Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, believes future ships must incorporate potential Arctic operations during the design stage despite budget constraints, USNI News reported Monday.
Richardson told a Center for American Progress event that the Navy wants to maintain its presence in the Arctic to better familiarize itself with the region’s geography and learn how to conduct operations and research in the area, Megan Eckstein reports.
“We’ve got sort of a persistent presence in the Arctic, mostly it’s been sort of undersea – so our submarine force has done an exercise in the Arctic every other year where we surface one or more submarines through the ice, set up a base camp up there,†he told the event, USNI News reports.
But budget constraints and emergency requirements in other parts of the world have limited the Navy’s presence in the Arctic region, Richardson said, according to the report.
Richardson told the event that the Navy plans to integrate permanent energy generation, propulsion system and hull design into future naval vessels amid these challenges, the report says.
“The Arctic is going to be a different kind of a theater in the future, and if we neglect the fact that we’re going to be operating in the Arctic as we design this new class of ship, that’s just narrow thinking on our part,†Richardson told the event, the report says.
The Navy also seeks to replace its guided missile cruisers, destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships with surface combatants that would incorporate modular components to adopt new and emerging technologies, Eckstein reports.
