Defense Technology International – The US Navy has decided not to build more than two DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class land-attack destroyers. Official word comes Thursday???
more…

Virginian Pilot – The DDG 1000 was to be a class of two dozen destroyers with a radar-evading profile and a crew half the size of those on similar vessels. But purchases are on hold because of the cost ñ up to $5 billion each ñ and reliance on unproven technologies.
more…

Defense News – Even before the first test version of the U.S. Navy’s P-8 Poseidon is completely built, program managers have their eye on future versions of the submarine-hunting, intelligence-gathering plane.
more…

Associated Press – Thousands of Japanese rallied against the permanent basing of a nuclear-powered U.S. warship near Tokyo, saying a recent onboard fire made it unsafe.
About 13,000 protesters gathered at a park near the port of Yokosuka, just south of the capital, where the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will be based.
more…

Armed Forces Journal – Adding small combatant ships would beef up the Navyís capabilities.
more…

Air Force – The US military now feels a need to keep a wary eye on the Strait of Malacca and its neighborhood.
more…

Virginian Pilot – During the last five months in the Middle East, tensions grew in Syria, unrest delayed Lebanonís president election more than 15 times, and Iraq struggled to keep oil pumping to its main offshore terminals. The USS Nassau Expeditionary Strike Group has had front row seats for all of the action.
more…

Associated Press – The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was moved out of the Persian Gulf and to the Gulf of Oman, shortening the time that the carrier’s strike planes must fly to support combat in Afghanistan.The decision reflects both the worsened state of the fight in Afghanistan but improvements in Iraq as well.
more…

Defense Technology International – A recent report (PDF) by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, titled, ìRange, Persistence, Stealth, and Networking: The Case for a Carrier-Based Unmanned Combat Air Systemî by Thomas P. Ehrhard, PhD and Robert O. Work takes the U.S. Navy to task for not pushing harder to develop and field unmanned air combat systems for its aircraft carriers.
more…

BBC – US military prosecutors have filed charges against the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship that left 17 sailors dead.
more…

Armed Forces Journal – The Navy today is overly focused on the tactical employment of its combat forces, in its doctrine and practice. This might not be a problem in case of a conflict with numerically and technologically inferior forces. However, the Navy would have a much greater problem and possibly suffer a major defeat in a war with a relatively strong opponent that better balances the employment of his forces at the tactical and operational levels of war. The Navyís superior technology and tactics would not be sufficient to overcome its lack of operational thinking.
more…

Armed Forces Journal – It might be tempting to dismiss the U.S. Navyís potential focus on China as a passing fad ó part of the now-familiar phenomena of ìChina fever.î Another perspective holds that this focus can best be explained by a simple case of enemy deprivation syndrome. While there is a kernel of truth in both of these intellectual approaches, facts on, above and especially under the water increasingly belie these conclusions and demand serious attention from American strategists.
more…

Associated Press – The U.S. military intercepted a ballistic missile Thursday in the first such sea-based test since a Navy cruiser shot down an errant satellite earlier this year.

The military fired at the target, a Scud-like missile with a range of a few hundred miles, from a decommissioned amphibious assault ship near Hawaii’s island of Kauai.

The USS Lake Erie, based at Pearl Harbor, fired two interceptor missiles that shot down the target in its final seconds of flight about 12 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

The $40 million test showed that Navy ships are capable of shooting down short-range targets in their last phase of flight using modified missiles, the military said.
more…

Defense Technology International – The customer sounds happy as the first EA-18G Growler reaches the operator.
more…

The Times – The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines???When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
more…

Associated Press – The oldest active ship in the U.S. Navy, the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, made its final departure from Japan on Wednesday to be decommissioned after nearly half a century of service.
more…

Associated Press – Japanese seeking to block a nuclear-powered U.S. warship from being permanently based in Japan took their lawsuit to a higher court Monday.
The latest move by the 248 plaintiffs follows the May 12 rejection by a district court of their lawsuit demanding a halt to harbor work to accommodate the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, which is scheduled to be based at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, starting August.
more…

Virginian Pilot – Riverine Squadron Two, with 130 sailors, is expected to return to Norfolk today after nearly eight months on deployment in Iraq.
more…

Northwest Cable News – The Boeing 737 is the most popular airliner in the world, but Boeing is also building a militarized version.
more…

Associated Press – The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk sailed into Hong Kong on Monday on its final away-from-home port call five months after being turned away by China.
more…

New York Times – A critical look at the troubled gestation of the Littoral Combat Ship.
more…

Virginian Pilot – The Navy will review maintenance and training across the surface fleet after a recent inspection found the Norfolk-based destroyer Stout unfit for sustained combat.
more…

Defense Technology International – Surprisingly few airframe changes are needed to make Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk into the US Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance System, although the RQ-4N will have a different mission profile than the US Air Force’s RQ-4B.
more…

Aviation Week – Within three years, the U.S. Navy’s fleet will have fielded the technology for precisely locating small, flying targets. The target set embraces some of the Navy’s latest nightmares, including the next-generation of stealthy – sometimes supersonic – cruise missiles.
more…

Armed Forces Journal – A comparison of good risk with bad risk. Successful implementation of the new maritime strategy depends on the Navy leadership seizing the first while mitigating the latter.
more…