The ten most significant naval news stories/ trends / themes this year included:

• The Ukrainian Navy’s closing of the Black Sea to the Russian Navy. What lessons can other navies learn from Ukraine’s anti-access area denial strategy?

• The Houthi’s closing of the Red Sea (with help from their sponsor Iran) to merchant shipping. What lessons will other insurgencies learn from this anti-access area denial strategy?

• The US Navy’s alarming ammunition expenditure while conducting successful anti-ballistic missile and cruise missile target practice against the Houthis in the Red Sea. Will the US Navy be able to use this experience to convince the US Congress to increase its surface to air missile procurement in order to have a more than adequate missile magazine depth in case of war with China?

• The increasing emphasis Western navies are placing on countering sea bed warfare against all the critical national infrastructure that exists under the sea. When will naval budgets meet naval aspirations for this new arena of warfare?

• The transformation of the Baltic Sea into a NATO sea, with Finland joining NATO this year and hopefully Sweden joining NATO next year. What will Russia do in response?

• The awakening of Japan and the Philippines to the Chinese threat, as evidenced by their increase in defense procurement. How will they spend their funds in order to best deter China?

• Taiwan’s beginning to adapt a porcupine strategy for its defense against a Chinese invasion. Will Taiwan be able to keep buying these low-cost, unglamorous, but effective weapons in ever-increasing numbers going forward, or will they again revert to buying high-cost, glamorous and ineffective weapons?

• The European Union’s growing realization that it has a role to play in the Indo-Pacific theater, evidenced by increasing European naval deployments to that region, such as seen with France’s Charles De Gaulle strike group deployment this year. How can Europe get maximum use out of its constrained naval resources?

• The US Navy’s interesting experiments with TF-59 in the Persian Gulf, its experimental unmanned surface vessel squadron. When will the US Navy have learned enough from experiments to start building medium and large unmanned surface vessels for use by the fleet?

• The difficulties that Western navies (Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Navy, Royal New Zealand Navy, US Navy, US Coast Guard, US Maritime Administration) are experiencing in recruitment and retention. If these countries were to expand their fleets, how would they man them?

To see every post you can also follow NOSI via RSS at nosi.org/feed or via email by entering your email address and clicking on the Follow button in the right hand column of the site.

You can also follow us on social media as @nosintel on Facebook at facebook.com/nosintel or on Twitter at twitter.com/nosintel

BBC – Global supply chains could face severe disruption as a result of the world’s biggest shipping companies diverting journeys away from the Red Sea.

To see every post you can also follow NOSI via RSS at nosi.org/feed or via email by entering your email address and clicking on the Follow button in the right hand column of the site.

You can also follow us on social media as @nosintel on Facebook at facebook.com/nosintel or on Twitter at twitter.com/nosintel

To see every post you can also follow NOSI via RSS at nosi.org/feed or via email by entering your email address and clicking on the Follow button in the right hand column of the site.

You can also follow us on social media as @nosintel on Facebook at facebook.com/nosintel or on Twitter at twitter.com/nosintel

USNI News – When asked if he looked forward to having additional watercraft under his command, the commanding general of the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command (TSC) said: “We know that in our exercises, having more capability would really give us flexibility, and a lot of better options,” he said.

USNI News – Faced with an annual $10 billion loss from Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, West African nations are moving to work together to better understand and police their exclusive economic zones as a group.

War on the Rocks – Commercial shipping has made major strides in recent decades toward digitalization. Supply-chain concerns, green technology, and costs across the industry have led to a new push for automation. This promises greater efficiency, but it also creates a massive new target for cyber attacks. Where the internet once borrowed the term “piracy” from the maritime domain, we are rapidly reaching the point where it will be possibly to digitally hijack a container ship on the high seas. 

US Naval War College Review – Small navies face two important problems: the difficulty of acquiring the requisite financial resources and managing them properly, and the need to transform themselves so they can cooperate as parts of multinational teams. The latter aspect is the most important factor affecting their continued existence.

Reuters – Subsea cables, which carry the world’s data, are now central to the U.S.-China tech war. Washington, fearful of Beijing’s spies, has thwarted Chinese projects abroad and choked Big Tech’s cable routes to Hong Kong, Reuters has learned.

