– ABC – The goal is to keep ships at sea as “Covid-free bubbles.”

– USNI News – The Navy and the Department of Defense haven’t finished their homework needed to inform how the Navy builds its future fleet, a panel of naval experts told a House panel on Thursday.

– War Zone – Although they are both huge supercarriers, the futuristic-looking Ford class has major external differences from its iconic predecessor.

– War on the Rocks – Diego Garcia is America’s major geostrategic and logistics support base in the Indian Ocean. Sovereignty over the island is increasingly being challenged by Mauritius, but it seems unlikely that Washington would be interested in doing a deal that would facilitate its transfer.

– CIMSEC – Naval mine warfare has played a significant role in every major American military conflict. If employed in support of sea control strategies under development by the Navy and Marine Corps, and should its full potential be leveraged by emerging technologies, MIW can serve as the lynchpin for deterring aggression in the maritime domain, and if necessary, for defeating adversaries at sea.

– CIMSEC – The ability of the United States to sustainably conduct expeditionary operations in the strategic chokepoints and littorals of Asia could crumble in the absence of the allied access it has come to rely on.

– USNI News – If the Navy has spent the last three years taking USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) from a construction project to a platform that can launch and recover jets, the service is now taking steps to turn the ship into one that can fight in maritime combat.

– Defense News – The Navy recently inked a $200 million contract with BAE Systems to upgrade the amphibious assault ship Boxer to be able to operate with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the fifth landing helicopter assault ship to be so amended.

– Defense News – An internal study from the Office of the Secretary of Defense is looking to pour money into large robot submarines that the U.S. Navy says will free up its larger manned submarines for more complex missions.

– Defense News – The U.S. military is banking on unmanned surface and subsurface vessels to boost its capacity in the face of a tsunami of Chinese naval spending. But before it can field the systems, it must answer some basic questions.

– Defense News – In the coming years, the U.S. Navy will be faced with a decision that will radically shape the carrier air wing: Is the service willing to sacrifice dozens of new Super Hornet jets for the promise of a sixth-generation fighter in the 2030s?

– C4ISRNet – “The goal of the Sea Train program is to be able to develop and demonstrate long-range deployment capabilities for a distributed fleet of medium-sized tactical unmanned vessels.”

– War on the Rocks – The ability to project sea power must be a strategic priority for the entire government and not solely a U.S. Navy challenge to solve.

– Guardian – Kauai has one of the Pentagon’s most valued testing sites. It’s an economic driver, but some residents say the military shouldn’t be on the islands at all

– CIMSEC – CIMSEC had the opportunity to discuss the formation and future of the U.S. Navy’s Information Warfare (IW) community with Vice Admiral Brian B. Brown, commander of U.S. Naval Information forces (NAVIFOR).

– USNI News – For nearly two decades, the Navy has grappled with replacement concepts for the hospital ships. It’s eyeing retirements for the ships in 2035 and 2036 under its long-range shipbuilding plan, but those projections are far from certain.

– USNI Proceedings – The U.S. ally network is under attack, and the Navy must redouble its efforts to build and expand global partnerships.

– War Zone – The successful test of the powerful laser is a major step forward for the Navy’s directed energy weapons ambitions.

– CIMSEC – The United States has the largest and most advanced navy in the world, and is an important actor in the Caribbean region and the Western Hemisphere as a whole. Increased maritime enforcement is vital, especially to combat drug trafficking in the region. However, aiming to control drug trafficking will not make these criminal groups disappear. They will take alternate routes and capitalize on trading other illicit goods. In order to establish a sustainable and peaceful approach to the region’s maritime security challenges, the U.S. must take a holistic approach to maritime security threats and empower local organizations to solve regional security challenges at their source.

– USNI News – The Navy this week released a request for proposals for a Medium Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (MUUV) that is meant to streamline two existing unmanned systems into a single open architecture UUV.

– War Zone – The mini-torpedoes could be a game-changer and are set to be fielded on Virginia class submarines in the next few years.

– USNI News – USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) is underway for the first time since its deployment was interrupted for 55 days to battle a COVID-19 outbreak that infected almost a quarter of the crew.

– USNI News – The increased technical complexity of systems and reduced manning make U.S. warships less able to operate if a disease breaks out on a ship than the previous ships that weathered the 1918 influenza outbreak, a panel of experts said last week.

– War on the Rocks – Malaysian oil exploration in a contested area of the South China Sea sparked a “five-nation face off” in April, with Malaysian, Vietnamese, Chinese, U.S., and Australian maritime forces sailing within relatively close proximity. When the responding U.S. Navy Expeditionary Strike Group departed after spending only a few days in the area, some observers panned the U.S. response as uninvited, insufficient, and having emboldened China. The passage of a few weeks has shown these accusations to be premature, but also highlighted a recurring weakness in the U.S. approach to maritime security in the Indo-Pacific. While the U.S. strike group may have departed, U.S. forces sortied from both forward deployed locations and the U.S. homeland to maintain a persistent presence over the South China Sea with platforms ranging from small surface combatants to strategic bombers. China’s presence has remained largely static. Overall, the United States shows progress in its approach but also an inexplicable missed opportunity to reach out to its Southeast Asian partners.

– War Zone – U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft flew a route close to China’s Hainan Island in the South China Sea, which is home to a massive People’s Liberation Army Navy base, earlier today. This particular aircraft is one of a small subset of the service’s Poseidon fleet that is configured to carry a shadowy radar system known as the AN/APS-154 Advanced Airborne Sensor.