On June 22, Denmark’s Ministry of Defense announced what companies would be building its next patrol ships. The new type of vessel is designed to be modular and upgradeable for years and even decades to come, allowing the same hulls and bones of the ship to serve even as the tools and technologies change with the times.
While Denmark is a small country, its possession of Greenland ensures it has an outsized role to play in the Arctic. With global climate change and thawing ice, the Arctic was already going to become a more trafficked and contested part of the globe. And that was before Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then at massive scale in 2022, put a deep freeze on cooperation between all of the Arctic states. As a founding member of NATO, Denmark has long been part of a defensive military alliance, ready to respond to Russian threats. New patrol ships will enable the country’s navy to operate more capably where needed for decades to come.
“A rethinking of the design will mean that we in the maritime domain are future-proof to handle changing needs. This applies, for example, to dealing with hybrid threats in a faster and more flexible way than before,” said Torben Mikkelsen, the head of the Danish Defense Ship program, according to Shephard News.
Observers expect the new patrol vessels will be based on a ship template called the OMT MPV80, built by Odense Maritime Technology and SH Defence. OMT is a naval design and advising firm—it’s one of the three major parts of the named consortium responsible for producing Denmark’s new patrol vessels, alongside Terma, a naval military contractor, and PensionDanmark, a pension fund.
The OMT MPV80 debuted at the DSEI arms exhibition in 2021. It was built with SH Defense’s modular “Cube” system as an essential characteristic. CEO of OMT Kåre Groes Christiansen told Naval News that they had made “a ship that was born Cubed.”
Cubed? Christiansen is…
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