– USNI Blog – In a conflict with China, the United States will be pressed for time, personnel, and especially ships. U.S. industrial capacity struggles to produce a 355-ship Navy even in peacetime. In a hot war where the Navy is contested on the high seas, losses will be taken. New ships will need be needed to fill the gaps left by bloody battles of attrition. If the industrial base has difficulty meeting the needs of a peacetime Navy, one can only speculate that the strain after the opening salvos of a conflict. Between 1975 and 2000, the U.S. shipbuilding industry declined from 80 ships a year to just eight. The lack of industrial surge capacity shows a serious weakness in U.S. military capability, especially for the Navy.

– Defense One – Great power competition requires more than preparing for great power conflict.

– USNI News – Almost three months after arriving in Guam, a pair of MQ-4C Triton autonomous, unmanned aircraft have integrated into fleet operations and training flights and stretched the Navy’s maritime domain awareness across the Indo-Pacific.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy’s Barents Sea patrol is the latest sojourn into an increasingly militarized Arctic, where questions of international law are proliferating.

– Defense News – Research in the Arctic Ocean is no small feat. The area can prove inaccessible at times, and sensors can fail to communicate data from under the ice or get crushed by slabs of ice.

– USNI News – The U.S. Navy is continuing to run missions to ensure freedom of navigation and show presence in the Western Pacific while other militaries are scaling back their operations amid COVID-19 concerns.

– USNI Proceedings – To best support their warfighting customers, naval intelligence professionals must know the threat and U.S. combat capabilities.

– War Zone – Boeing has released a video of the rollout of the first of two Block III F/A-18F Super Hornet test jets for the U.S. Navy. The service plans to use these aircraft, which do not feature the full set of upgrades, for various flight tests and to explore new concepts of operation ahead of the delivery of jets with the complete Block III package, which is set to begin later this year.

– Breaking Defense – A mix of US ships have probed waters illegally claimed by China in the South China Sea in recent weeks, as the PLA Navy continues to harass civilian ships of neighboring countries.

– Barents Observer – The US and UK naval group leaves the Barents Sea Friday evening after five days in waters where Russia’s Northern Fleet normally exercises. The voyage marks a new age with U.S. Navy surface warships sailing in the north.

– National Review – Jerry Hendrix writes that the U.S. Navy’s decision last week on a new frigate design for domestic production undercuts the argument that the United States is withdrawing from the world.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy just isn’t equipped to deploy or sustain a new fleet of unmanned vessels yet.

– C4ISRNet – A project inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has the potential to pull the Navy’s unmanned surface vessel aspirations forward a decade.

– Defense News – The Navy selected Fincantieri’s FREMM design for its next generation frigate, but as with most new platforms it will be a long time before the first ship hits the fleet.