– War on the Rocks – What happens when the U.S. Navy’s force structure planning is built on strategic assumptions that are superseded by a change in the Oval Office? In the case of the U.S. Navy, the right answer is to conduct a new force structure assessment, and the Trump administration’s recent release of overarching strategic guidance created a question as to whether the Navy would do so. Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfare Systems Vice Adm. William Merz answered that question recently while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, revealing that the Navy would perform an updated force structure assessment in response to the new National Defense Strategy.

– CIMSEC – The American maritime shipping industry is one of the most vulnerable critical infrastructures (CI) to ransomware and other forms of cybercrime.

– USNI News – The rollback of ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria and changes in how Iran operates in the Persian Gulf are prompting the U.S. Navy to evolve how it operates its carrier strike groups in the Middle East. In the Gulf, the ships and aircraft that operate close to USS Theodore Roosevelt have seen harassment from Iranian fast attack craft cease but the threat from Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles grow to a daily concern.

– CIMSEC – From urgent stock market transactions to endless videos of cats, undersea cables support many aspects of twenty first century life that we take for granted. A moment’s thought is sufficient to appreciate the strategic importance of this fact. As a result, any discussion of future seabed warfare would be incomplete without a consideration of the challenges presented by ensuring the security of this vital infrastructure.

– CIMSEC – As the United States Navy looks to space and cyber as new domains for warfare, it also ought to look deeper: to the seafloor. Increased competition for vital resources and the intent to control critical sea lines of communication will drive nations and their navies to the seabed.

– War on the Rocks – An interesting future war scenario by T.X. Hammes.

– CIMSEC – an excellent introduction to the future of naval warfare on the seabed.

– War Zone – The Navy’s two hospital ships are expensive to operate and maintain, but offer capabilities found in no other Navy in the world.

– USNI Proceedings – The U.S. Navy has been in steady decline qualitatively, quantitatively, and culturally in its ability to wage naval warfare against a peer adversary since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Navy has lost the corporate knowledge and cultural ethos to fight a peer navy and to prosecute an offensive naval campaign successfully. The causes are many, but of particular note are geopolitical shifts, budgetary pressures, and training focus. The Navy must move swiftly and seriously to escape its predicament while adversaries challenge the United States around the globe and several build blue-water navies and land-based anti-access systems specifically designed to defeat the U.S. Navy.

– US Naval War College Review – If the United States is to develop and maintain the capacity to defeat—and thereby have the ability to deter—sophisticated antiaccess strategies that threaten to reduce the U.S. presence in, influence over, or access to contested regions, a coordinated, articulated, and persistent intragovernmental approach is required, not just Department of Defense (DoD)–only planning.

– USNI Proceedings – The Navy’s commanders and future commanders must study and practice command and control at every opportunity in war games and in real-world operations, while never ceasing to learn how to implement it at every level of command. This will be key to our success in a future conflict with a peer or near-peer competitor. It also will be core to any failure we may face in that conflict.

– US Naval War College Review – America is suffering from a strategy deficit in the South China Sea. For nearly a decade—and at accelerated speed since 2014—Beijing has been salami slicing its way to a position of primacy in that critical international waterway, while eroding the norms and interests Washington long has sought to defend. To date, however, Washington has struggled to articulate an effective response.

– USNI Proceedings – The foundational principle for all operational excellence is integrity. Integrity means adhering to standards when nobody is watching and freely admitting mistakes when they are made.

– War Zone – The service will use the retired aircraft as parts sources to keep other jets flyable before turning those planes over to the Marines.

– War Zone – Arguably a U.S. Navy surface combatant’s most important weapon deals in electrons not high-explosives, and it’s more important now than ever.

– CIMSEC – The sudden rise of a powerful maritime rival is coinciding with the atrophy of high-end warfighting skills and the introduction of exceedingly complex technologies, making the recent stunning revelations about how the U.S. Navy has failed to prepare for great power war especially chilling.

– BBC – US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is making a historic call at Vietnam, the first time a ship of this size has visited since the Vietnam War ended. The nuclear-powered carrier set anchor off the port city of Danang, where US combat troops first landed in the war, making this a highly symbolic location.

– Breaking Defense – By 2020, for the first time, the US Navy will put a lethal laser on a warship.

– War Zone – As part of a larger “Ocean of Things,” an array of sensors would watch marine animal activities for signs of man-made intruders.

– Army Times – The Navy is set to equip its Super Hornet and Growler fleet with bigger fuel tanks in the coming years, a development that will allow the jets to fly farther and provide additional capability in a changing world.

– CIMSEC – It is time for a Navy-wide campaign to rethink force strategy, design, and culture for competition in a digitized world.

– Defense News – Republican Sens. Roger Wicker and John McCain have introduced sweeping legislation that takes aim at the U.S. Navy’s readiness and organizational shortfalls that came to light in the wake of last year’s deadly accidents in the Asia-Pacific region.

– CIMSEC – With the fielding of increasingly capable anti-ship missiles, the centerpiece of the next conflict with a near-peer maritime power will be warfare to deny the adversary the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target acquisition information required for successful anti-ship missile attack on surface combatants and capital ships.

– Breaking Defense – Andrew Krepinevich writes that the National Defense Strategy does a service by getting the diagnosis right. But that is only the first step. To get the right prescription—the defense program—we will have to develop the operational concepts that link the ends sought with the means we can procure to achieve them.

– USNI News – Under cover of darkness, U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG-71) slipped through the Bosporus Strait and into the Black Sea on Friday. The next day USS Carney (DDG-64) joined Ross. The ships are operating are part of an unspecified regional “proactive” presence mission in the sea bordered by Russia, according to the Navy.