Center for Maritime Security – It’s widely established that near-peer adversarial actors have actively and clandestinely targeted the U.S. defense industrial base; notable actions include cyber operations and corporate obfuscation to embed itself within the lower tiers of the U.S. supply chain. This extends to the United States’ MIB, with a 2025 Section 301 Investigation Report by the Office of the United States Trade Representative indicating China’s multi-decadal systemic campaign targeting and marginalizing the U.S.’s maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors to diminish the U.S.’s naval dominance and destabilize its maritime enterprise. Accordingly, the shipbuilding enterprise has evolved into a principal arena intensifying the active U.S.-China competition.

USNI News – The U.S. Navy is looking to develop a next-generation standoff torpedo that can be carried by carrier-based aircraft and drones.

CIMSEC – The Iran war was a failure of strategic understanding of the dynamics of asymmetric cost-tolerance in existential littoral conflict compounded by the absence of an alliance architecture that should have been the precondition for military action.

USNI News – The U.S. Navy received its final Lewis B. Puller-class Expeditionary Sea Base this week as Military Sealift Command prepares for the return of three sidelined ships.

RUSI – The US is exceeding its own plans for deployment of aircraft carriers, and the knock-on effects, and the strain, should be a cause for concern.

Defense News – The Navy’s top admiral says the service is changing how it does pre-deployment stocking and resupply and looking at different places to make port calls, including on the African continent, after the carrier Lincoln’s punishing 270-day deployment.

Army Recognition – On July 24, 2026, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG-65) suffered a four-day total electrical blackout during routine operations in the South China Sea. An engineering casualty involving its gas-turbine generators paralyzed propulsion, maneuvering, climate control, and life-support systems, requiring the warship to be towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines for repairs. The failure highlights acute maintenance and operational force-structure pressures on forward-deployed U.S. Navy surface combatants in the Indo-Pacific theatre.

(Thanks to Alain)

Naval News – Liberator has emerged from the U.S. Navy’s budget as a high-end standoff capability for uncrewed undersea vehicles (UUVs), enabling the deployment of heavyweight torpedoes on the seafloor.

The War Zone – The Navy’s newest extreme-range air-to-air missile is intended to be used by the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, F-35C JSF and the upcoming F/A-XX.

USNI News – Aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) has left the Middle East after almost seven months and is now in U.S. 7th Fleet.

Defense News – Vague operational planning and a lack of transparency during U.S. actions in Iran have exacerbated the U.S. Navy’s longstanding logistics, maintenance and manpower issues — and sailors are feeling the effects, congressional leaders, retired military officials and deployed sailors have told Military Times.

War on the Rocks – The ability to prepare U.S. naval forces today, at a deckplate level, for the resilience challenges that the large-scale combat operations against a peer-competitor will manifest cannot be overstated.

The War Zone – The Washington’s replacement of the Lincoln leaves no carrier in the Western Pacific and the Navy’s struggle to meet demand may get far worse before it gets better.

The War Zone – The U.S. Navy is reportedly evaluating a major change to the Ford class aircraft carrier design that would move the island superstructure further forward on the flight deck. President Donald Trump is said to be pushing the service to reposition the island on aesthetic grounds, to make the ships look more like World War II-era carriers.

Breaking Defense – The Navy’s youngest of its four public shipyards is more than 100 years old. Now, President Donald Trump says it’s time for a fifth, in an effort to expand repair capacity for nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. 

The War Zone – The new unit will also have short-range counter-cruise missile systems that will enhance the strategic island’s defenses and grow the Army’s overextended Patriot force.

Navy Lookout – President Donald Trump has ordered the US Navy to develop a plan to abandon electromagnetic aircraft launch systems on future Ford-class aircraft carriers and return to steam catapults. The wider memorandum contains some sensible measures to address America’s serious naval shipbuilding problems, but imposing a fundamental engineering redesign on an aircraft carrier already under construction is extraordinarily difficult to justify.

Breaking Defense – In a new memo certain to make significant waves for the future of US Navy shipbuilding, President Donald Trump on Thursday called for the US to outsource the building of at least a few Navy ships to foreign shipyards.

Breaking Defense – A Heritage Foundation study shows a significant drop in Taiwan Strait transits by the US military under the second Trump administration.

USNI News – President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to consider foreign-built warships and auxiliary vessels for the U.S. Navy, in addition to other proposed changes to shipbuilding, in a sweeping presidential memo released on Thursday.

CIMSEC – During World War II, General Quarters (GQ) was essential to U.S. Navy ship survivability. Setting GQ established the highest material condition—Zebra—throughout the ship and manned every combat and repair station with the crew’s most qualified personnel. That model reflected an era in which major naval engagements were expected to be intense but comparatively short. Today, however, surface ships face a different problem: they may need to sustain elevated readiness for hours, days, or longer under persistent missile and drone threat. Traditional GQ remains vital for brief periods of peak danger, but it is no longer a practical default for prolonged combat operations. The surface force should update how it employs GQ by preserving continuity at key watchstations and pre‑setting survivability measures in high‑threat environments before a ship is forced to react under severe time constraints.