War Zone – With an average depth of about 4,000 meters (or about 2.5 miles), most of the ocean and seafloor are out of sight and out of mind. However, trends suggest that the deep ocean and seabed are poised to rise in importance – both physically and as a venue for Information Warfare (IW) – due to the intertwined nature of critical infrastructure, resources, and national security. Undersea infrastructure is rapidly growing and populations are becoming ever more dependent on its utility. This infrastructure growth is posing novel challenges and opportunities for competition and national security. Navies must astutely follow the development of undersea infrastructure as they may be called upon to defend, attack, or influence it.

Council on Geostrategy – Professor Andrew Lambert writes that while the prospect of AUV submarines powered by AI roaming the deep ocean, striking submarine cables, ships and land targets at will may add a frisson of uncertainty to current anxieties, the technology is costly and offers limited return for continental powers focused on sea denial and area defence. It is more likely that, in the short term, AUVs develop into effective components of mixed underwater and three-dimensional security and combat forces which will enhance sea control, rather than challenge it. AUVs operating as fugitives in a hostile ocean will find it difficult to achieve tactical, let alone strategic effect.

Wavell Room – As the underlying technologies become ever more advanced, navies around the world are looking to integrate uncrewed vessels into their fleets.

The Strategist – Understanding what’s happening in the maritime domain, known as maritime domain awareness or MDA, is an essential element for any country that wishes to govern its maritime zones. But in the Indo-Pacific, many countries struggle to afford the costly top-down, military-style surveillance systems used by wealthy countries. However, new technologies provide the opportunity to democratise access to information and help Indo-Pacific countries to have sovereign capabilities to better monitor their maritime domains.

To see every post you can also follow NOSI via RSS at nosi.org/feed or via email by entering your email address and clicking on the Follow button in the right hand column of the site.

You can also follow us on social media as @nosintel on Facebook at facebook.com/nosintel or on Twitter at twitter.com/nosintel

European Defence Review – In 2011 the Turkish Navy launched a programme aimed at developing a new generation of sea bottom mines to be deployed by surface ships, submarines and aircraft. Known as project Malaman, the results of this programme surfaced at IDEF 2023.

(Thanks to Alain)

European Defense Review – At IDEF 2023 Havelsan unveiled a new concept of unmanned system, the Çaka submersible kamikaze unmanned surface vessel, s-kusv in short.

(Thanks to Alain)

CIMSEC – The following is the 1st Place, Gold Prize-winning essay of the First Sea Lord’s Essay Competition.

To see every post you can also follow NOSI via RSS at nosi.org/feed or via email by entering your email address and clicking on the Follow button in the right hand column of the site.

You can also follow us on social media as @nosintel on Facebook at facebook.com/nosintel or on Twitter at twitter.com/nosintel

CIMSEC – While it will take years to unpack all of the lessons learned from the ongoing war in Ukraine, one method that has surfaced during this conflict that connects maritime warfare and unmanned surface vehicles in the use of USVs armed with explosives to attack naval vessels. This is a tactic and concept of operations that has been frequently discussed and simulated, but until now has been hypothetical. Today it is real.

CIMSEC – The force employment of a military will largely be a function of how good its force development can make it. A military’s ability to fully manifest a new warfighting concept will depend on how well its force development can take the abstract notions of the concept and convert them into genuine force-wide improvement in warfighting skill. As the U.S. Navy explores the future of distributed warfighting and naval salvo combat, it must be prepared to make major changes to how its force development institutions cultivate warfighting skill so the fleet can effectively evolve alongside the intensifying threat environment.

CIMSEC – Distributed naval warfighting and massed fires offer a practical operational context for valuing the combat power of force structure. The broad fundamentals of these warfighting dynamics could provide an enduring basis for force design. By establishing criteria and frameworks based on lasting operational considerations, navies can preserve their relevance.

CIMSEC – Winning on the future battlefield will undoubtedly require an organizational culture that promotes human trust in artificial intelligent systems.

USNI Proceedings – The efforts of Southeast Asian nations to push back against Chinese aggression at sea should be recognized and bolstered.

CIMSEC – In practice, interactions-at-sea can escalate due to hyper-local misperceptions, influenced by factors like command, control, and communications, situational awareness, or relative capabilities. All of these factors are changing with the advent of unmanned and autonomous platforms. Escalation in this context cannot be an afterthought.