– Daily Telegraph – An armada of US and British naval power is massing in the Persian Gulf in the belief that Israel is considering a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.

– AOL Defense – Improving the Navy’s long-neglected capability to hunt mines is a top priority for the fleet — but it still gets less than 1 percent of the Navy budget.

– Foreign Policy – Was the U.S. Navy really better in 1917 than it is today?

– Defense News – As storms go, it wasn’t a biggie. Eight-to-12-foot waves, 40 mph winds. But the ocean’s saltwater was a baptism of sorts, as the U.S. Navy’s latest littoral combat ship (LCS) left behind more than 2,000 miles of Great Lakes freshwater sailing and entered the Atlantic on Aug. 17 for the first time.

– Aviation Week – Maritime missiles are in a period of rapid evolution. Warships and submarines are persistent platforms with deep magazines, for long-range attacks on land targets and hostile ships. But more warships now carry effective missile-defense gun and missile systems and countermeasures, while sea traffic has continued to grow rapidly worldwide—creating a major challenge in terms of collateral damage. Some of the biggest decisions in the past year involve the U.S. Navy, which is moving toward an arsenal of “net-enabled” weapons—missiles that take advantage of other sensors to find and hit targets, but can still function if communications are down. Two quick-reaction missile programs have been started recently, along with a large, expensive and remarkably low-profile airborne radar to support them.

– US Navy – Zap, crackle and pop – Energy weapons are finally moving from the laboratory to the real world. But they are hardly the super-weapons of science fiction…and the US Navy is leading the pack in terms of weaponizing them.

– Aviation Week – As budget-cutters swipe at major Pentagon programs and sequestration threatens to tighten the leash on expected expenses, the U.S. Navy remains focused on building its future surface warfighting fleet, and the service is pinning its hopes on futuristic ships like the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

– Wall Street Jouranl – The U.S. is planning a major expansion of missile defenses in Asia, a move American officials say is designed to contain threats from North Korea, but one that could also be used to counter China’s military. The planned buildup is part of a defensive array that could cover large swaths of Asia, with a new radar in southern Japan and possibly another in Southeast Asia tied to missile-defense ships and land-based interceptors.

– Washington Post – Gwenyth Todd had worked in a lot of places in Washington where powerful men didn’t hesitate to use sharp elbows. She had been a Middle East expert for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. She had worked in the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, where neoconservative hawks first began planning to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But she was not prepared a few years later in Bahrain when she encountered plans by high-ranking admirals to confront Iran, any one of which, she reckoned, could set the region on fire.

– Defense News – A new, high-powered effort to boost development of the littoral combat ship (LCS) is kicking off, intended to help implement numerous proposals and suggestions to integrate the new ship type into U.S. Navy operations.

– Aviation Week – With Senators up in arms over disputed reports that a Russian submarine cruised around the Gulf of Mexico undetected for a month, it was an opportune time for DARPA to award SAIC a contract to develop an unmanned vessel that can shadow a submerged submarine throughout its patrol.

– Aviation Week – U.S. Navy emails and other documents suggest that officials muzzled bad test results for the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) variant, the USS Freedom, at a crucial time in the program’s development, when the service was considering which seaframe to pick for the $30 billion-plus fleet. Top program officers for the ship and at Naval Sea Systems Command (Navsea) told subordinates to avoid certain language in the test-result reports because of concerns over the downselect decision, the documents show. One naval officer said in an email he would delete the offensive wording of the report.

– The Diplomat – The AirSea Battle concept for countering China’s military rise is expensive and unhelpful. And could even spark a nuclear conflict.

– San Diego Union Tribune – As the third ship in the Navy’s littoral class left a Wisconsin shipyard this week, the inaugural step toward its eventual home in San Diego, the Navy billed it as an “exponential” improvement over the controversial first vessel in the line.

– Flight Global – The US Department of Defense needs to develop new unmanned aircraft that can survive inside contested airspace, as it shifts its focus toward the Pacific – but the services must invest in new technologies to seamlessly share intelligence data.

– Washington Post – A very interesting look at how AirSea Battle is playing out in the Pentagon…

– US Naval War College Review – The U.S. Navy has an integrity problem in the ranks of its commanding officers (COs). Although (as far as we can tell) over 97 percent of the Navy’s commanding officers conduct themselves honorably, the increasing number of those who do not raises concerns that the Navy must address.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Undersea warriors must learn from the past while handling a sophisticated network of manned and unmanned platforms and sensors.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – The Navy must redesign a capable follow-on ballistic-missile submarine that it can afford.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Today’s tech-dependent, risk-averse submarine culture keeps young officers from developing warfighting skills crucial to success in conflict.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – While the Navy appears to be doing a better job of selling itself to lawmakers and the American public, it still needs to improve its marketing, or the whole effort could blow up in its face.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Three bedrock lessons from the War of 1812 remain the basis for U.S. Navy operations in the 21st century.

– US Naval War College Review – For more than three decades, beginning soon after the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off against each other. The concept of “mutual assured destruction”-MAD, the U.S. threat of massive retaliation to a Soviet first strike-became America’s Cold War de facto strategic defense policy. In March 1983, however, President Ronald Reagan asked whether ballistic missiles could be destroyed before they reached the United States or its allies, thus catalyzing efforts for a national ballistic-missile-defense program that would undermine the need for MAD. That same year, the U.S. Navy commissioned USS Ticonderoga (CG 47), the first of what is to become a fleet of more than eighty Aegis warships. In 2012, these trends have converged, and Aegis ballistic-missile defense (BMD) is an increasingly important component of a robust national BMD System (BMDS).

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – The Secretary of the Navy says that the Navy and Marine Corps will be the long arm of a National Fleet central to U.S. military power.

– US Naval Institute Proceedings – Let’s just say it: AirSea Battle in East Asia is about China. Foreclosing its options is perhaps the surest way to deter aggression.