– War Zone – The price of a single Ford class supercarrier is approaching the size of the entire annual defense budget of Canada.

– Defense News – The U.S. surface fleet’s brand-new anti-ship missile was used as part of the barrage of rockets and missiles that put an end to the landing ship tank Racine on July 12 during the Rim of the Pacific exercise, but it wasn’t shot by the Navy.

– War on the Rocks – Energy for military operations in the geographically vast Pacific region still primarily takes the form of military-grade fuels used by ships and aircraft. That fuel is still mostly stored in fuel terminals in known locations, many of which are in range of potential adversaries’ aircraft, submarines, and surface-to-surface missiles. The United States relies on an inadequate number of overtasked fleet tankers to support logistically fragile operational concepts (in contrast to southwest Asia and Europe, where it is often possible to move military fuel by other means, such as pipelines and ground transportation). Because of the enormous quantities of fuel required to support military operations in the Pacific and elsewhere, the military is increasingly aware of the tension between war plans and their underlying fuel logistics.

– CIMSEC – The stand-up of a new NATO Maritime headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, the re-establishment of the U.S. Navy’s East Coast-based Second Fleet and the prospect for a new NATO Maritime Strategy this year have again fueled interest in naval warfare in the wider Atlantic Ocean.

– Breaking Defense – America’s nuclear deterrent is aging, with a half-dozen replacement programs on the horizon. But the young men and women who serve, Gen. John Hyten said, are better than ever: “They love this country. They want to defend this country. They go to work every day. They’re amazing — they’re smarter than we were, by far. They get motivated differently so you have to lead them differently, but their passion is just the same.”

– Defense News – The Harry S. Truman carrier strike group is returning to Norfolk after just three months on deployment, a dramatic shift from the Navy’s standard seven-month deployment and a move that has been signaled at the highest levels of the military as the Navy moves to rebuild readiness and surge capacity.

– National Interest – A “ship” is more than a hunk of steel that rides the bounding main. It is an expression of human ideas and history in steel. It’s a composite of materiel, human beings, and history. Therein lies its allure.

– USNI News – The three-ship Essex Amphibious Ready Group and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit left San Diego, Calif., on Tuesday with little fanfare for an expected Western Pacific and Middle East deployment.

– Defense News – The new head of U.S. Pacific Fleet is walking back from a throw-back command structure championed by his predecessor that had the San Diego-based head of U.S. 3rd Fleet take tactical control of ships in the Asia Pacific region, a role usually taken over by the Japan-based U.S. 7th Fleet once ships sail west of Hawaii.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is steadily rolling out a new phase of work-ups for carrier strike group and amphibious ready group deployments aimed at boosting its surface warfare skills.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy has crammed as much electronics as it can into its new DDG-51 Flight III destroyers now beginning construction, Rear Adm. William Galinis said this morning. That drives the service towards a new Large Surface Combatant that can comfortably accommodate the same high-powered radars, as well as future weapons such as lasers, on either a modified DDG-51 hull or an entirely new design.

– USNI News – Command ship USS Mount Whitney (LCC-20) and guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG-78) entered the Black Sea over the weekend, crossing through the Bosporus Strait into the Black Sea in support of the Sea Breeze 2018 exercise.

– CIMSEC – Where have tactics gone in the modern surface Navy? Whatever the cause, the loss of tactics – and the subsequent appearance of hundreds of publications which masquerade as tactics – is a problem that reaches the very heart of our profession. Tactics must be resurrected.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is rapidly moving toward procuring the first hull in its new class of frigate in 2020, but a new report is raising questions about whether the Navy has done detailed analysis about what it needs out of the ship before barging ahead.