Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson has said he agrees with Sen. John McCain’s (R-Arizona) plan to increase the U.S. Navy’s fleet of ships, but caution should be exercised when it comes to the replacement of existing designs, such as littoral combat ships, with new combat vessels, Breaking Defense reported Tuesday.
“LCS has got to compete (with alternatives) in my mind, but time is an element of that competition,” Richardson told reporters after a Defense One-hosted event.
“We just can’t stop building stuff.”
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. writes McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a white paper Monday that seeks to put a cap on the production of LCS in fiscal year 2017 in an effort to start the procurement of new small surface combatant ships by 2022.
Richardson noted that the Navy needs to ramp up construction of destroyers, attack submarines, amphibious ships and oilers in the near term and called for the adoption of drones that can operate with the service branch’s warships, the report said.
“I am really interested in unmanned (systems, and) we’re doing what we can to increasingly network the fleet together,†he added.
