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?”

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is pushing new technology to its undersea fleet to make it safer, smarter and deadlier, while also nearing a major step in developing its next-generation attack submarine.

Breaking Defense – The challenges for the Navy to dispose of the former USS Enterprise have driven the service to stand up a new office to deal both with “The Big E” and the pipeline of Nimitz-class carriers to come.

Center for Maritime Security – The U.S. Sea Services need more logistics ships. A lot more. The services allowed the combat-logistics fleet to wilt during the post-Cold War interregnum when Americans talked themselves into believing that their victory was for all time, history had ended, and strategic competition and warfare were no more. Why waste resources preparing for a war that will never come? Now, though, competition and conflict have come back with a vengeance. The U.S. Navy fleet—including the logistics fleet—must rebound in size and capability to keep pace with gathering dangers.

CIMSEC – The Navy needs to consider how it can leverage unmanned systems in campaigns, and how these systems can open up unique options for enhancing naval campaigns in pursuit of deterrence.

USNI News – Ukraine by no means invented lethal surface drones but the country has found new ways to use them in a conflict. Ukraine, a country without a naval fleet, has used drones and other missile strikes to largely stave off attacks from the Black Sea Fleet while slowly dismantling Russia’s dominance over the Black Sea.

War Zone – USS Thomas Hudner shot down a drone over the Red Sea but exactly what the drone’s intent was remains disputed.

War on the Rocks – Put simply, the U.S. Navy does not have enough personnel to man the ships it has, much less the ones it wants to build, and is now missing its recruiting goals. And this does not even consider the need to replace trained and experienced sailors who would be lost in the event of war with China.

Yet despite this challenge, there is a proven solution readily at hand. In pursuit of its constitutional duty to “provide and maintain a Navy” and in support of the Tri-Service Naval Strategy, Congress should create a Maritime National Guard as a way to strengthen the Navy’s force structure, improve recruiting and retention, and reconnect the American populace to the sea through a new generation of citizen sailors.

War Zone – The Navy is launching an effort to integrate JASSM, LRASM, JAGM, and Hellfire missiles on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.