Navy to decommission 10 aging vessels

MANILA, Philippines - The Navy will decommission five to 10 ships in its inventory after its newly acquired vessels are delivered.

Officials said the new ships would replace the aging ones still being used in naval operations.

“We are looking at about five to 10 vessels that we have to decommission as soon as the new vessels arrive,” assistant chief of naval staff for logistics Capt. Alberto Carlos said in a recent interview.

Navy vice commander Rear Adm. Caesar Taccad said they have about 102 to 107 ships in the inventory and about a third of these are undergoing repairs or training.

“We follow a maintenance system which we call the DSRT – deploy, sustain, repair and train cycle. About two-thirds of our fleet is operationally ready so I can roughly say that we are 67 percent operationally ready,” Taccad said.

Navy spokesman Col. Edgard Arevalo said the average age of the ships in their inventory is more than 30 years old.

“We really badly need additional new and better assets and better ships. We are still using ships that were used during the Vietnam War,” he added. 

Arevalo noted that the Navy’s newest vessels are the two frigates acquired from the United States, the BRP Gregorio del Pilar and BRP Ramon Alcaraz.

BRP del Pilar used to be known as the USCGC Hamilton and was commissioned in 1967. It was transferred to the Philippine Navy in 2011.

BRP Alcaraz, meanwhile, was originally called USCGC Dallas and commissioned by the US Coast Guard in 1968. The frigate was acquired by the Philippines in 2012 and was commissioned in the same year.

Both ships were used by the US Coast Guard for drug and migrant interdiction, law enforcement, search and rescue, living marine resources protection, and defense readiness.

The Navy is expecting the delivery of P6.4 billion worth of equipment including the strategic sealift vessels, additional naval helicopters and small amphibian vehicles.

Indonesian company PT PAL Indonesia (Persero) won the bidding for the supply of two new strategic sealift vessels, which can transport a large number of soldiers, logistics equipment and supplies.