforms more capable, delivering more naval power," he said.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/06/13/navy-taking-hard-look-pulling-frigates-out-mothballs.html