According to Wired’s Danger Room blog, the Navy will be sending its newest, latest kinds of surface ships to the Mideast, not Asia where a buildup of forces is planned.
The blog cites Adm. Jonathan Greenert remarks to Pentagon reporters on Wednesday:
The arrival of those newer ships to the Middle East will enable a “metamorphosis” of the Navy’s Asia presence, Greenert continued. Into the Pacific go aircraft carriers — more on them in a second — destroyers, cruisers and minesweepers. Littoral Combat Ships, with their plug-and-play modular payloads of sensors and weapons, will come into the Gulf, along with the new Afloat Forward Staging Base like the retrofitted U.S.S. Ponce, a new kind of ship that can ferry commandos, helicopters, drones and Osprey tiltrotors.
But it would be wrong to say the Mideast gets all the new ships and Asia gets all the old ones. Singapore is going to provide a home port for Littoral Combat Ships in a few years. And despite the “metamorphosis,” Greenert said that at all times in the foreseeable future, the Navy will keep at least one aircraft carrier in the Gulf. One carrier “is the plan, and we’ll take it from there,” surging more if the U.S. Central Command chief needs it.
