Naval News – The US Navy is advancing its efforts to roll out a next-generation of non-kinetic ‘soft-kill’ anti-ship missile defense capabilities to the fleet.

Defense News – The Navy Expeditionary Combat Command enables the rest of the fleet, providing port security, naval construction, mine clearance, salvage diving and more. But as the community thinks about how to modernize to keep up with evolving technology and unpredictable threats, it’s mulling adding a new tool to the toolkit: operating offensive, lethal drones.

Defense News – The Navy in December stood up a network of Surface Readiness Groups, or SURFGRUs, to put proven leaders in a position to focus solely on getting ships through maintenance and basic training on time, before turning them over to operational squadrons.

USNI News – The White House on Wednesday announced a multi-billion dollar maritime infrastructure plan that would restart the domestic production of container cranes to address the cybersecurity threat from Chinese-made cranes operating in ports around the United States.

USNI News – The Navy’s Indo-Pacific logistic command is building a more robust and responsive logistic sustainment framework to support theatre operations, its commander said earlier this week.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has ordered the builder of its Landing Craft Utility 1700 program to stop work and moved to terminate the contract, the shipbuilder Swiftships told Defense News, following years of challenges and disagreements on the program.

Defense News – The Navy on Friday awarded HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding a $1.2 billion deal to begin a maintenance overhaul on attack submarine Boise, which hasn’t operated at sea since 2015.

Breaking Defense – During a recent trip to South Korea, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro pitched two of the country’s major shipbuilders to potentially set up shop stateside, according to statement from Del Toro’s office.

US Naval War College Review – Too many naval officers mistrust, neglect, or even ignore the importance of naval theory, instead placing too much reliance on advanced technologies. Yet without full understanding of naval theory, it is very difficult to have the broad outlook necessary to develop naval doctrine, train one’s naval forces, and employ those forces successfully in a war.

US Naval War College Review – Strategists and analysts should be aware that the recently issued triservices strategy suffers from at least six political-bureaucratic-doctrinal disadvantages that very easily could turn into material disadvantages if the U.S. Navy were to face a competent enemy on the actual oceans.

CIMSEC – Can we reform the Department of Defense and the Navy? In their new book, American Defense Reform: Lessons from Failure and Success, Admiral Dave Oliver (ret.) and Dr. Anand Toprani make a spirited argument that, yes, we can. But it won’t be easy. 

National Interest – How many attack submarines does the U.S. Navy need? With Chinese and Russian SSN threats looming, the more, the better. But accomplishing the mission is essential, and the ability to do so might come from unusual quadrants. 

CIMSEC – How to return to WWII production pace in an unsure geopolitical environment that requires ever more ships? The first step should not be asking where can we produce more and spending resources, but rather asking how can current facilities be operated at the maximum efficiency?

The War Zone – The Navy firing off many multi-million-dollar missiles highlights cost and capacity concerns that could play factor in a fight against China.

USNI News – Nearly two in five enlisted sailors say they feel severely or extremely stressed, according to newly released data from the Navy’s Health of the Force survey.

Defense One – With DIU contracting for prototypes, Pacific Fleet is experimenting with unmanned craft that may one day defend Taiwan.

Reuters – The United States conducted a cyberattack recently against an Iranian military ship in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden that had been collecting intelligence on cargo vessels.

AP – Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its accompanying warships have spent four months straight at sea defending against ballistic missiles and flying attack drones fired by Iranian-backed Houthis, and are now more regularly also defending against a new threat — fast unmanned vessels that are fired at them through the water.

National Interest – Firing off more weapons than America buys causes stockpiles to decline quickly. These are the same weapons reserve the nation would need should Beijing seek to use force to take Taiwan while the United States is supporting wars in two other regions.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is incorporating lessons learned from its Red Sea engagements with Houthi missiles and drones, and are using them to improve tactics for seeing and eliminating threats.

Breaking Defense – Bilal Saab and Kevin Donegan of the Middle East Institute argue for a series of steps from the White House and Pentagon to secure global waterways against the threat of Houthi militants.

War on the Rocks – I propose a series of ideal typical missions in support of capabilities development and refining continency and campaign plans. Specifically, three concepts of operations emerge: imposing costs, denying terrain, and buying time. Swarms offer viable options for imposing costs linked to the concept of virtual attrition and how much an adversary expects to gain from a particular course of action. They offer low-cost ways — similar to mines and obstacles — of denying terrain. In an era of great-power competition between nuclear adversaries, drone swarms offer a new rung on the escalation ladder that buys time and space for political leaders to form prudent crisis response strategies.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Navy’s historically diminished size combined with the constraints necessary to maximize that diminished force’s availability paves a path to relative diminished quality against a PLAN which is growing and improving every day. If the U.S. Navy is truly serious about honing a cognitive combat edge against its numerically superior opponent, then it must recognize, advocate for, and invest in the quantity necessary to cultivate quality. There are no silver bullets for the Navy’s most likely adversary; they are communists, not werewolves. The U.S. Navy is going to need, in laymen’s terms, “more” – not merely to fight the next war, but enough to keep cultivating in ourselves the skills and mindset to win it.

Breaking Defense – Breaking Defense was given exclusive access to the Foundry, the US Navy’s office developing its Integrated Combat System, vital for the surface fleet.

Defense News – The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Anduril Industries a contract that will get its Dive family of large-diameter autonomous underwater vehicles into the hands of sailors for operations this year.