– National Interest – Tallying up ship numbers makes poor shorthand for U.S. naval power. Bean counting yields one datapoint, albeit an important one. There is some bare minimum of assets needed to concentrate strength at scenes of battle. But bean counting not only disregards the enemy, the surroundings, and the goals set by the navy’s overseers, it doesn’t differentiate among ship types.

– Business Insider – Some nagging problems are affecting the Navy’s P-8As, according to a recent Pentagon report.

– Navy Times – A scathing internal Navy probe into the 2017 collision that drowned seven sailors on the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald details a far longer list of problems plaguing the vessel, its crew and superior commands than the service has publicly admitted.

– Navy Times – The watchstanders on the bridge of the USS Fitzgerald had succumbed to “confusion, indecision, and ultimately panic,” according to an internal Navy investigation into the Fitzgerald disaster obtained by Navy Times.

– USNI Proceedings – The rise of the Chinese Navy and the return of the Russian Navy have created serious challenges to U.S. command of the sea.

– USNI Proceedings – A dedicated office could coordinate R&D efforts and focus on delivering prototypes of autonomous unmanned systems to the fleet.

– USNI News – The Navy’s approach to information warfare continues to mature, as the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is conducting the first pre-deployment training with a board-selected Information Warfare Commander serving on the strike group admiral’s staff.

– War Zone – The Navy’s newest and most advanced carrier can’t make it through a day of operations, on average, without a launch and recovery system failure.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is looking to get a lot of underway time out of its new frigate and is eyeing a crewing model that swaps out teams of sailors to maximize the operational time for each hull.

– Breaking Defense – Despite the Navy’s misgivings over having dozens of its ships sailing in boxes hunting for missiles, plans remain in place for more Aegis-capable hulls, as well as new radars, and mobile missile defense batteries.

– Defense News – Large and medium-sized unmanned surface combatants under development by the U.S. Navy will likely have crews aboard, at least at first.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy is looking to get out of the missile defense business, the service’s top admiral said today, and the Pentagon’s new missile defense review might give the service the off-ramp it has been looking for to stop sailing in circles waiting for ground-based missile launches.

– USNI News – Naval Surface Forces is continuing its push for an experimental squadron that would help figure out how to best leverage new platforms such as the Zumwalt-class destroyers and unmanned surface ships.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is zeroing in on a cost and the shape of its new frigate as it prepares to launch an open competition this summer.

– CIMSEC – “There’s a good chance…we’d lose the opening stages of this war,” remarked one high ranking official at a recent conference on Multi-Domain Operations.

– Defense News – For this edition of The Drift, I want to circle back to some things that I haven’t written up yet from my pre-Surface Navy Association interview with Rear Adm. Boxall, who was incredibly generous with his time, and cover some ground I haven’t made publicly available yet. I’m also going to dive into a couple Navy-related items from the Missile Defense Review.

– USNI News – The Littoral Combat Ship mission package program office considers itself to be out of the technology development business and fully into testing and production.

– USNI News – The investigation into the web of corruption spun by contractor Leonard Francis has wreaked havoc on the Navy’s ability to fill senior leadership roles, unintentionally stalled hundreds of officers’ careers and thinned out the service’s flag ranks.

– Navy Times – The Navy will say farewell to its last operational F/A-18C Hornet fighter jets in a special ceremony at Naval Air Station Oceana on Feb. 1.

– CIMSEC – The paper is about synergy. It demonstrates the power of using analytical tools in a logical sequence to generate, develop, and assess new concepts and technologies in warfare.

– Breaking Defense – Smaller unmanned vessels will act as expendable scouts and decoys, larger ones — over 50 meters — will carry masses of missiles, while manned ships will carry both the largest systems and the human beings essential for rapid adaptation in combat.

– USNI News – The Navy is still looking at a variety of options to arm the dormant 155mm Advanced Gun Systems aboard the Zumwalt-class of guided-missile destroyers.

– CIMSEC – Vice Admiral Hank Mustin earned a reputation as a hard-charging commander and a cunning tactical innovator. At the apex of his career in the 1980s Cold War U.S. Navy, Admiral Mustin played a critical role in the Navy’s force development. From developing new tactics to organizing large-scale fleet exercises, to introducing new weapons and drafting requirements for future warship types, Mustin was at the very forefront of naval force development in an era of great power competition. In these excerpts, Mustin shares his experiences and insights on leading naval force development, experimenting with new weapons, and how generating fresh tactical insight can make friends and foes in some of the most powerful places.

– National Interest – A U.S. access-denial strategy, then, would impose a hard fate on China. Which is the point. Threatening fearful consequences could deter Beijing from aggression tomorrow morning, and the next.

– Defense News – An update on where some of the most important surface Navy programs stand heading into 2019.