– US Naval Institute Proceedings – In this cost-constrained era, when it comes to responding to threats in dangerous coastal waters, a single-purpose ship is best suited to the task.

– Defense News – Fighting back at repeated budget cuts to its nuclear power budget requests, two of the Navy’s top leaders warned Congress on Monday that the cuts can’t go on.

– US Naval War College Review – The US Navy has never been comfortable with theory or doctrine at what is now known as the operational level of war. The Navy has always possessed robust ship- and formation-level doctrine—tactics—and of course has
embraced the high-level sea-power theories of both Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett. The gap in the middle either has not been needed—as has been essentially the case for most of the Navy’s history except for World War II—or has been filled by adaptive practice in the form of specific campaign or operations plans. For the Navy, the old framework of strategy and tactics has sufficed since 1945. However, an emergent set of circumstances in the form of Chinese naval development, as well as a new generation of weapons and sensors, is driving the Navy into incorporating the operational level into its culture. Moreover, this development is bringing the Navy into competition, or perhaps conflict, with the US Air Force over which should exert operational control of aviation over the water. Whereas this task was always presumed to be the preserve of the Navy, the establishment in Hawaii of a regional air operations Center (AOC) that in theory controls all air in the theater will challenge Navy assumptions and equities. The tactics of interservice squabbling aside, the Navy will need a theory of naval airpower as a foundation for its arguments to preserve operational control of its aviation.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – The U.S. Submarine Force actively applies the knowledge gained from historic incidents such as the loss of the H. L. Hunley and the USS Thresher to inform its approach toward safety.

– US Naval War College Review – Naval (or sea) mines are, by themselves or in combination with other weapons, a promising choice to parties pursuing antiaccess/area-denial objectives. The number of mines in the stocks of countries around the world and the ease of laying them mean that sea control is very likely to be lost again in future tension and conflict. This article is an attempt to describe the means, and to some extent the methods, under consideration to win it back if the need arises again.

– USNI News – Budget pressure and an insatiable demand for ships capable of bulls eyeing ballistic missiles drove the Navy to alter its plan to upgrade Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers (DDG-51).

– USNI News – The Navy’s surface warfare community is taking a second look at a guided shell that could be fired from existing ship board guns as part of the service’s recent focus on expanding the combat power of the Navy’s surface ships.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – An antisubmarine warfare doctrine adopted U.S. Navy-wide nearly a decade ago still applies, now more than ever.

– Defense News – The US Navy and Congress are in a sort of faceoff over the fleet’s cruiser force. To extend their service lives, the Navy is asking to take half its cruisers — CGs in Navy-speak — out of service now and gradually bring them back starting in 2019. Congress, fearful that Pentagon budget-cutters will instead decide to cut costs and reduce the force, is insisting the ships be modernized now and kept running.

– The Diplomat – An all-encompassing U.S. maritime strategy must include all the armed forces—not just the navy, coast guard and marines.

– The Diplomat – Without underway replenishment ships, America’s ability to project power in wartime will shrivel.

– USNI News – The U.S. Navy has not yet tasked any of its surface ships to move closer to Ukraine following the suspected shoot down of Malaysian Airliners Flight 17. A collection of NATO frigates, electronic surveillance ships and mine sweepers are in the Black Sea following the conclusion of a minesweeping exercises.

– War is Boring – Undermanned and overworked crews can’t keep Littoral Combat Ships running.

– USNI News – A U.S. guided missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf (CG-72) has left the Black Sea on Tuesday, leaving a collection of NATO ships to maintain an ongoing presence mission following Russia’s seizure of the Crimea region from Ukraine.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Information dominance will be vital in future conflicts.

– USNI News – In a rare concurrence of events, a carrier strike group and all three ships of a Navy Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) are in the Persian Gulf.

– USNI News – A senior member of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has called on the Navy and the Pentagon to have more open discussion about Chinese military capability and not grant, “Beijing a veto over what we can and cannot say.”

– New Republic – Find the places that resemble bars, play dominoes, imagine a fated connection

– Breaking Defense – “Failure to launch” isn’t a metaphorical concern when you work on nuclear weapons. That’s why the director of the Navy’s euphemistically named Strategic Systems Program (SSP) is a worried man. What has Vice Adm. Terry Benedict worried is something neither he, nor the Navy nor the entire Defense Department directly control. It’s the viability of what Benedict called “an already fragile industry” that produces the solid-fuel rocket boosters for the Navy’s Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The worst part is that the solid fuel rocket engine business is an industry that will live or die not on the military’s own decisions, but on NASA’s.

– Navy Times – New data shows the fleet’s underway time is out of balance, where some ships have picked up the slack for others that, for one reason or another, haven’t been out to sea as often.

– USNI News – Lockheed Martin outlined the range of options they presented to the Navy as part of the Pentagon mandated study into a follow-on ship to the Flight 0 Littoral Combat Ships.

– AP – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered the amphibious transport dock ship USS Mesa Verde into the Persian Gulf as concern grows over a militant group’s advancement toward Iraq’s capital.

– USNI News – The Northrop Grumman E-2D Advanced Hawkeye maybe the U.S. Navy’s secret weapon against the emerging threat of enemy fifth-generation stealth fighters and cruise missiles. The key to that capability is the aircraft’s powerful UHF-band hybrid mechanical/electronically-scanned AN/APY-9 radar built by Lockheed Martin. Both friend and foe alike have touted UHF radars as an effective countermeasure to stealth technology.

– Los Angeles Times – A U.S. Navy plan for aircraft carrier-based drones has launched a dogfight in Washington over the role of the robotic planes in combat.