CIMSEC – The ability to harness and use AI is critical, but Navy culture must change to realize its potential. Military members must remain the masters – never the servants – of technology.

CIMSEC – Despite enlistment bonuses, recruiter rodeos, a renewed focus on influencers, and modest policy changes from PERS, the U.S. Navy continuously fails to keep Sailors from walking out the door and to convince would-be recruits from stepping in. This problem has gotten so severe that the Navy is on target to miss recruiting goals by over 7,000 personnel for FY23, and gapped billets at-sea continue to exceed 750. This shortage will continue as overworked enlisted Sailors leave, refusing the possibility of being sent TAD on additional deployments, and officers resign, rejecting uncertain billet assignments.

CIMSEC – The Get Real Get Better initiative has been a near-term effort to increase the effectiveness of how Sailors do things, to include problem-solving – which could be described as the science of warfighting. To holistically improve Sailors, the “Navy-wide culture renovation” must also inculcate learning strategies – the art of warfighting. A supplement or revision to NDP-1, tentatively entitled Naval Warfighting, would accomplish this by integrating the art and science of warfighting into an enduring doctrine on learning strategies.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Navy is now at a force design and readiness crisis point not seen since Admiral Elmo Zumwalt took the helm in 1970. Admiral Lisa Franchetti should take the initiative to develop a comprehensive, operational level of war maritime strategy that will determine fleet missions, which will subsequently inform a specific fleet size and force design.

War Zone – The SEWIP Block III alters the Arleigh Burke destroyer’s appearance fairly dramatically via huge new extensions onto its superstructure.

Defense News – Four unmanned ships are now operating out of Japan for the first time, as part of the U.S. Navy’s Integrated Battle Problem 23.2 exercise aimed at folding these unmanned vessels into routine fleet operations.

CIMSEC – If used unwisely, without a solid understanding of what decisions machine learning (ML) will support, the joint force may be playing a rigged game against a peer adversary. ML-enabled capabilities can absorb large amounts of data, process and organize it, and generate insights for humans who work at a relative snail’s pace. However, these nascent tools cannot reason and interpret words or events as a competent military professional can. As strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Russian-Ukraine war, and other geopolitical issues, American political and military leaders must develop a better understanding of when and how to use ML to support joint force planning, execution, and assessment in combat, lest U.S. service members pay an ungodly sum of the butcher’s bill.

CIMSEC – The robotic age of warfare enables a much closer relationship between international partners using smaller, more numerous systems for maritime security and creating a lethal warfighting advantage by increasing surveillance, targeting, and weapon capacity in critical regions.¹³ Leveraging this relationship is the basis for a maritime strategy to maintain integrated forces with partners forward, while retaining major elements of the traditional fleet to preserve sea control along the ocean’s logistics lines. It can become the maritime component of a maritime nation’s national strategy, executed through a well-planned and worldwide integrated naval campaign.

1945 – James Holmes opines on “Replicator,” an initiative meant to field “small, smart, cheap” uncrewed, autonomous aerial, surface, and subsurface vehicles by the thousand within the next two years—all without asking Congress for additional taxpayer dollars.

War Zone – Boeing has provided visuals of its first pre-production example of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, which the company is currently developing for the U.S. Navy. Up to this point, the MQ-25 demonstrator — which is also known as the T1 — has been the public ‘face’of the Stingray program.

USNI News – India will be serving as a future maintenance hub for U.S. Navy assets in the Indo-Pacific, according to a joint U.S.-India statement issued last week on the sidelines of G20 in New Delhi.

USNI News – After making several updates to the platform, the Navy’s MQ-4C Triton unmanned squadron is back in Guam for its second operational deployment. 

Barents Observer – This is the first time a guided missile submarine of the Ohio-class makes port call to Northern Norway. The “USS Florida” is one of the most powerful warships in the world, capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy expects the submarine-industrial base to start delivering attack submarines on time by 2028 — more than a decade after vendors and shipbuilders began struggling to keep up with growing demand, made worse by the pandemic and the seismic disruption it brought to the labor market.

