War Zone – After some 16 years of research and development, the U.S. Navy appears poised to kill its electromagnetic railgun program. The service has not asked for any new funding for the project in its latest budget request and says it will wrap up all the work it has planned now by the end of the current fiscal year, before effectively putting what’s left of this effort into storage.

1945 – James Holmes discusses the casual claim that because the United States spends more on defense than the next X countries combined—X usually being defined as ten or upwards—it is so crushingly superior that it need not spend more and could probably get away with spending less on the armed forces.

War Zone – “Body-worn” signal snooping gear gives American special operators an additional way to spot and track enemy forces, and monitor their surroundings.

USNI News – The Navy is now pushing the Littoral Combat Ships out into the Pacific in force after more than a decade of stops and starts and studies.

USNI News – The long-delayed Navy Fiscal Year 2022 budget request submitted to Congress May 28 reflects modest increases in several areas, but overall shows no significant changes, either in weapons procurement or readiness accounts.

US Naval War College Review – Technological advancements in weapon systems, platforms, and communications raise questions about the continuing relevance of blockade strategies and tactics that were developed during previous eras of naval warfare. If modern navies are using a centuries-old strategy, to what extent do the old rules still apply?

USNI News – The American aircraft carrier based in Japan will make a rare deployment to U.S. Central Command to support the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan later this summer.

CIMSEC – When attempting to answer the question of what the U.S. military should be ready for, the responses are usually positive ones, statements of actions it should be prepared to undertake. But another possible answer is a negative one, a statement of what the U.S. should reject doing, and should choose to not be ready for. When the U.S. makes an effort to be ready for one eventuality, it is reducing its readiness to respond to others. Policymakers should consider both sides of this coin, and more consciously accept risk.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Department of Defense is like an NFL franchise that, for lack of any game tape, relies solely on the athletic testing numbers to determine how ready their players are for the next game. Internal metrics of success, as the only numbers available, take on an outsized importance in predicting battlefield success. But anyone with even a small amount of military (or athletic) experience understands that there is more to winning than simply being the most proficient person on the field. A military, like a football team, has to be effective, as well.

CIMSEC – The adoption of this new data framework for military readiness would go a long way toward achieving the quantitative underpinnings necessary to support the service chiefs’ vision and it can be used to fix the fundamental problem they call out: the “gold-plating” of existing force requirements at the expense of future capability.