– USNI News – The Navy is looking to Raytheon’s Excalibur guided artillery round to replace the effective but expensive Long Range Land Attack Projectile for the Zumwalt-class of guided missile destroyers.

– Military.com – In a pair of congressional hearings about the Navy’s embattled littoral combat ship program this month, service program managers and oversight officials fielded tough questions about unexpected increases from ship unit costs — from $220 million to $470 million over the course of the program — and concerns about a planned block buy of upgraded frigates based on the same design. But the panel also revealed new details about the cause and scope of a series of engineering casualties that have sidelined five of the eight active littoral combat ships in a little more than a year.

– Breaking Defense – One of the oddest military drones aborning reinvents a stillborn technology from 1951. It turns out the unmanned aircraft revolution is resurrecting configurations that were tried more than a half century ago but proved impractical with a human pilot inside. A case in point: Northrop Grumman’s new Tern, a drone designed to do everything armed MQ-1 Predators or MQ-9 Reapers can, but to do it flying from small ships or rugged scraps of land – i.e., no runway needed.

– Proceedings – Decoupling naval intelligence from the information warfare community is key to ensuring the Navy maintains maritime superiority.

– AP – One after another, fighter jets catapult from the flight deck of the USS Eisenhower, a thousand-foot (305-meter) American aircraft carrier, afterburners glowing amber above the blue Persian Gulf, on their way northwest to join the fight in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State group.

– USNI News – The Navy is set to deploy unmanned buoyancy gliders from its guided missile destroyers in an effort to expand its anti-submarine warfare edge.

– National Interest – President Elect Donald Trump, correctly understanding the current strategic environment, is committed to building a 350 ship Navy.

– USNI News – The Navy isn’t planning on buying the rocket assisted guided round designed for a key system in the Zumwalt-class of guided missile destroyer.

– The Diplomat – New contract augments old Cold War “SOSUS” arrays.

– Breaking Defense – The Army’s long-range artillery rocket, ATACMS, will get upgraded to strike moving targets on land and at sea, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today. After at least two years of pressure from Congress and vague promises from Pentagon leaders, and for the first time since the Coastal Artillery Corps was disbanded 66 years ago, the Army is officially back in the business of killing ships. That gives the largest service a big new role in countering Russian aggression in the Baltic and Black Seas or defending allies like the Philippines against China.

– CIMSEC – Newly appointed U.S. Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. gave a signature speech at the Naval War College in Newport, RI in 1981. In his remarks Lehman hailed, “the return of naval strategy” to the forefront of the Navy’s planning.1 Such a message was again issued last week by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson. While the CNO’s 18 October naval message (R 182128Z OCT 16) did not have Secretary Lehman’s dramatic turn of phrases, it is no less important and in fact is the most significant change in the role of U.S. naval strategic thinking since late 1991. The CNO’s message implements a major change in the planning and execution of the annual Navy budget statement known as the Program Objective Memorandum (POM.) For the first time since July 1991, the Navy Staff (OPNAV) Operations, Plans and Strategy (N3/N5) office will have the first input to the Navy POM building process. While this may not seem significant at first glance, it is a major course correction in Navy thinking. It could signal a return to the halcyon days of the 1980s when the Navy’s Maritime Strategy served as the service’s global blueprint for operational naval war against the Soviet Union, informing Navy programs, budgets, exercises, war games, education, training, and real world operations.

– USNI News – The Navy should prepare for a future operating environment where anti-ship weapons propagate globally and attacks such as the recent ones against guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG-87) are more commonplace, one the service’s top budget officials said.

– Free Beacon – Senior White House officials blocked the Navy from conducting needed freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea amid growing concerns that China is militarizing newly reclaimed islands, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

– Breaking Defense – The multinational Unmanned Warrior exercise off the coast of Scotland is doing “really groundbreaking” work on naval drones, said one participating US scientist. There’ve been “a number of world firsts” in networking unmanned vehicles of different types and from different nations into a single unit.

– USNI News – The U.S. Navy’s Commander of Logistics Group Western Pacific/Task Force 73 is in the process of expanding its maintenance and support capabilities.

– Breaking Defense – “Outranged and outgunned” by Russian and Chinese missiles, the US Army wants a new long-range artillery rocket of its own. The nascent Long-Range Precision Fires program could do much more than replace the 25-year-old ATACMS missile, however. LRPF could become a linchpin of what the Army is calling Multi-Domain Battle, extending ground-based artillery’s reach not only to unprecedented ranges — hitting distant targets once reserved for airstrikes — but out to sea.

– Breaking Defense – The $13 billion supercarrier USS Ford and the $500 million Littoral Combat Ship are both suffering engine trouble. But Navy Secretary Ray Mabus took pains today to defend LCS even as he derided Ford as “a textbook example of how not to build a ship.”

– BBC – The US has hit radar sites in Yemen after one of its warships in the Red Sea came under missile attack for the second time in days.

– Defense News – It’s almost a given that when a new administration takes over in Washington, international opponents find ways to test the will of the new leadership. Russia and China, Iran and North Korea, ISIS and Al Qaeda can all be expected to take actions that will put pressure on the new president to show what he or she is made of. And when the issues arise next year, a new set of leaders are likely to ask the proverbial question, “Where are the carriers?” The answer, at least in the first weeks of the next administration, may not be what people want to hear.

– USNI News – The guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG-87) was unsuccessfully attacked with two missiles fired from Yemen on Sunday.

– CIMSEC – As the United States and the U.S. Navy move into the 21st century, the United States faces the duel challenge of engaging in a “long war” against Islamofacism and meeting the threat of emerging “peer competitors” in a period of economic and fiscal constraints. Meeting these dichotomous challenges requires a fundamental rethink of the nature of naval forces and their roles. Is the U.S. Navy moving from an era of exceptional “ships of the line” – including LHA’s & LPD’s, FFG’s, CG’s, DDG’s, SSN’s and CVN’s – to one filled with USV’s, UAV’s, LCS’s, CV’s, SSK’s and perhaps something new – Long Range Patrol Vessels (LRPV’s)? But what in the world is an LRPV?

– USNI News – Three U.S. warships are operating off the coast Yemen following a guided missile attack against a UAE operated ship by Houthi rebels.

– US Naval War College Review – We suggest that a number of unique and complex ethical questions are likely to arise regarding the applications of autonomous UUVs and USVs…

– USNI Proceedings – Dispersing ships in smaller groups will increase the surface Navy’s ability to deceive and defeat the enemy, but such distributed lethality cannot exist without distributed authority.