page_title: Colombian Navy
section_title: Ships
hierarchical_section_title: Colombian Navy / Equipment / Ships
caption_attribution_description: English: It is a picture of my own property, i am an officer of the Colombian navy, ensign rank, im not aware if this image is or is not already on the internet, but it is not copyrighted.
context_page_description: The Colombian Navy, officially the Colombian National Navy, also known as the "Armada Nacional" or just the "Armada" in Spanish, is the naval branch of the military forces of Colombia.
  The Navy is responsible for security and defence in the Colombian zones of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the extensive network of rivers inside the country, and a few small land areas under its direct jurisdiction.
  The Colombian Navy has a strength of 35,086 personnel as of September 2013 including approximately 22,000 in the Marine Infantry corps.
  The acronym "ARC", is used both as the official ship prefix for all the Colombian Navy ships, as well as a common short name for the Navy itself.
context_section_description: In keeping with its three major operational scenarios: blue-water operations, littoral/riverine operations and coast guard, the ARC maintains a mix of ships suited to each of those profiles. The scope of its operation has been historically oriented towards lightly armed coastal patrol, and as such, the majority of its vessels had been usually mid-size cutters. Traditionally, the ARC has had strong ties to the American and German navies and shipbuilders and much of its equipment traces its roots to them.
  
  Similar to other navies in the Latin-American region, the Colombian Navy acquired many vessels in the postwar years of the 1950s and 1960s, usually as war surplus from the US Navy, and then went through a somewhat dormant period during the 1960s to 1980s, during which few major acquisitions were performed.
  In more recent years, the Colombian Navy has seen two major periods of upgrading and modernization of its equipment: 
  
  The first period, as a result of the rise of the drug trade in the late 1970s and 1980s as well as, at the time, increased political tensions in the Caribbean due to territorial disputes with some of its neighbors -with Nicaragua over the San Andres archipelago and with Venezuela over the Los Monjes Archipelago- saw the need for a stronger Caribbean patrol force, and resulted in the acquisition of its biggest vessels to date, four missile corvettes (later upgraded to light frigates) in 1983 as well as some additional patrol craft. 
  The second period, as a consequence of the deepening in the internal Colombian conflict, started in the late 1990s and extended over to 2005–2006, provided strengthening of its riverine and littoral capabilities, involving research and development for new indigenous designs in collaboration with the state-owned Cotecmar shipyards that resulted in new types of vessels such as the state-of-the-art Riverine Support Patrol Boats (Spanish: Patrullera de Apoyo Fluvial, "PAF"), also called "riverine mothership" (Spanish: Nodriza Fluvial) like ARC Juan Ricardo Oyola Vera (NF-613) which have drawn the eye of other navies with similar requirements.
  Currently, the ARC is working on additional medium and long-term programs, including the development and acquisition of a number of coastal patrol vessels (Fassmer CPV-40)
   in 2011–2012, two oceanic patrol vessels (Fassmer OPV-80) (2011–2013), and the research and development of an indigenous corvette or frigate-class vessel ("Plataforma Estratégica de Superficie"), planned towards 2018–2020.
  7 October 2011, South Korea is to donate a recently retired Pohang-class corvette to Colombia as part of a drive to boost arms exports to the South American region. An-Yang (PCC-755) was decommissioned by the Republic of Korea Navy (RoKN) on 29 September, having been active for some 28 years since entering service in 1983.
caption: ARC Almirante Padilla (FM-51)
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