BBC – It’s not just merchant ships being targeted by the Houthis in the Red Sea. The US carrier strike group trying to protect them has also been under constant threat too.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is pushing back the start of construction on its next-generation attack submarine by nearly a decade, citing tight budgets and a need to fund current and near-term operations.

Defense News – There is no more valued attribute, as famed naval tactician Wayne Hughes declared, than “the number of ships … a fleet can have.” But ships must be sustained — something the naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan recognized nearly a century earlier when he wrote: “Fuel stands first in importance of the resources necessary to a fleet.”

USNI News – More pieces of the extensive Pentagon effort to build a pier and establish a sea route for humanitarian aid to Gaza departed from the East Coast this week. 

National Interest – In short, Secretary Del Toro has taken on an unenviable task: persuading Asian business leaders to invest in the U.S. shipbuilding complex to take on China at a time when domestic political headwinds are fierce. Profit, risk, time. Let’s wish him well.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy will postpone most of its planned development and purchases of large unmanned systems and next-generation ships and planes in fiscal 2025, citing spending caps.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy’s fiscal 2025 budget request includes money for one Virginia-class attack submarine instead of the planned two, but still represents “a prioritization and very significant investment in undersea warfare capabilities,” the service’s undersecretary said Friday, arguing this is not contradictory.

USNI News – The Navy wants to buy six battle force ships and decommission 19 ships in the next fiscal year, according to the service’s latest budget request.

Center for Maritime Strategy – Putting a U.S. military beachhead into the middle of the region’s worst war in a generation will only make U.S. forces the #1 target for terrorists in the region, and without a U.S.-led distribution plan, it is unlikely that aid will reach those in need. 

BBC – A US military ship is sailing towards the Middle East, carrying equipment to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, the army says…but it could take up to 60 days to build the pier.

National Interest – If new defensive and offensive technologies come to fruition, the aircraft carrier could resume its habitual functions as a capital ship, raider, and offshore airfield. If not, the carrier confronts a dour future.

USNI News – It is a truth universally acknowledged by Navy leadership that the sea service has a manning problem , and a stress one. Manning and stress are linked problems.

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?