CIMSEC – This article will discuss the role of the Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer (NGLO) as one human in a  JADC2-enabled theater. Any conversation about fires, lethality, and the Pacific leads either implicitly or explicitly to considerations of how naval vessels can support maneuver forces ashore. However, this legacy — maritime fires directed against terrestrial objectives — is now only one part of the equation. As concepts evolve for potential wars in the Pacific, the NGLO can provide maritime expertise that improves the integration of joint, multi-domain fires at the tactical and operational levels of war.

USNI Proceedings – U.S. sea power has always hinged on the nation’s ability to build and maintain partnerships.

War Zone – The E-2’s into its sixth decade in the air and has never been more potent. Here’s how the Navy and Northrop Grumman plan to keep it that way.

National Review – The U.S. Navy is currently dealing with the aftermath of a series of bad decisions regarding a unique category of ships within its overall force-structure design. 

Breaking Defense – The mine countermeasures USV is one piece of tech designed keep Navy ships safe from undersea mines.

Breaking Defense – Sailors operating the USVs at RIMPAC were more concerned about what the drones could do, rather than how they were controlled.

USNI Proceedings – Maritime contests are regional, requiring U.S. actions to be similarly conceptualized and executed while navigating a mosaic of local interests.

1945 – Today the chief of naval operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, released an updated “Navigation Plan” for 2022. In effect, the Navigation Plan represents Admiral Gilday’s instructions to the service on how to execute the Triservice Maritime Strategy (2020), along with higher-order directives such as the National Defense Strategy and the interim National Security Strategy. Several things are worthy of note in the Navigation Plan, some of them head-scratchers.

USNI News – The latest plan to design a future force calls for a fleet of 373 manned ships, buttressed by about 150 unmanned surface and underwater vehicles by 2045, according to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday’s update to his Navigation Plan for the Navy.

War on the Rocks – The challenge of logistics in the Pacific theater is different than those associated with land movements across a shared border in Europe. Failure in the Indo-Pacific theater might not be represented by lines of stalled vehicles, but rather troops and equipment far removed from the battle and without adequate intra-theater lift to move them across the ocean. Though the Army and Marine Corps (via the Navy), each have plans to acquire intra-theater watercraft, without coordination and a significant increase in scale, U.S. forces could find themselves without adequate numbers of watercraft or a joint logistics concept that captures the dynamic changes of force design and modernization that each of the services has embarked upon.

1945 – Niccolò Machiavelli, meet Chester Nimitz. In his Discourses on Roman history the Renaissance Florentine philosopher-statesman claimed that human beings do not relish change. In fact, he verges on saying people can’tchange as the times and surroundings change around them. They get stuck as events march on. Thankfully for World War II America, Fleet Admiral Nimitz was an exception to the Machiavellian rule.

Politico – No one can agree on how many ships the Navy needs, and Congress isn’t pleased.

USNI Proceedings – Disaggregated forces would provide U.S. Navy commanders with more options to deter China. 

USNI News – The Navy quietly slipped a new, classified assessment on the number of ships the service needs to meet its missions around the world to Congress earlier this month. The report calls for a battle force of 373 ships – 75 more than in the current fleet.

1945 – James Holmes says that a contender has to take the field of competition and stay there in order to compete.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has long sought more flexibility in how its deployable ships are used, but it’s been hard to break out of the mold: the high-demand destroyers, for example, go through maintenance and training, most likely deploy as part of a carrier strike group, have a few months of free time upon their return, and then start the process all over again.

Defense News – Maintenance issues are hindering the East Coast fleet’s readiness, according to Adm. Daryl Caudle, who leads U.S. Fleet Forces Command. 

CIMSEC – Despite rumors to the contrary, the United States is not interested in disengaging from the Middle East. The Indo-Pacific is the new focal point of U.S. foreign policy, but the Middle East remains essential for U.S. interests. However, current patterns of interaction between the United States and its Middle Eastern partners are tied to routines that were hardened during the Global War on Terror. While these routines have proven difficult to escape and a source of political divergence at times, the reality today is that U.S. priorities are more disparate globally—and U.S. presence in the region should not remain locked within previous formulas.

Defense News – The initial response to the July 2020 fire that destroyed the multibillion-dollar amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard was uncoordinated and hampered by confusion as to which admiral should cobble together Navy and civilian firefighters, according to new information from the then-head of Naval Surface Forces.

USNI Proceedings – Countering China’s gray-zone tactics starts with a simple but challenging premise: the U.S. Sea Services have to be there.

USNI Proceedings – Leading strategists examine China’s insurgency in the South China Sea and offer ways for the United States and its allies and partners to push back.

Defense News – The Navy will order fewer F-35C jets in fiscal year 2023 than manufacturer Lockheed Martin could produce under a pandemic catch-up plan, with officials hoping to use the lull to spend money on other priorities.

USNI News – The Biden administration plans to station two more forward-deployed Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in Rota, Spain

CIMSEC – In the Indo-Pacific and beyond, almost every speech, strategy document, and think tank report mentions “allies and partners” as a critical element of American national security. The military’s culture is organized around warfighting, a concept that may not immediately bring the criticality of allies and partners to mind. When officers in the sea services sit down to discuss big strategic issues, conversations more often center on the strengths and weaknesses of our adversaries, while any assessments of our allies come as an afterthought.

War on the Rocks – As the U.S. Navy pivots to autonomous technologies for its future hybrid fleet of crewed and uncrewed ships, defense professionals and military officers (inspired in no small part by the novels Ghost Fleet and 2034) are keenly aware that every automated system is at risk of intrusion. The focus on cyber attacks, however, obscures a more fundamental cyber reliability problem. When computers replace people in the role of monitoring engineering systems, identifying equipment failures becomes more difficult. Leaving those problems unfixed makes vessels fail earlier, and fixing them puts ships and people at risk. In short, automated systems can introduce system-wide vulnerability even if nobody hacks them.