USNI News – China has been honing its ship-killing skills for potential future conflicts on new targets in a remote desert, according to new satellite photos reviewed by USNI News. New analysis shows the People’s Liberation Army is testing the ability to hit ships in port with long-range ballistic missiles.
Yearly Archives: 2022
Is a new Navy shipyard realistic, or just a ‘tall order?’
Breaking Defense – In interviews with Breaking Defense, lawmakers say they’re concerned about the Navy’s revitalization plan, but still aren’t sold on a fifth public shipyard.
How The Russian Navy Is Losing Dominance: The Curse Of Snake Island
Naval News – One of Russia’s first moves in its invasion of Ukraine was the capture of Snake Island. Two months later they are desperately struggling to keep it. This is a sign of their weakening dominance over the Northern Black Sea.
The littoral combat ship’s latest problem: Class-wide structural defects leading to hull cracks
Navy Times – Half of the Navy’s littoral combat ship fleet is suffering from structural defects that have led to hull cracks on several vessels, limiting the speed and sea states in which some ships can operate
USMC Force Design 2030: Threat Or Opportunity?
1945 – Robert Work weighs in on the Marine’s Littoral Combat Regiments.
Marines’ Force Design 2030 update refocuses on reconnaissance
Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps has updated its Force Design 2030 plans, putting a stronger emphasis on the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance competition as foundational to lethality, the commandant said.
The light amphibious warship is delayed, but the Marine Corps has a temporary solution
Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps planned to have its light amphibious warship on contract by now, ushering in a small ship that will move Marines around island chains and coastlines without relying on traditional, large ships. But moving forward on the program and awarding that contract simply hasn’t been possible, after the effort was crowded out of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget two years in a row.
First-of-kind Marine littoral regiment plays with new concepts, weapons
Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps’ first unit designed to carry out new concepts of operations conducted its first exercise in the Philippines and is now preparing to start a range of experimentation and training events this year.
Warship Moskva was Blind to Ukrainian Missile Attack, Analysis Shows
USNI News – The crew of RTS Moskva was blind to and not ready for the Ukrainian missile attack that sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship, according to a new analysis of the April 13 strike reviewed by USNI News.
From concept to reality – the next generation of naval subsea technologies
Navy Lookout – The Royal Navy recently announced its ambitious vision for the future underwater domain, stating that it must leverage cutting edge technologies from industry, academia and the RN innovation ecosystem to accelerate and de-risk future capabilities.
Distributed Maritime Operations – Becoming Hard-To-Find
CIMSEC – The concept for Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) is based on three bedrock tenets: the distributed force must be hard-to-find, hard-to-kill, and lethal. For decades, the Navy has been focused on and has continuously improved its fleet defense capabilities – the hard-to-kill tenet. And, with the recent increased emphasis on the offense, the Navy is making significant progress in becoming more lethal. In contrast, there is limited evidence of progress with respect to the hard-to-find tenet: the very lynchpin of the DMO concept, and the subject of this article.
20 Years of Naval Trends Guarantee a FY23 Shipbuilding Play Failure
CIMSEC – In 2014, before the scale of Chinese naval development was widely appreciated, the Navy reported to Congress a Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 near-term requirement of 300 ships for “conducting a large-scale naval campaign in one region while denying the objectives of an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.” In the time since, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) added more than 120 battleforce ships and countless maritime militia – while the U.S. Navy still remains short of the lapsed 300-ship goal, and 57 ships short of its current 355 ship requirement. In the past 20 years the Navy’s ideal battleforce goals have all exceeded 306, but the fleet has not broken 300 ships since 2003.
An Offensive Minelaying Campaign against China
US Naval War College Review – Using existing assets, it is feasible to lay minefields in the Taiwan Strait to delay any Chinese military movement against Taiwan, providing a crisis-response option more forceful than diplomacy but less risky than kinetic operations. This option must be developed in peacetime to be available to U.S. leaders in a crisis.
The International Commanders Respond
USNI Proceedings – This year, Proceedings asked the commanders of the world’s navies, “How is your nation’s maritime security environment changing? Have new regional threats, climate change, or the COVID-19 pandemic caused you to alter your future assumptions? How is the changing environment impacting operations, budget, and personnel policy for your Navy and/or Coast Guard?”
Jomini and Naval Special Operations Forces—An Applied-Competition Approach to Russia
US Naval War College Review – A version of Jomini’s campaigning theory, in combination with maritime special-operations capabilities, offers a convincing maritime approach for contesting Russia’s malign activity in Europe while remaining below the level of armed conflict and supporting a broader conventional effort to prepare a war-fighting environment by using irregular warfare to secure advantages prior to conflicts.
Autonomous Nuclear Torpedoes Usher in a Dangerous Future
USNI Proceedings – Russia’s megaton-class Kanyon weapon disrupts arms control and deterrence.
Seoul’s Misguided Desire for a Nuclear Submarine
US Naval War College Review – Rather than waste its money on nuclear submarines that would provide only a single-dimensional response, South Korea should lock down a superior ASW suite by combining new technologies with existing ROKN platforms to provide multiple mission capabilities for less money, including support by existing maintenance infrastructure.
The Character of War Is Constantly Changing
USNI Proceedings – Organizations and people who can rapidly and effectively adapt are more likely to prevail.
Aircraft Carriers—Missions, Survivability, Size, Cost, Numbers
US Naval War College Review – A new, twenty-first-century design of the size of USS Midway with an air wing up to sixty-five aircraft, whether conventionally or nuclear powered, could complement larger nuclear flattops while still incorporating rugged survivability and being capable of independent operations—and could be built quicker and cheaper and in more shipyards.
Preparing a Post-Invasion Taiwan for Insurgency
USNI Proceedings – The Marine Corps must be ready to assist Taiwan in destroying infrastructure to thwart Chinese surveillance capabilities and ensure success in a broader conflict.
The Limits of Sea Power
US Naval War College Review – Sea powers have many handicaps that often are forgotten, resulting in a dangerous overestimation of their safety, influence, and staying power in a competitive world. A more clear-eyed assessment of sea power—one less enamored of the grandeur associated with naval might—reveals that often their hopes were unwarranted and ended up having tragic results.
The ‘Kalibrization’ of the Russian Fleet
USNI Proceedings – Destruction of critical infrastructure by long-range precision strikes has become the Russian Navy’s newest mission.
Innovation, Interrupted—Next-Generation Surface-Combatant Design
US Naval War College Review – Three ships designed in the 1930s that fought in the Pacific theater during the early months of America’s involvement in World War II represent three different ship design approaches that continue to create dissonance in the U.S. Navy’s current ship-design processes. The Navy must transition to a next-generation surface-combatant-design process to accommodate the future warfighting environment.
Letter from Port Moresby
US Naval War College Review – As the world shifts away from the global war on terrorism toward renewed great-power rivalry, areas previously considered strategically peripheral offer the United States and its allies both opportunity and challenge. Papua New Guinea (PNG), with its strategic location in the southwest Pacific, is poised to play a role in this new “Great Game.”
Marine aviation plan invests heavily in digital glue to connect far-flung forces
Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps is expanding its vision of connectivity among aircraft and with ground units below, creating local networks to share situational awareness and targeting data even in communications-denied environments.
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