The plan is to triple the assets on Italy's southern maritime border ahead of an EU summit next week in which Italy wants the issue of increased refugee arrivals to be on the agenda.
"It is a deployment that will allow us to ask the European Union to do the same," Defence Minister Mario Mauro said ahead of a cabinet meeting later on Monday with Prime Minister Enrico Letta.
Ministers said the mission would be humanitarian and for security, following complaints by migrant rights advocate who said it was just the latest example of a "Fortress Europe" mentality.
The cabinet is planning to approve the final details of the operation to begin on Tuesday, with media reports saying Predator drones could also be used as well as a new radar to track the boats.
Italy already has three navy ships patrolling in the region, as well as helicopters, ships and planes from the coast guard and border patrol.
The biggest Italian navy ship in the area is currently the Espero, a frigate with a crew of 225 men and women, a helicopter and a clinic.
Two border guard Piaggio P-180 planes also scan the sea with hi-tech sensors, although officers say they are frequently overwhelmed by arrivals.
The UN refugee agency estimates 32,000 asylum seekers have landed in Italy and Malta this year -- many of them from Eritrea, Somalia and Syria.
The numbers have increased drastically since the Arab Spring revolts in North Africa in 2011 and there is a particularly serious problem in Libya which is unable to control its maritime frontier.
"We have a non-state like Libya in front of us," Mauro said, adding: "What is going in Syria will make millions of people flee for decades."
Letta is also planning to request that an Italian be appointed to head up the European Union's Frontex border agency and that the service have an operational office in Italy.
Frontex is based in Poland and headed up by executive director Ilkka Laitinen from Finland.
Meanwhile a new boatload of 137 migrants was taken by coast guards to the tiny island of Lampedusa, where 364 migrants drowned on October 3 in Italy's worst ever refugee shipwreck disaster.
The bodies from that tragedy, which was followed by another one off Malta last Friday in which at least 36 people parished, were being taken to Porto Empedocle in Sicily on Monday for burial.
Relatives of the victims and representatives of the Eritrean community were seen crying over the coffins as they were loaded into a ship.
"What we have experienced in these days is a painful chapter that calls for responsibility from Europe," Lampedusa mayor Giusi Nicolini said.
The new arrivals on Monday were all migrants from Syria and are believed to have arrived from Libya.
They have been taken to an overcrowded refugee centre on Lampedusa, where some of the 155 survivors from the disaster are also being housed.
Over the weekend, Italian border guards also said they had picked up 14 Eritrean migrants trying to cross Alpine passes into Switzerland.
The migrants had all come from Lampedusa, which is one of the biggest entry points for irregular migration into the European Union.
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