War on the Rocks – While critics have rightly focused on the program costs and timing of delivery, potential operational challenges for the Navy, and redundancy, proponents have countered that the new cruise missile will enhance deterrence and reassure allies facing adversaries with stocks of tactical nuclear weapons. This is an important claim and ultimately central to whether the program is worthy of funding. However, the deterrence and reassurance benefits of a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile are vastly overstated and may actually undermine the ability of the United States to deter adversaries by diverting scarce resources away from investments in more useful conventional platforms and munitions.  

USNI News – The U.S. is talking with other partner countries to possibly set up a maritime task force to protect ships in the Red Sea.

Defense News – Recent Vertical Launching System, or VLS, rearming experiments — including one aboard the DDG I commanded — demonstrate its promise. Additional doctrinal advances and equipment investments could help realize at-sea rearming’s operational potential even sooner.

CIMSEC – The Surface Navy needs to cut itself free of its extraneous entanglements and make concrete changes to how it improves warfighting skill. Our most urgent target for reform should not be improving individual tactics on a piecemeal level. Rather, we should be focusing on systematic changes to the personnel and training systems throughout the Surface Warfare community that will cultivate more tacticians.

USNI News – Within the last two months, the Navy and the Pentagon have created new organizational structures to connect the unmanned vision to the wider U.S. military command and control infrastructure. While operators are getting more tools to solve near-term problems, the longer-term future of the hybrid fleet and air wing is still very much an open question, frustrating both the forward-deployed Navy and the defense industry that will ultimately build the fleet.

USNI News – Destroyer USS Carney (DDG-64) shot down three drones in the Red Sea on Sunday while responding to distress calls from several commercial vessels that were attacked by missiles originating in Yemen

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has established a new program office to plan and manage aircraft carrier inactivations, defuelings and dismantlements, as the service readies for that work to become more common.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy will conduct its first submarine maintenance work in Australia next summer using the sub tender Emory S. Land, with 30 Australian sailors embarked to learn how to repair the Virginia class of submarine. This will be an early step in establishing a nuclear-powered attack submarine maintenance capability at the HMAS Stirling naval base in Western Australia in the next few years as part of the trilateral AUKUS arrangement.

War on the Rocks – Today, the U.S. military produces too few pilots, eroding experience in deployed squadrons. It risks a similar path as Japan in the event of hostilities. A chronic shortage of pilots will plague the U.S. military for years. One reason is that outmoded training systems and syllabi needlessly prolong flight training and exacerbate acute shortages.