– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is eyeing canceling six planned service-life extensions on its oldest cruisers, meaning the Navy will be short six of its current 22 largest surface combatants by 2022.

– Fox – The increasing global reach of Chinese nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines, armed with JL-2 weapons reportedly able to hit parts of the US, continues to inspire an ongoing Navy effort to accelerate production of attack submarines, prepare long-dwell drones for deployment to the Pacific and continue acquisition of torpedo-armed sub-hunting planes such as the P-8/A Poseidon.

– Post and Courier – Robert D. Kaplan writes that “A naval century is upon us, in keeping with an era of globalization that depends on safe and secure sea lines of communication for container shipping. But nobody should assume it will be peaceful. The United States is coming home from tragic wars, but there is little relief in sight.”

– Forbes – With global naval tensions on the rise, a grand tool of naval diplomacy, the old-fashioned international fleet review, is making a weaponized comeback. While the U.S. can easily sink the restless navies that are busy flaunting their latest ships and newest technologies, America’s maritime rivals have discovered that these maritime beauty contests offer an entirely new and low-risk axis of naval competition. Looks can kill; the stressed and tired-looking U.S. Navy is ill-prepared to compete as the genteel pageantry of ceremonial port calls and flamboyant multi-national fleet reviews become just another means to grind down an overextended U.S fleet.

– Defense News – A project birthed in the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office is getting some serious buy-in from the U.S. Navy, and could yield the world’s first large-scale armed unmanned warship.

– USNI News – The Navy’s new focus on distributed maritime operations and the incorporation of high-end weapons is prompting a re-look at the future Large Surface Combatant program and an apparent delay in the planned start of the new ship class.

– CIMSEC – This has been an attempt to capture some of the interesting thoughts, from two separate working groups, on how the U.S. Navy could achieve a 355 battle force ship Navy sooner than current plans predict.

– USNI News – The Pentagon requested a Fiscal Year 2020 budget that advocates changes in the way the Navy does business – pushing for lethal but “attritable” unmanned systems, artificial intelligence and hypersonics to give the Navy and Marine Corps an edge against high-end adversaries.

– Breaking Defense – An inside source explains the logic behind the 2020 budget’s most controversial call.

– War Zone – The service wants to get the first two unmanned ships quickly to help refine its requirements and craft plans for employing them in actual combat.

– Breaking Defense – The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. Bases burn. Warships sink. But we could fix the problem for about $24 billion a year, one well-connected expert said, less than four percent of the Pentagon budget.

– USNI News – The Navy is moving fast to acquire a new class of unmanned surface vehicles and hopes to award a contract for USV designs by the end of the year.

– War on the Rocks – The aircraft carrier fleet and the amphibious fleet are typically viewed as polar opposites: the fast nuclear carrier projecting strike aircraft from the deep blue on one side, and the plodding but versatile amphibious ship projecting Marine infantry in the littoral on the other. Despite obvious dissimilarities in speed, payload, and function, they both share a critically important place in the overall fleet architecture — they are both unaffordable anachronisms of a bygone era.