MSC announces scheduled ship delivery

WASHINGTON (USTCNS) --- Military Sealift Command announced that USNS Lance Cpl. Roy M. Wheat is scheduled to deliver next year for prepositioning in the western Pacific Ocean.

Upon delivery, Wheat will join more than 35 ships prepositioning military equipment and supplies near potential hot spots around the world.

Wheat is the last of three ships being added to the Maritime Prepositioning Force, which prepositions Marine Corps equipment and supplies.

The ship will carry an expeditionary airfield, Navy construction battalion equipment, a 500-bed Navy fleet hospital and equipment displaced from the original Maritime Prepositioning Ships by increasingly outsized cargoes. Wheat will also carry seven pieces of Navy lighterage, which will enable the ship to be off-loaded offshore.

Wheat will be capable of supporting a full range of Marine Corps missions -- from low-intensity humanitarian operations to major theater conflicts. The ship, scheduled to deploy in late 2002, will carry critical assets that will strengthen the Maritime Prepositioning Force presence in the western Pacific.

The MPF ships in the western Pacific together carry enough equipment and supplies to sustain a Marine Corps Air/Ground Task Force of up to 17,000 Marines for up to 30 days of operations.

Lance Cpl. Roy M. Wheat was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for heroic actions while serving as a fire team leader with the First Platoon, Company K, Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, First Marine Division in Vietnam, Aug. 11, 1967.

For more information about the Maritime Prepositioning Force visit the Navy's Military Sealift Command on the web at http://www.msc.navy.mil/.

(FROM MILITARY SEALIFT COMMAND PUBLIC AFFAIRS)