– National Interest – The Greeks took official accountability too far. The U.S. Navy might not take it far enough.

– War Zone – One of the U.S. Navy’s most unique ships, the USS Ponce, has returned home to the United States after spending more than five years as a floating base in and around the Arabian Sea. Though she was the subject of intense public interest during that time, thanks to internal histories The War Zone obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, we can tell the story of a ship that went from being infested with bugs and headed to the scrap heap to a hub for conventional and special operations elements in the Middle East that helped set the stage for an all-new classes of ships.

– War Zone – The U.S. Navy has created its first ever dedicated underwater drone unit, Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron One, or UUVRON 1, splitting it off from a secretive submarine unit in the process. The decision highlights the steadily growing importance of unmanned craft within the service, which hopes to have dedicated operational unmanned undersea elements by the end of the decade, and across the U.S. military in general.

– CIMSEC – This article reviews America’s current naval strategy and is divided into two parts. Previously, Part 1 analyzed U.S. naval defense strategy in light of 21st Century national defense threats. Part 2 will recommend changes to the Navy’s force structure to gain significant cost savings while still satisfying America’s naval defense requirements.

– USNI News – With unmanned vehicles integral to the future of the Littoral Combat Ship, the Future Surface Combatant and the next-generation SSN(X) attack submarine, the Unmanned Maritime Systems Program Office is testing as many unmanned vehicles – both programs of record and prototypes alike – as fast as it can to learn lessons and field systems to the fleet.

– USNI News – Following this year’s pair of deadly collisions between U.S. guided missile destroyers and merchant ships, the Navy is now considering whether it’s surface fleet is often too stealthy.

– USNI News – The Navy is creating a new Naval Surface Group Western Pacific to train and certify forward-deployed surface ships operating out of Japan and has begun additional readiness assessments and certifications, after four surface ship collisions and groundings in the region that killed 17 sailors this year.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy is making cyber investigations automatic after any mishap, starting with the at-sea collision that killed 10 sailors aboard the USS McCain. They don’t expect to find any evidence of a cyber attack this time, admirals emphasize, but they’re using the McCain as a test case.

– Washington Post – An image posted to a Pentagon media site and tweeted by Scottish journalist Ian Keddie shows the USS Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine, returning to her home port in Washington Tuesday flying the American flag alongside the unmistakable pirate skull and crossed bones, known as the Jolly Roger.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – The Navy should develop a new class of carriers to exploit the combat power of unmanned aerial vehicles to fight and win the nation’s future battles.

– 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.