Officials consider European home ports

[Lex]

Navy planners are investigating the possibility that ballistic-missile defense ships could be forward-deployed to ports in Europe to make it easier for them to defend the continent, a top U.S. commander said.

Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of Naval Forces Europe, said that the top authorities involved have made no decision about whether BMD-capable cruisers and destroyers could be based somewhere in Europe, in the same way warships stay in Japan, but the move is being considered.

"That's one of the things we're going have to look at, to see if we should do that," Fitzgerald told reporters April 15, along with looking into many other details for how the surface force will next year become Europe's shield against the threat of ballistic missiles fired from Iran.

Some other questions still under consideration include basics such as which areas American ships will defend and when; how many ships will be available; and how the alphabet-soup of U.S. and international commanders will work together in a crisis.

Fitzgerald gave a simple example of the bureaucratic and diplomatic intricacies involved with Navy ballistic-missile defense of Europe: Although U.S. European Command controls the territory in which BMD ships will be on guard, the potential launch sites in the Middle East, from which an attack might come, belong to U.S. Central Command.

Officials need to determine how to integrate their sensors, how they'll handle warnings, and who will be in the loop — American, NATO, European Union or individual countries' militaries — if a threat occurs.

Another element is the simple number of BMD-capable warships, which are in constant demand from commanders in the Persian Gulf and the Western Pacific. Although the fleet is increasing the number of East Coast BMD ships, Fitzgerald said he expected the ships available to defend Europe full time would increase only "by onesies and twosies" above the standing BMD warship the Navy has tried to keep in the eastern Mediterranean.

"When you have a few numbers and a critical demand, 'how do you allocate it,' becomes the question," he said.

The U.S. and its allies have begun testing systems and practicing for threats, Fitzgerald said, and American BMD ships are confirmed ready to join Israel's command-and-control grid in case of an attack.

Fitzgerald said one thing is clear: American ships will probably need to patrol only the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Early diagrams from the Missile Defense Agency showed American ships in the North and Black Seas, above the continent, but in practice, those parts of Europe will probably not be in danger because Iranian missiles can't reach that far — yet.

"We're going to have to pace the threat. Whatever the range of the threat is, that's where we'll put the ships," Fitzgerald said.

BMD-CAPABLE SHIPS

As of April 16, the Navy's fleet of ballistic-missile defense ships was made up of:
Cruisers: Lake Erie, Port Royal, Shiloh, Vella Gulf
Destroyers: Paul Hamilton, Higgins, Decatur, Fitzgerald, Curtis Wilbur, John S. McCain, Stethem, Russell, O'Kane, Hopper, Milius, John Paul Jones, Benfold, Stout, Ramage, The Sullivans
Another ship, the cruiser Monterey, is scheduled to get the BMD upgrade sometime this summer, Navy spokesman Lt. Tommy Buck said.

Source: Navy

Navy Times,
Posted : Monday Apr 19, 2010 14:27:13 EDT