CIMSEC – Where can the Surface Navy focus its efforts for future growth given the financial constraints and maritime industrial base capacity? What capabilities are most likely to enable a replaceable, lethal force to deter or deny Chinese aggression from the Taiwan Strait to the Second Island Chain?

CIMSEC – As navies look to evolve during the missile age, much of their ability to threaten other fleets will come down to how well they can mass missile firepower. The ability to combine fires against warships heavily depends upon the traits of the weapons themselves. These traits offer a valuable framework for defining the aggregation potential of individual weapons and the broader force’s ability to mass fires.

1945 – James Holmes says that Admiral Samuel Paparo, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, told the U.S. Naval Institute’s WEST 2023 symposium in San Diego that the Navy can no longer make efficiency the North Star of combat logistics.

Modern War Institute – Instead of viewing surface-to-ship fires as a sideshow capability to the sexier science-fiction domains married up at the boutique Multi-Domain Task Force level, the Army should place primacy on the coast artillery role. This calls for the reanimation of a modern Coast Artillery Corps.

CIMSEC – A U.S. maritime militia force in the Indo-Pacific will not win a war outright, but it does offer the low-cost ability to impact the balance of power at sea. As storm clouds brew in the Indo-Pacific and long-term planning within the U.S. defense establishment continues to be fraught, low cost, high yield maritime capacity of any stripe should not be left on the table.

CIMSEC – In the spring of 2019, then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer publicly released the “Navy Cybersecurity Readiness Review.”¹ Conducted in the tradition of earlier reviews commissioned by Navy Secretaries such as the Chambers Board and the General Board Studies of 1929-1933, this report, led by the now-Under Secretary for Intelligence Ronald Moultrie, concluded that the Navy’s cybersecurity shortfalls were “an existential threat.”

USNI News – The Navy will christen the first of a new variant of the expeditionary fast transport ship with expanded medical facilities this week. The new ship comes as the service’s medicine branch starts to transform to meet the challenges of the Indo-Pacific’s vast distances.

Defense News –  Lockheed Martin will have a ship-based hypersonic missile launcher ready for flight tests next year, the company said, as part of the development work covered by a contract awarded Feb. 18.

CIMSEC – What exactly does DMO mean for the Navy, how is it different than current naval operations, and how could a distributed force fight a war at sea? This series focuses on these questions as it lays out an operational warfighting vision for how DMO can transform the U.S. Navy and be applied in modern naval warfare.

Part 1 will focus on defining the DMO concept and illustrating core frameworks of distributed warfighting.

Defense News – The day President Joe Biden ordered a Chinese spy balloon shot down, sailors at Naval Expeditionary Combat Command began thinking through their potential involvement in recovering debris.

USNI News – A logistics ship that Congress directed the Navy to build with the ability to operate autonomously delivered to the service on Thursday, Naval Sea Systems Command announced.

CIMSEC – Navy Medicine is likely to face numerous challenges in future conflicts. The framework provided here should enable further discussion of planning for medical care for future conflicts beyond that of a near peer confrontation in the USINDOPACOM area of operations.

Defense News – The Virginia-class submarine production line at Newport News Shipbuilding is now fully staffed, after taking a back seat to the preeminent Columbia-class submarine program for years.

(Thanks to Alain)

Defense News – The US Navy will likely be in China’s backyard, again, but don’t expect another Subic Bay.

CIMSEC – As the Navy expands the scope of its anti-ship arsenal, it needs to consider a concurrent expansion of the information architecture that is needed to employ these weapons at range.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is considering how best to equip ships and sailors to take advantage of fleetwide connectivity that Project Overmatch will provide. At the heart of this is the Integrated Combat System, a single hardware-agnostic software suite that all ships can pull from to conduct missions alone or in a group.

USNI News – A U.S. amphibious warship, explosive and ordnance divers and underwater robots are off the coast of South Carolina surveying about a square mile off the Atlantic Ocean for the remains of a high-altitude Chinese spy balloon a U.S. fighter shot down on Saturday.

Naval News – Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Carlos Del Toro once again emphasized the need for at-sea reloading at this year’s Combat Systems Symposium.

Defense News – Distributed maritime operations is now the U.S. Navy’s principal concept and doctrine in organizing and fighting. But despite all the rigorous and extensive war gaming and analysis, is DMO viable in an era of precision weapons and nearly ubiquitous surveillance? Or, like the National Defense Strategy’s pursuit of “integrated deterrence” and “campaigning,” is more effort needed in defining and understanding where DMO is effective and where it is not?

USNI News – The plan to upgrade the Navy’s fleet of Flight IIA Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyers with new radars and electronic warfare suites is estimated to cost about $17 billion and take anywhere from a year and a half to two years to upgrade each warship. The service has been working for the last several years to develop a plan to back fit about 20 Flight IIAs with the AN/SLQ-32(V)7 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program Block 3, the AN/SPY-6 air and missile defense radar and the Baseline 10 version of the Aegis Combat System.

USNI News – The Pentagon’s emerging technologies research arm awarded two aviation companies contracts to develop seaplanes that would fly less than 100 feet off the ground and carry 90 tons of cargo more than 6,500 nautical miles.

Breaking Defense – An earlier Air/Sea battle concept was a good start but weakened through forced parochial jointness to include other services that were not ready to contribute.

CIMSEC – The Department of Defense is projected to need on the order of one hundred tankers of various sizes in the event of a serious conflict in the Pacific. The DoD currently has access it can count on – assured access – to less than ten.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is close to declaring initial operational capability on its second and final Littoral Combat Ship mission package, the mine countermeasures package, as it awaits a final report from the service’s test and evaluation office.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy’s next-generation destroyer is slated to provide more space and power for new weapons that today’s Arleigh Burke destroyers cannot accommodate — but the DDG(X) program continues to be delayed. With those new weapons needed now, Northrop Grumman is pitching a way to free up space and weight on existing ships for additions like lasers and microwave weapons.