Washington Post – The U.S. military unveiled a new maritime strategy today — its first created jointly by the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard — shifting from a narrow focus on sea combat toward one that also emphasizes the use of “soft power” to counter terrorism and deliver humanitarian assistance.
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Aviation Week – The U.S. Navy is looking at an upgrade program for its eight Cyclone-class 350-ton coastal patrol craft, focusing on command & control as well as habitability issues.
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Washington Post – In response to angry protests, as well as some pressure from Congress and the marine mammal scientific community, the Navy has now funded an ambitious, $6 million project to learn more about beaked whales and their response to sonar and other loud ocean noises.
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Virginian Pilot – America’s high-tech, smart-bombing Navy could be seeing its future in a pair of hulking former oil tankers and their patchwork crews of civilian and military mariners and medical specialists.

Adm. Gary Roughead, the Navy’s chief of naval operations, on Friday told the crew of the hospital ship Comfort that its four-month cruise points the way toward other medical missions aimed at adding combat prevention to the Navy’s warfare portfolio.
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Esquire – Thomas P.M. Barnett asks if we know that maritime traffic is vulnerable to terrorism, wouldn’t we want to do something about it?
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Virginian Pilot – After two years, three trips around the globe and more than 100,000 miles at sea, the Swift returned Friday to Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base.
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AFP – The US Navy has all but ended its presence at a nuclear submarine base in Sardinia with the departure of support vessel USS Emory Land.
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Wired – The US Navy identifies an ‘Alien Life Force,’ and it is you???
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Armed Forces Journal – The Littoral Combat Ship serves too many masters with too many roles
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BBC – The US navy has won the latest round in a court battle over whether it can use sonar equipment which environmentalists say can kill whales and other mammals.
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Aviation Week – The Office of Naval Research has been funding designs for a Heavy Air Lift Seabasing Ship (HALSS) – a monster high-speed trimaran with hangars on its Nimitz-sized deck for six C-130J transports.
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Aviation Week – Northrop Grumman is starting to reveal details of its X-47B unmanned combat aircraft demonstrator. Despite protestations by company officials that they only wanted to talk about the $635.8 million, 6-year project to demonstrate launches and recoveries at sea, they soon turned to the operational potential of its X-47B unmanned combat aircraft design.
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BBC – The US Navy has been ordered not to use mid-frequency sonar equipment during training exercises off the coast of California until the end of 2009.
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Armed Forces Journal – America’s maritime strategy amounts to neglect.
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Aviation Week – Is electromagnetic armor being installed on US aircraft carriers?
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Aviation Week – The Navy has chosen Northrop Grumman for the Unmanned Combat Air System CV Demonstration (UCAS-D) contract, beating Boeing. It’s no small effort, valued at $636 million between now and September 2013, and it is an important win for Northrop Grumman and an important loss for Boeing.
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BBC – A US court has ordered Sudan to pay $8m (£4m) to the families of 17 sailors who died in a suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen in 2000.
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Associated Press – The federal government wants to extend by five years its rules allowing the Navy to use a new low-frequency sonar, despite objections from environmentalists that the technology may harm whales and dolphins.
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Associated Press – Stung by cost overruns, the U.S. Navy is looking to return to a past when it controlled the shipbuilding process from beginning to end.
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Virginian Pilot – The aircraft carrier Enterprise and its strike group will begin departing Saturday for a scheduled six-month deployment.
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Virginian Pilot – Ditching the nuclear fleet is a complex, budget-draining process. The Navy began planning the program in the 1970s. A vessel is defueled, then its reactor is removed. The core is taken to a nuclear reservation, where it is buried.
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Virginian Pilot – Navy inspectors found 30 major flaws aboard the USS San Antonio. Despite the flaws, the Navy has earmarked $13 billion to purchase nine more of the ships.
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Virginian Pilot – Four warships and several hundred sailors from France, Russia and Great Britain joined U.S. forces this week for a series of exercises off the Virginia and North Carolina coasts aimed at forging better relationships and operations among navies.
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Army Times – In the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, 4 SEALs made a tough choice. Only one lived to tell.
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Aviation Week – If you asked anyone to guess what were some of the most in-demand aircraft in Afghanistan and Iraq, the answers would not include aircraft designed to hunt Soviet submarines in the open ocean. But a combination of high-end sensors and displays, trained crews with space for more, and the ability to carry a wide range of communication equipment has made RAF Nimrods and US Navy P-3s uniquely valuable.
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