USNI News – The Department of the Navy’s first long-range shipbuilding plan in three years proposes multiple fleet procurement schemes for the Navy.

Navy Times – The Navy now has five submarines homeported in Guam — up from two the service had based there as of November 2021.

War Zone – Just days after The War Zone published a deep dive into the fascinating ship and its murky future, it has appeared executing its mission in official images.

CIMSEC – The U.S. is out of space, money, and time for the Navy’s multi-generational plans that avoid uncomfortable disagreements while awaiting tectonically slow shifts in OSD bureaucratic and strategic inertia. In a decade where China seeks ascendance with a likely vassal Russia in tow, the U.S. and its public needs a strong, forward, and mobile military to backstop American interests abroad. The military’s failure to understand its rightful place in answering both to the executive and legislative branches has impoverished the public debate on military and foreign policy matters, and weakened national security. Strong, innovative leadership comfortable with serious but professional public disagreements between OSD and other services is necessary to innovate and advocate for America’s pressing security needs. Such leadership is possible, as proven by Admiral Burke, General Shinseki, General Berger, Vice Admiral Copeman, and others who took the right risks for the right reasons. If Washington headquarters continue to fear dissenting conversations held in public more than war, our Navy – and military generally – will face brutal defeat and the ascendancy of a system determined by strategic adversaries.

USNI Proceedings – After a dozen articles on the “ends” of strategy, the project transitions to the “ways.”

War Zone – For a ghost of a special operations ship, the Carolyn Chouest has an amazing history but lack of funding may spell the end of her mission.

USNI News – Aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is in the Sea of Japan, in time to coincide with key North Korean anniversaries like the 110th birthday of its late founding leader Kim Il-sung on April 15 and the founding anniversary of the North Korean People’s Revolutionary Army on April 25. The carrier’s recent move is the second time this year Lincoln has been employed to conduct a presence operation to deter North Korea.

War Zone – The Marines turned USS Tripoli into a ‘Lightning Carrier’ packed with over 20 F-35Bs. We were there.

Navy Times – While the U.S. Navy is steaming full speed ahead in developing unmanned surface and undersea drones to augment the fleet of the future, the information technology and artificial intelligence that will drive these platforms remains a work in progress. The sea service needs to better map out its efforts, according to a government watchdog report released this week.

Naval News – The U.S. Army’s Maneuver Support Vessel-Light (MSV-(L)) is intended to replace the Army’s Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM-8) with a new vessel that can sail at speeds much faster than the venerable LCM-8 and also carry a heavier cargo payload. The MSV(L) will be able to carry a single U.S. Army’s M1A2SEP Main Battle Tank onto the beach.

USNI News – The Marines broke a record on Sunday when they loaded the most 16 F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters ever aboard a big-deck amphibious warship.

Defense News – The upcoming National Defense Strategy will highlight “campaigning forward” as a pillar of future operations, and top naval leaders say the force is already moving in this direction.

USNI Proceedings – Naval special warfare is the nation’s naval commando force. 

War Zone – The U.S. Navy wants to decommission both of its Montford Point class expeditionary transfer dock ships as part of its budget plans for the 2023 Fiscal Year. Cutting these vessels, which are both less than a decade old, relatively young by ship standards, is ostensibly part of a broader reorganization of the Navy and Marine Corps to focus more on distributed operations. This logic seems highly questionable given that these floating logistics nodes, which are unlike anything else the service has now, offer capabilities that would be ideal for those new concepts of operations.

CIMSEC – A wing-in-ground maritime attack craft (WMAC) would present an opportunity to field a cost-effective, survivable asset that can punch above its weight and cost. Such a platform would assist the United States naval battlegroups in attriting adversarial surface platforms and shore-based area denial systems to pursue maritime superiority in a contested environment. The United States Navy should pursue the acquisition, experimenting with, and eventual conversion of commercially produced wing-in-ground craft to fill an anti-surface warfare role until purpose-built designs can be developed, tested, and fielded. 

Defense News – The U.S. Navy wants to decommission nine of its Freedom-variant littoral combat ships and eliminate the anti-submarine warfare mission for the ships, citing a trade-off between the cost of the ships and equipment versus the warfighting capability they’d actually deliver.

US Naval War College Review – In the end, the debate over aircraft carriers always boils down to cost; their acquisition costs are much higher than for any other single-item defense program, making them a natural target for criticism. Combined with a simplistic perception of vulnerability, high costs tend to cause critics to declare aircraft carriers unaffordable—but “compared to what?”

War Zone – The Navy needs more ships to carry missiles in order to overcome the loss of Ticonderoga cruisers, five of which could be retiring this year.

USNI News – The Navy is making the first major changes to the carrier air wing in a generation. The service just wrapped up the first carrier deployment of the F-35C Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters – the first new fighter jet on a carrier in 20 years – and is a few years away from introducing the first unmanned aircraft into the air wing. But while the Navy is moving ahead with new platforms and ways of fighting, it is still wrestling with maintenance gaps and a fighter inventory too small to deploy and train efficiently. The service is also shifting its strategy to focus on the Indo-Pacific, a vast region for the carrier air wing to operate in, after two decades of providing close-air support for combat missions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Defense News –  The U.S. Navy is nearly done assessing whether to put missile tubes on an unmanned surface vessel, comparing the idea to other options for getting missile launchers out to sea.

Breaking Defense – The selection of Remus 300 for the Lionfish program is a big win for HII, which has spent much of recent years positioning itself for the unmanned systems market.

USNI Proceedings – Female Naval Academy graduates tend to leave active duty long before their male counterparts; the Sea Services must reverse this trend.

USNI News – Since December, the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, Carrier Air Wing 1 and its escorts have been operating in the Adriatic and Ionian seas launching 80 to 90 sorties a day as far north as Lithuania for a variety of missions with NATO-allied aircraft from Romania, France and Italy. Some fighters launched from Truman are training, while some are set to police NATO’s airspace and prevent Russian aircraft from violating those borders.

War Zone – The U.S. Navy will reportedly seek to decommission between eight and 10 Freedom class Littoral Combat Ships, or LCSs, as part of its budget proposal for the 2023 Fiscal Year. This would despite the oldest example still on active duty being only seven years old. Last year, the service admitted that it would take years to implement critical fixes to the propulsion systems on all of the Freedom class vessels it has acquired to date.

CIMSEC – The submarine force needs sailors with specialized skills to maintain, operate and integrate UUVs into SSN(X) operations. Because the submarine force and the United States Navy at large lack a documented, repeatable, and formalized process for training UUV operators and maintainers, the qualitative concept and computational model presented in this article offers a bridge to scaling multi-UUV operations. The Navy needs to develop codified training and manning requirements for UUV operations and the infrastructure, both physical and intellectual, to support unmanned systems operations. The recommendations discussed here are focused on the specific use case of UUVs deployed from manned submarines.