US Warships Need Faster Ways to Rearm, Repair, Navy Secretary Says
Carlos Del Toro has also ordered up several steps intended to improve his service’s tech innovation.
CAITLIN M. KENNEY | DECEMBER 8, 2022
NAVY MISSILES INDUSTRY
The Navy needs to work out how to repair and rearm warships faster to get them back into a fight, the service’s secretary said Thursday.
“Being able to quickly rearm our warships’ vertical launch tubes at sea will significantly increase forward persistent combat power with the current force. No longer will our combatants need to withdraw from combat for extended periods of time to return for vulnerable in-port reloading of weapons systems,” Carlos Del Toro said during a speech at Columbia University in New York City.
Reloading VLS tubes—the Navy’s current destroyers carry nearly 100 apiece—has long required a ship to come dockside so a crane can lift and dangle replacement missiles down into the launcher cells. But the service has been working on ways to do it at sea since at least 2016. An October test aboard the destroyer Spruance in San Diego harbor marks, in Del Toro’s words, an “early step in the right direction and paves the way for expedited development.”
“My intention is to perfect this capability and field it for sustained, persistent forward strike capacity during wartime,” he said.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/12/us-warships-need-faster-ways-rearm-repair-navy-secretary-says/380678/
