The Navy resupplied a warship’s weapons at sea for the first time last week – providing what Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro called a “game changing” update in combat readiness for the surface fleet.
The cruiser Chosin and its sailors employed the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method device, known as TRAM, to load the ship’s MK 41 Vertical Launching System off the coast of San Diego on Friday.
The TRAM prototype allows warships to rearm during the underway replenishment process when supply ships deliver fuel, food, and other critical supplies. This ability to reload at sea, rather than at shore, saves time for combatant ships and keeps them in the fight, instead of having to go into port to reload, according to the service.
For the at-sea demonstration, the Chosin teamed up with the Military Sealift Command dry cargo and ammunition ship Washington Chambers to connect and transfer the missile canister to the cruiser. The team then utilized TRAM to transport the missile canister along rails connected to the cruiser’s VLS modules to successfully place it into a VLS cell, the Navy said.
The Navy plans to field TRAM in the next two to three years.
“Today, we proved just how game-changing TRAM truly is — and what a powerful deterrent it will be to our competitors,” Del Toro said in a statement. “This demonstration marks a key milestone on the path to perfecting this capability and fielding it for sustained operations at sea.”
He first outlined TRAM as one of his top priorities in 2022 during a speech at Columbia University, calling it a “sustained, persistent forward-strike capacity during wartime.”
The Navy previously tested a land-based demonstration of TRAM in July at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division in California.
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