The German Navy’s fleet of frigates could be upgraded to deploy Raytheon’s [RTN] Standard Missile-3 to participate in NATO’s ballistic missile defense program if the modifications were approved by the government, Germany’s top naval officer recently said.

Vice Admiral Axel Schimpf, the counterpart to the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations, said in a recently published article that the F124 frigates are capable of being upgraded to play a vital role in ballistic missile defense (BMD).

“The German Navy, with the F124 Frigates in their current configuration, has a weapon system at their disposal which forms the basis for capability enhancements for (German) armed forces’ participation in various roles,” according to a translation of an article he penned in Marine Forum, a publication of the German Maritime Institute.

One option, Schimpf said, would be to upgrade the F124s’ SMART-L and Active Phased Array Radar (APAR) combat management system, along with the Mk-41 vertical launch system to accommodate the SM-3. The SM-3 is already deployed by the U.S. and Japanese navies for ballistic missile defense.

The enhancements would be one way for Germany to participate in the Obama administration’s European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) embraced by NATO, and could be done in cooperation with Denmark and the Netherlands, Schimpf said.

EPAA calls for the deployment of U.S. Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) destroyers equipped with the Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system to Europe as part of an initial, sea-based defense system. Later this decade, EPAA would extend to a land-based system known as Aegis ashore, which would first be based in Romania beginning in 2015.

The German government has not made a decision on whether to adapt its frigates for ballistic missile defense, and Germany’s role in EPAA is the source of ongoing political discussions in Berlin ahead of NATO’s May 20-21 summit in Chicago.

“Depending on the political decision and funding, the German Navy stands ready to provide sea-based capabilities,” Schimpf said.

Only a handful of NATO allies deploy the Aegis combat system on ships, and Germany is not one of them. Germany’s combat system does not operate on an S-band frequency used on Aegis. Raytheon, however, says it has developed a duel band data link that would allow the combat system on allied ships to talk to the SM-3 and guide it to targets.