– DOD Buzz – The U.S. Navy is surging through the early stages of development to build a new class of replenishment oilers able to replace the aging current fleet starting in 2020.

– Medium – Somewhere out there, someone has built something that has the Navy absolutely freaked.

– Aviation Week – By now the recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) findings on a certain U.S. Navy small-ship program are pretty well known. Costs and concerns about survivability keep rising and confidence keeps waning in the ship’s capability to fill national defense needs. Oh, lord, you may be thinking – not another piece about the GAO and the Littoral Combat Ship. But not so fast. The GAO report in question is the Jan. 3, 1979, statement to Congress on “The Navy’s FFG-7 Class Frigate Shipbuilding Program, and Other Ship Program Issues.” That’s right – we’re talking about the FFG-7s here, the now-noble Oliver Hazard Perry guided missile frigate-class ships slated to become the backbone of the Navy’s sea control in the mid-1980s and whose missions, or some of them, the LCS vessels are supposed to assume.

– Aviation Week – The U.S. Navy expects to award contracts soon for a longer-range version of the AIM-9X Sidewinder, known as Block III. Not only will it be a major change to the AIM-9X—retaining only the seeker, optical target detector (laser fuze) and data link of the Block II weapon—but its development is starting before the Block II has finished operational tests…With these developments, the U.S. Navy is following the lead of other air arms—notably, the Royal Air Force—in investing in non-RF sensors and weapons that work far outside the within-visual-range envelope. One key technology is better processing that has greatly improved the performance of IRST.

– Breaking Defense – In intellectual terms, Air-Sea Battle is the biggest of the military’s big ideas for its post-Afghanistan future. But what is it, really? It’s a constantly evolving concept for high-tech, high-intensity conflict that touches on everything from cyberwar to nuclear escalation to the rise of China. In practical terms, however, the beating heart of AirSea Battle is eleven overworked officers working in windowless Pentagon meeting rooms, and the issues they can’t get to are at least as important as the ones they can.

– Aviation Week – If the U.S. Navy can untangle some of the rather significant acquisition, operational, logistical and programmatic knots still tying up its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) efforts there are plenty ready to court the vessel for missions – providing the LCS works as advertised.

– Aviation Week – There is no doubt that today’s first-ever arrested landing of the Northrop Grumman X-47B air vehicle 2 on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush will go down in history books as a major milestone in aerospace history. But, what could be a footnote in the historical record is an anomaly that took place shortly after the first-ever landing of a stealthy, tailless unmanned aircraft on a carrier deck. It could have dampened the historical day had the system not been preprogrammed to handle a host of issues that could crop up. But, it didn’t. That came later when a third landing attempt sent the aircraft ashore

– Flight Global – The US Navy made aviation history on 10 July when a Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat air system-demonstrator aircraft made a first-ever arrested landing onboard the aircraft carrier USS George H W Bush, which was sailing some 70 miles (113km) of the Virginia coast.

– Business Week – The U.S. Navy should delay the award of a multibillion-dollar contract to Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. (HII) to build the second aircraft carrier in a new class as the first one faces failings from its radar to the gear that launches planes, congressional investigators said.

– Medium – By homing in on their heat with a new missile.

– Aviation Week – The biggest impediment to the potential success of the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) may very well be some of the top-level brass who continue to view the ship through the “old-think” prism used to scrutinize traditional Navy warships.

– Medium – Just below the surface with the submarine USS Toledo.

– Aviation Week – The ghosts of the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) past still haunt the program – with the specter of LCS-yet-to-come striking fear among some in Congress about what may be in store for the fleet in terms of costs and operational relevance.

– DefenseTech – The U.S. Navy wants to improve its ability to store, generate and surge electricity on ships to accommodate exponentially increasing demand for power, service officials said.

– Defense Tech – The U.S. Navy plans to outfit destroyers with a next-generation radar that is far more powerful in detecting and locating potential threats than the system on ships today. The Air and Missile Defense Radar, or AMDR, now in development and slated for integration on ships by 2016, is part of a series of technological upgrades in what the Navy calls Flight III modernization increments for its fleet of DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class of destroyers.

– Defense News – There’s a new Fire Scout in the pipeline — bigger, faster, longer legs, more muscle. It’s still being assembled and won’t fly until later this year, but it’s headed for the fleet as soon as late 2014. And it could fundamentally change some of the parameters expected of the US Navy’s seagoing unmanned helicopter program.

– AFP – The US military has failed to prepare a realistic “plan B” if political turmoil forces the closure of a vital naval base in Bahrain, a naval officer argues in a report.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – The 3D printing revolution will radically change naval construction and logistics.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Deep yet pragmatic cooperation with our allies and partners could bring surprising strategic benefits—even under fiscal austerity.

– Air Force – The air and maritime concept is maturing, but must fight off interservice rivalries and Pentagon politics.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Littorals are increasingly dangerous to naval forces. The proliferation of sophisticated shore- and ship-launched antiship missiles, asymmetric tactics such as the fast-boat swarm, and sophisticated anti-access/area denial technologies, makes these areas more difficult to penetrate and dominate. Though few groups or nations can challenge or threaten the U.S. Navy on or below blue water, the risks presented today to our manned warships by the green and brown waters of the world are neither negligible nor cheap to mitigate.

– Breaking Defense – Like the Holy Trinity or the designated hitter rule, the concept known as AirSea Battle has been much discussed but little understood. The Defense Department released an official and unclassified summary of the concept for the first time this evening on a Navy website . AirSea Battle would break down longstanding barriers: barriers to cooperation among the four armed services, barriers separating domains of conflict like submarine warfare and cyberspace, and, most problematically, barriers that have kept past crises from escalating to greater destruction and even, ultimately, to nuclear war.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Here are steps the U.S. Navy must take to realize the vision of autonomous systems.

– DefenseTech – The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. Navy are developing next-generation Aegis ballistic missile defense (BMD) hardware and software along with a longer-range interceptor missile engineered to massively increase the protective envelope against intermediate and long-range ballistic missile threats, service officials said.

– Virginian Pilot – The USS Stethem is one of two warships in the western Pacific that are responsible for detecting, tracking and, if necessary, shooting down a ballistic missile launched by Pyongyang. And they represent the first line of defense for U.S. allies and territories in a region that has become increasingly nervous as North Korea has ratcheted up its rhetoric and threats in recent months.