Aegis Ashore

Administration eyes land-based SPY

As the surface Navy continues to gear up for its new mission of defending Europe against ballistic missiles, which begins next year, fleet bosses think they have a good handle on what ships and crews will need to accomplish to be ready. But cruisers and destroyers won’t have the only Aegis systems watching the skies for long.

The next step in the Obama administration’s plan to defend Europe, “Aegis Ashore,” will take components familiar to many surface sailors — the ships’ distinctive hexagonal SPY-1 radars and a battery of Standard Missile-3s — and park them on the ground as additional insurance against potential nuclear attacks from Iran.

The only question is: Who will run them?

The pair of Aegis Ashore posts in Europe could afford sailors a chance for some of the most unusual duty in the Navy, working on the most advanced radars in the world without any of the standard worries of seasickness or drowning. Although officials aren’t yet clear what role sailors will play in Aegis Ashore, if they don’t run it full time, they could at least be tasked with helping to set it up before turning it over to locals.

One reason sailors could get a chance to serve at the Aegis Ashore sites is that they will include almost all the same equipment and setup as the Aegis radars aboard cruisers and destroyers.

“The Aegis Ashore system would be similar to the O-3 level of [an] Aegis ship that would be contained in stacked levels approximately 60 feet high,” wrote Riki Ellison, founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, which represents missile defense industry vendors. “The levels would include water coolers, power converters, processing computers, combat information center and radar processors with the S-Band radars and antennas on top. The communications, power source, cooling tower and the vertical launch containers that would hold a mixture of interceptors would be located outside of the main structure. The interceptors could be placed miles away if desired.”

Officials with the main Aegis Ashore contractor, Lockheed Martin, deferred to the Navy on questions about who would run the radars. Naval Sea Systems Command did not have details by the time Navy Times went to press.

The Obama administration’s plans call for two Aegis Ashore sites: The first will be stood up in Romania in 2015 and the second in Poland in 2018. In 2020, both will get the newest, latest versions of the Aegis BMD software and the latest version of the SM-3, according to information from the Missile Defense Agency.

When the two sites are up and radiating, that will likely relax the burden on the surface force, according to a Congressional Research Service report by naval expert Ron O’Rourke, meaning the fleet will field fewer ships as part of the Euro-BMD mission.

According to O’Rourke’s study, that relief will most likely be welcome: For the Navy to maintain a constant presence of about six ships in the Mediterranean, it would need a dedicated force of 26 Aegis ships. In other words, 30 percent of the Aegis fleet would more or less be locked into standing BMD patrols.

“Some observers are concerned — particularly following the administration’s announcement of its intention to use Aegis-BMD ships to defend Europe against potential ballistic-missile attacks — that demands from U.S. regional military commanders for BMD-capable Aegis ships are growing faster than the number of BMD-capable Aegis ships,” O’Rourke wrote. “Much of the concern focuses on the situation over the next few years, prior to the scheduled establishment of the two Aegis Ashore sites in Europe, which observers anticipate will permit a reduction in the number of BMD-capable Aegis ships needed for European BMD operations.”

It’s not clear how much of a reduction Aegis Ashore will permit.

Even if sailors don’t get a chance to work at the Aegis Ashore sites in Europe, they could help develop the technology in Hawaii. The Navy and MDA want to build a test site at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai to demonstrate that Aegis can work on land.

There are already a few older Aegis test sites on land, including, most famously, the “cornfield cruiser” at the Navy’s Combat System Engineering Development Site in Moorestown, N.J., which includes a mockup superstructure of a warship — the “USS Rancocas” atop a building.