USNI News – The Pentagon, on Monday, announced an initiative to protect commercial traffic in the region after almost two months of attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea by forces in Yemen.

War Zone – MH-60 Seahawk helicopters are set to use new AN/ALQ-248 electronic warfare pods to cooperatively defend ships against incoming missiles.

Center for Maritime Strategy – The 1980s-era video game Missile Command may offer the Navy a solution in terms of how to improve the size of crewed warship missile magazines without modifying existing ships or building more conventional combatants.

USNI News – A civilian-led convoy canceled its plans to deliver donated supplies and Christmas gifts to Philippine outposts across the South China Sea after China harassed Philippine vessels near Second Thomas and Scarborough Shoals over the weekend.

The Messenger – James Holmes writes that the Department of the Navy’s inaugural Cyber Strategy starts off with a startling claim, namely that “the next fight against our major adversary will be like no other in prior conflicts.” Why? The strategy’s framers go on to prophesy that “the use of non-kinetic effects and defense against those effects prior to and during kinetic exchanges will likely be the deciding factor in who prevails.” In other words, brute force might not make the difference.

Bloomberg – The US Navy plans to begin arming submarines next year with ship-targeting versions of the widely used Tomahawk missile, part of Washington’s push to ramp up military capabilities to challenge Chinese maritime forces, particularly around Taiwan. 

Defense News – A U.S. senator is developing legislation meant to revitalize the U.S. commercial maritime industry, which he called an economic and national security imperative.

Defense News – Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro is raising the alarm on the US ship building industry, warning that the service won’t be able to fulfill its mission without a strong commercial counterpart.

War on the Rocks – While critics have rightly focused on the program costs and timing of delivery, potential operational challenges for the Navy, and redundancy, proponents have countered that the new cruise missile will enhance deterrence and reassure allies facing adversaries with stocks of tactical nuclear weapons. This is an important claim and ultimately central to whether the program is worthy of funding. However, the deterrence and reassurance benefits of a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile are vastly overstated and may actually undermine the ability of the United States to deter adversaries by diverting scarce resources away from investments in more useful conventional platforms and munitions.  

USNI News – The U.S. is talking with other partner countries to possibly set up a maritime task force to protect ships in the Red Sea.

Defense News – Recent Vertical Launching System, or VLS, rearming experiments — including one aboard the DDG I commanded — demonstrate its promise. Additional doctrinal advances and equipment investments could help realize at-sea rearming’s operational potential even sooner.

CIMSEC – The Surface Navy needs to cut itself free of its extraneous entanglements and make concrete changes to how it improves warfighting skill. Our most urgent target for reform should not be improving individual tactics on a piecemeal level. Rather, we should be focusing on systematic changes to the personnel and training systems throughout the Surface Warfare community that will cultivate more tacticians.

USNI News – Within the last two months, the Navy and the Pentagon have created new organizational structures to connect the unmanned vision to the wider U.S. military command and control infrastructure. While operators are getting more tools to solve near-term problems, the longer-term future of the hybrid fleet and air wing is still very much an open question, frustrating both the forward-deployed Navy and the defense industry that will ultimately build the fleet.

USNI News – Destroyer USS Carney (DDG-64) shot down three drones in the Red Sea on Sunday while responding to distress calls from several commercial vessels that were attacked by missiles originating in Yemen

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has established a new program office to plan and manage aircraft carrier inactivations, defuelings and dismantlements, as the service readies for that work to become more common.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy will conduct its first submarine maintenance work in Australia next summer using the sub tender Emory S. Land, with 30 Australian sailors embarked to learn how to repair the Virginia class of submarine. This will be an early step in establishing a nuclear-powered attack submarine maintenance capability at the HMAS Stirling naval base in Western Australia in the next few years as part of the trilateral AUKUS arrangement.

War on the Rocks – Today, the U.S. military produces too few pilots, eroding experience in deployed squadrons. It risks a similar path as Japan in the event of hostilities. A chronic shortage of pilots will plague the U.S. military for years. One reason is that outmoded training systems and syllabi needlessly prolong flight training and exacerbate acute shortages.

Naval News – South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration along with delegates from the nation’s leading shipbuilding companies visited U.S. shipyards and met with the U.S. Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command from November 13th to November 17th to tour facilities and discuss opportunities for mutual cooperation.

War on the Rocks – The United States has a need for military surveillance, but the most valuable forms of surveillance are costly and require significant resources. To address this, the U.S. military and its allies could scale up from the fundamental thesis of China’s maritime militia and outsource maritime surveillance in select locations vis-à-vis merchant shipping. Such a bold maneuver would enable a great increase in surveillance (in desired locations) at a fraction of what it costs to increase military vessel procurement. Using these vessels for surveillance only, all the way up to the beginning of a conflict, would spare the West from the same international finger wagging that China often receives. 

BBC – A US Navy warship has captured armed men who seized an Israeli-linked tanker off the coast of Yemen on Sunday

USNI News – USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) shot down multiple one-way attack drones launched from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen.

War Zone – A top Pentagon watchdog has raised concerns that the U.S. Navy is pushing ahead too fast in its plans for the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, and inviting new risks in doing so, in a new report. 

Center for Maritime Strategy – Industry has demonstrated that scalability, endurance, and real-time data processing and dissemination must be bedrock characteristics of future ACINT system of systems. The outstanding challenge for the Navy is to identify and promote the right mix of legacy and industry development.

Naval News – RAND Corporation’s Dr. Bradley Martin, a retired U.S. Navy captain, and Director, Institute for Supply Chain Security, returns to answer a Naval News question, “What does the U.S. Navy really need in the future?”

Naval News – RAND Corporation’s Senior Engineer, Dr. Scott Savitz, returns to answer a Naval News question, “What does the U.S. Navy really need in the future?”