– Weekly Standard – A strategy to meet the challenges to the U.S. Navy.

– DOD Buzz – After first entering the water in October of last year, the Navy’s first DDG 1000 next-generation destroyer is gearing up for additional tests and heavy weather trials.

– DOD Buzz – Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert cited the Littoral Combat Ship, Mobile Landing Platform and Joint High Speed Vessel as critical new ship programs essential to the service’s future surface warfare strategy.

– Forbes – …But the Navy’s surface warships can’t simply abandon the Western Pacific as Chinese anti-ship missiles proliferate. They need active defenses that can improve the cost-exchange equation for defenders by greatly reducing the cost of successful engagements. Some senior officials, including apparently the Chief of Naval Operations, think lasers might be the answer. Lasers are tightly focused beams of electromagnetic energy that hit targets at the speed of light, while costing only a few dollars per engagement. The Navy has proven it can hit fast-moving targets with them even in turbulent weather and high seas.

– Aviation Week – The U.S. Navy surface fleet must steer away from depending on defensive missiles and must move toward becoming more offensively lethal, says the admiral in charge of those ships.

– Breaking Defense – The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to be one of the fastest things in the fleet, but it seems like the skeptics – and the sequester – have caught up with it. The question is, what’s next?

– Virginian Pilot – Thousands of sailors in Hampton Roads will deploy less frequently but for longer periods under a new policy the Navy is launching later this year.

– Aviation Week – Sure there’s a lot more to the U.S. Navy than its surface fleet, Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program and the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific. But those three are inextricably interlinked and they form the tripod of one of the major foundations upon which the Navy will stand and grow or fall and wither.

– Navy Times – The four-star commander of U.S. Pacific Command says the era when the U.S. military enjoys uncontested control over the Pacific’s blue water and its airspace is coming to an end.

– Military.com – The U.S. Navy is in the early phases of a series of engineering and combat systems modernization upgrades to its current fleet of 62 commissioned Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, service officials said. The planned upgrades are what the Navy calls “Hull, Mechanical & Electrical” or “HME” modernizations. Separate combat systems upgrades are also part of the effort, Navy officials said.

– USNI News – Lockheed Martin has demonstrated that its Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) can be launched from the Mk-41 vertical launch system with only software modifications.

– The National Interest – The U.S. Army has a storied history of preparing for the wrong wars. In the post-WWII era, the U.S. has usually fielded an army trained to harness America’s superior technologies to defeat similarly organized nation-state armies in conventional conflicts. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, the army has found itself in messy contingencies fighting ragtag groups of insurgents where its training and capabilities were at best useless and at worst counterproductive. Despite some admirable efforts at adaption, the U.S. Army has usually found it difficult to overcome these initial disadvantages enough to achieve a favorable, lasting outcome in such conflicts. The U.S. military should keep this history in mind as it seeks to counter China’s growing capabilities and assertive diplomatic posture in the Western Pacific [3]. Although China is the type of nation-state peer competitor that the U.S. military prefers to deal with, this fact by no means ensures that Beijing will engage the U.S. on America’s terms [4]. The old adage that the enemy gets a say in the fight is as true of the People’s Liberation Army as it was of Iraqi insurgents. Any U.S. strategies for winning the “contest for supremacy” against China must grapple with this reality.

– USNI News – Navy leaders are in the midst of a series of studies to see whether the MV-22 can be flown off the sea service’s expected fleet of Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) ships.

– Stars and Stripes – The U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, a multibillion-dollar behemoth that is the first in a next generation of carriers, is beset with performance problems, even failing tests of its ability to launch and recover combat jets.

– USNI News – The Navy is continuing to wrestle with landing deck issues aboard its amphibious ships, tied to flight operations with the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and MV-22 Osprey.

– USNI News – USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) has been tapped by the Navy to be the service’s next forward deployed carrier in Japan and move USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) to Naval Station San Diego. Reagan will replace USS George Washington (CVN-73) ahead of the Washington’s three-year long refueling at the Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) Newport News Shipyard in Newport News, Va.

– War is Boring – Stealthier than you might think.

– Defense News – The office of the secretary of defense (OSD) has directed the US Navy to limit its overall buy of littoral combat ships to a total of 32 ships, foregoing 20 more of the small, fast and controversial warships, Pentagon sources have confirmed.

– Global Security Newswire – The United States next year is slated to begin reducing launch tubes on each of its Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, a new independent report states. The elimination of four operational launch tubes on each of the 14 submarines that make up the Navy’s Ohio submarine fleet will be the first substantial reduction in U.S. strategic weapon delivery capability since the 2011 New START accord went into effect.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy, is, hands down, the service in the best shape for 2014. Every act of belligerent idiocy from Beijing – and there’ve been a lot of them lately – makes the Navy budget an easier sell. In stark contrast to the Army, the Navy has the central role in the new Pacific-focused strategy, a high-tech threat justifying high-cost programs, a highly visible role in peacetime engagement around the world, and, perhaps most crucial, a clear set of missions.

– Breaking Defense – The Littoral Combat Ship has come under light fire from Congress because they worry especially about findings by operational testers that the ships cannot survive a firefight. Norman Friedman, a consultant at Gryphon Technologies with more than 30 military books to his name, argues in the following piece that critics need to consider that “change is at the core” of the LCS design, marking a welcome change in naval design. He believes LCS marks “the most fundamental change in warship design” in decades. Friedman compares the just-launched LCS ship USS Little Rock with the history of its predecessor, a light cruiser built near the end of World War II, mothballed a few years later and later rebuilt as a guided missile cruiser at considerable cost.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – For future naval activity that involves closer proximity to potential adversaries’ coastlines—and thus a requirement for more maneuverable ships—the Navy should consider flotilla operations.

– Aviation Week – There’s something special and hopeful about steaming into a tropical port on the bridge of a Navy warship that’s just finished a trek across the Pacific as the year’s drawing to a close. It’s a time of reflection of the deployment that’s been and hope for the potential that lies ahead. Green island hills hovering above a postcard Honolulu cityscape and a blue sea – all add to the dreamy scene. It’s easy to ignore the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. And as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) USS Freedom steamed into Pearl Harbor and docked, it was easy to focus on all of the positives of the ship’s maiden Western Pacific deployment – and forget about the roiling seas still threatening the LCS program.

– USNI News – The U.S Navy’s unmanned carrier launched airborne surveillance and strike (UCLASS) program has evolved to call for a jet that is much larger and much more capable than what was envisioned just six months ago.

– Georgetown University Institutional Repository – A *fascinating* analysis from Jonathan Solomon of how lessons learned in the Cold War by the US Navy in how to defeat the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System and air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles can be applied today against the Chinese Ocean Surveillance System and their anti-ship ballistic missiles. 137 pages long, but well worth the read. Happy Holidays!