– US Naval Institute Proceedings – On 11 July, Naval Institute staff members Ward Carroll and Bill Hamblet interviewed the Navy’s “Air Boss”—Vice Admiral Mike Shoemaker—in the Pentagon about the current state of naval aviation and some issues getting attention in the press.

– USNI News – The Littoral Combat Ship community is taking steps to both decrease the amount of overall maintenance work the ships require and increase the percentage conducted by sailors instead of contractors.

– Breaking Defense – Congress’s repeated budget malpractice and the Navy’s flawed policies combined to cause the accidents that killed 17 sailors, the Navy and the GAO say.

– USNI News – USS Wasp (LHD-1) arrived in the U.S. Virgin Islands Thursday to offer recovery assistance in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

– USNI News – A flurry of Littoral Combat Ship activity on the San Diego waterfront belies any thought the program is in a sleepy infancy phase.

– USNI News – The Littoral Combat Ship fleet has spent the last year in the midst of a reorganization and preparing for a new way of doing business following recommendations from a 2016 LCS Review that pointed the Navy towards injecting simplicity, stability and ownership into the unusual program. A year into implementing those recommendations, the LCS fleet looks vastly different than originally envisioned.

– CIMSEC – A look at non-kinetic ways to disable a navy.

– USNI News – The inclusion of the unmanned MQ-25 Stingray aerial tanker into the U.S. carrier air wing could increase the effective strike range of the strike fighters aboard aircraft carriers by up to 400 nautical miles.

– CIMSEC – The Navy’s Strategic Studies Group 35 concluded the “Navy’s next capital ship will not be a ship. It will be the Network of Humans and Machines, the Navy’s new center of gravity, embodying a superior source of combat power.” Such a network could consist of networks of sea mine swarms and their support ships. Networked sea mine swarms could converge on masses of adversary ships, bringing to bear overwhelming force. The visibility of surface support ships would enable the network to generate conventional deterrence by signaling the swarm’s presence, while helping maintain the swarm itself. The history of mine warfare suggests swarming sea mines could deliver a decisive force.

– CIMSEC – Today, a confluence of events has made revisiting the Sea Control Ship a vital task for the sea services. From commissioning new, large-deck amphibious assault ships specifically designed to maximize aircraft operations, expanding ARG-MEU mission sets via the tiltrotor MV-22 Osprey, and most significantly the imminent deployment of the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), such a ship with its vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopters could conduct ASW and carry out other sea control missions such as surface warfare (SUW). Additionally its air group of F-35B aircraft could conduct strike missions in lower intensity conflict situations such as the U.S. in Libya in 2011. Such a platform is the key to the future of maritime warfare not because it is a replacement for the conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) aircraft carrier, but rather because it is a complement that will free up the larger and all too few fleet nuclear powered aircraft carriers to focus on the power projection mission of striking enemy targets inland during a high intensity conflict.

– CIMSEC – From the galleasses at the Battle of Lepanto to the aircraft carriers of today, the capital ship has been that ship type that is capable of defeating all other types. That is the general and simplistic definition of the term, but to speculate on the future capital ship, we must understand the underlying characteristics of a capital ship and its role in fleet architecture and design. We will start with the ship itself and then move outward to its context and implications for maritime strategy.

– Washington Post – Constant deployments, a shrinking number of ships and high demands on crews have frayed the U.S. Navy, according to naval experts and current and former Navy officers, leading to four major incidents at sea this year and the deaths of 17 sailors.

– Navy Times – In the wake of two fatal collisions of Navy warships with commercial vessels, current and former senior surface warfare officers are speaking out, saying today’s Navy suffers from a disturbing problem: The SWO community is just not very good at driving ships.

– Second Line of Defense – Undersea warfare is becoming more complex as an increasing number of nations are operating submarines, advanced submarines and seafloor mines are being proliferated, and there are an increasing number of seafloor military and commercial activities world wide. Thus, there are increasing demands for navies to have enhanced capabilities to carry out surveillance to support anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, general surveillance, and “special missions” in the depths.

– CIMSEC – Security researchers do not believe in coincidences. In the past few weeks, a very rare event – a U.S. Navy destroyer colliding fatally with a huge commercial vessel – happened twice in a short period of time. Could these collisions be due to cyberwarfare?

– War on the Rocks – I realized Hollywood has it all wrong. The future of military robotics doesn’t look like The Terminator. It looks like Planet Earth II.

– Proceedings of the US Naval Institute – Facing growing networks of anti­access warfare systems, the U.S. Navy can regain an early offensive capability by taking conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles to sea.

– National Interest – Division officer training—not cyberattacks—may be to blame for recent collisions at sea.

– USNI News – The unprecedented string of U.S. surface ship incidents that have resulted in the death of at least seven sailors and hundred of millions in damages is prompting the Navy to take a hard look at how they operate their warships in the Western Pacific.

– BBC – Ten US Navy sailors are missing and five have been injured after the US destroyer John S. McCain and an oil tanker collided near Singapore.

– Proceedings of the US Naval Institute – The Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) and Northrop Grumman’s Tactical Autonomous Systems business unit are preparing for a second phase of dynamic interface testing for the MQ-8C Fire Scout vertical takeoff unmanned aerial vehicle (VTUAV), to be conducted on board the littoral combat ship USS Little Rock (LCS-9) early next year. The “Charlie” is on track to complete initial operational test and evaluation in late 2018.

– USNI News – The Navy will re-designate its first Expeditionary Landing Base ship a warship this week, converting the Military Sealift Command ship USNS Lewis B. Puller (T-ESB-3) into USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) so it can better meet operational needs abroad.

– USNI News – The Navy and Raytheon are close to signing a deal to integrate a new sensor into the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile to allow the missile to attack moving targets at sea.

– CIMSEC – An interview with Admiral Scott Swift, the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

– Breaking Defense – Lockheed Martin is studying several new air and missile defense systems, from an all-new six-foot rocket to a ship-launched version of the Patriot missile. In keeping with the military’s emphasis on multi-domain operations that attack old problems from new angles, Lockheed is even looking at launching its Patriot PAC-3 MSE from an aircraft.