War on the Rocks – Deterring China in the Indo-Pacific requires a different set of U.S. capabilities than wars in the Middle East or Ukraine. The vast maritime expanse and China’s buildup across the South China Sea would make it difficult for U.S. forces to operate within the first and second island chains. Most of America’s major weapon systems are 30 years old and many of the new major systems for a high-end conflict won’t be operational until the 2030s…The United States should implement a hedge strategy across all domains. This strategy would require developing and purchasing small and low-cost, unmanned, many, and smarter weapons and designs to complement existing exquisite (costly, complex, massive, and few) weapon systems. The hedge strategy should leverage emerging technologies with an emphasis on adopting these technologies at scale within the next three years.

Breaking Defense – The melting of the polar ice caps combined with increased Russianship movements is driving “heightened awareness” of the arctic region among US Navy leadership, who are increasingly concerned about the possibility for geopolitical rivals to make unfounded claims to vital sea lanes and natural resources.

1945 – Endorsed! This month over at the Naval Institute Proceedings, coastguardsman Steve Hulse urges the U.S. Navy to procure a flotilla of Sentinel-class fast response cutters (FRCs) to serve as missile patrol craft.

War Zone – Admiral John Aquilino, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), offered remarkably detailed comments on what he sees as critical future capabilities needed to fight and win a high-end conflict in his vast area of responsibility — namely against China.

CIMSEC – Digital Horizon presages a new paradigm in the way navies will think about uncrewed assets, no longer as “vehicles” but rather as “systems” that are nodes in a web of assets delivering far greater capability than the sum of the parts. World navies will conduct ambitious unmanned exercises, experiments and demonstrations throughout 2023 and beyond, and the lessons learned from Digital Horizon will no doubt inform those efforts.

USNI News – The Pentagon is betting that by fielding thousands of attritable autonomous systems across domains in fewer than two years, the United States can overcome China’s advantage of mass in manpower, ships, aircraft and missiles, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a Monday speech.

War on the Rocks – The U.S. sea services should develop and deploy tactics, techniques, and procedures that stress-test the carrier strike group in order to ensure it can offensively operate under emissions control and a denied and degraded command-and-control environment all while maintaining superior battlespace awareness.

Defense News – During a major exercise this month, aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower was tied to the pier here at Naval Station Norfolk, but appeared to be operating alongside fellow carrier Gerald R. Ford across the Atlantic in European waters.

Defense News – China’s recent announcements of new submarine-hunting technologies are probably more hype than hardware, but they highlight Beijing’s goal of countering the threat posed by U.S. attack boats, which remain essential to U.S. war plans. The U.S. submarine force will not be able to rest on its laurels as the world’s finest for much longer. Soon it will need new approaches and capabilities to operate and potentially fight in the bastions that China and Russia consider their home waters.

USNI News – As the Navy and other services turn their attention to the Indo-Pacific as the next potential site of combat, researchers under the Navy Medical Research Center are thinking about blood.

CNAS: This report begins with a discussion of how the United States lost sight of great-power deterrence and why its legacy presence-reliant approach to deterrence is unsuited to the current challenge. Instead, the department should embrace deterrence by denial to improve simultaneous deterrence of China and Russia in the near term without consuming resources earmarked for modernization. The report redefines campaigning to demonstrate how it could support a denial strategy through the rigorous linkage of campaigning to warfighting. It develops a framework for how the U.S. Department of Defense could implement this revised approach to campaigning. The framework is applied to the Indo-Pacific and Europe to demonstrate how the United States can reimagine its forces and capabilities, posture, and activities to simultaneously deter China from aggressing against Taiwan and Russia from aggressing against the Baltics. These plans are analyzed to determine the implications of two-theater deterrence for U.S. defense strategy, peacetime activities, and resource management. Finally, the report concludes with recommendations for the DoD and Congress on how to manage the simultaneous threat of two major adversaries in the near term.