– USNI News – Ships on the high seas can largely be split between two major caregories, merchant ships that connect countries through commerce and national navies formed to ensure that trade continues to flow. However, in the margins between those two broad groups are fleets that have sought to influence international policy and politics independent of a national flag — non-state navies.

– Center for a New American Security – An examination of the value of directed energy weapons and a series of recommendations for how the U.S. can invest in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner to further mature this important technology.

– BBC – When nuclear-powered submarines reach the end of their lives, dismantling them is a complicated and laborious process.

– War is Boring – Starting in the 1960s, the world’s leading navies experimented with a new kind of warship. Heavily-armed and sporting huge flight decks for helicopters, the vessels were hybrids—not quite cruisers, not quite aircraft carriers. Ungainly and in many cases conceptually flawed, the helicopter cruisers nevertheless represented an important leap forward for naval technology. Today’s assault ships—arguably the most useful warships afloat—owe much to the helicopter cruisers that preceded them.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Global maritime partnerships in Latin America and the Caribbean are more important than ever before.

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– National Interest – Asia has some of the world’s best militaries—their navies are no exception. But how does one rank them?

– The Atlantic – James Fallows writes that the American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

– US Naval War College Review – A look at the global proliferation of submarines and the threat they pose.

– War is Boring – Across the Pacific Rim, regional powers are creating new marine infantry units.

– New Yorker – Thomas Ricks on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

– The Diplomat – ASEAN navies are rapidly acquiring amphibious capabilities. Their intentions, however, remain unclear.

– The Diplomat – Modern warfare is shifting to a competition between two “system-of-systems,” and smaller navies can’t compete.

– Reuters – NATO is sending part of its naval rapid reaction force to the Baltic Sea as part of a drive to step up the defense of eastern European allies in response to the crisis in Ukraine, the military alliance said on Thursday.

– Wired – The quest to build a drone that can make its way around the globe — no crew necessary.

– Washington Post – Tom Ricks opines that the best way to fix the US military is to shrink it drastically, and thus force it to become creative…

– USNI News – Last week’s delivery of the improved Kilo-class submarine Ha Noi to the government of Vietnam was just the latest undersea-vessel acquisition of Asian navies. Asia is in the midst of a submarine buying spree, with most of the major powers planning substantial fleet increases over the next two decades.

– Forbes – Robert D. Kaplan writes that “The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I do not refer to numbers when I say this. I am not interested in numbers. I am only interested in public support for those numbers.”

– War is Boring – Case studies in faulty flattops.

– War is Boring – Sneak up in a submarine, is how.

– Reuters – After a quarter century of Middle Eastern land wars and a sharp fall in big powers’ naval spending after the Cold War, sea power is back in vogue in response to the rise of China and Western reluctance to deploy ground troops in conflicts like Syria.

– CNN – Want to be an Asian superpower? Then an aircraft carrier, it seems, is the minimum requirement for joining this elite club.

– Miscellaneous – John Boyd’s Art of War – William Lind on why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.

– USNI News – The Asia-Pacific region recently has seen a rise in construction of multipurpose, aviation-capable ships by major area powers. Australia, China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand all have built ships with full-length flight decks with a variety of purposes: some as helicopter carriers, some as amphibious assault ships. Only one, China’s Liaoning, was built to accommodate traditional fixed-wing aircraft carrier operations, but many others, such as Japan’s Izumo-class of helicopter destroyers could conceivably carry some form of vertical or short takeoff-and-landing aircraft.

The aircraft carrier building spree has been highlighted by the recent turn in world attention to Asia. Reports characterizing the development of these ships as an “arms race” miss an important point: although there has been a considerable ramping up of tensions in Asia among its major powers, construction of all of these vessels predates such tension. The construction of carriers could be considered a logical expansion of seapower by the nations involved, especially those whose economies rely on overseas commerce.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Maritime pundits believe a shrinking ice cap translates to a frenzy of traffic as shippers rush to exploit shorter sea routes. They’re wrong.