NORFOLK, Va. — As the crew of the USS Arlington (LPD-24) has trained since the ship’s commissioning in April 2013 and works toward its maiden deployment next year, something has become clear–the ship has more capability than is being used.
Commanding Officer Cmdr. Greg Baker told reporters on Friday that “we haven’t fully tapped the capabilities of this ship” during pre-deployment workups or in preparation for Bold Alligator 2014, which is the ship’s largest event yet.
“We have the capability to do just about anything that the big deck, or the LHD/LHA, can do,” he said. “We can do pretty much the same thing. For that matter, the LPD-17 class is much more prone to be independently deployed. … The C5I–the communications and the command and control suite–is far more robust, the radars are better, the communications suite’s far better than previous LPDs.”
Add to that a larger flight deck, four diesel engines that can be controlled remotely from the Ship Wide Area Network, and other ship design features, and the Navy has a very powerful tool.
“The only thing that really constrains me as a ship is the actual sailors billeted onboard. It’s the schools that they’ve attended that really limits us,” he said.
“There are a couple initiatives that we onboard Arlington have done to get those skillsets that aren’t necessarily billeted, because we have our hierarchy in the Navy, the confines we work in with how our billeting works,” he said. “But we’ve sent people to schools to get those skillsets in order to increase our capability.”