Defense News – After decades of service, the guided-missile destroyer Arleigh Burke — the first of its class — appeared likely ready to retire. Commissioned in 1991, the warship may have in recent years started mapping out its shadowbox for when its reaches the end of its expected 35-year service life, in fiscal 2026. But Big Navy has other plans. Naval Surface Force Atlantic announced this week that the Arleigh Burke will continue plying the seas through fiscal 2031, when the ship will be 40 years old.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy says the rising cost of the San Antonio-class amphibious warship program is justifying the service’s decision to indefinitely pause the program.

CIMSEC – In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was not uncommon to find critics on the left disparaging military servicemembers in terms that cast them as immoral and bloodthirsty agents of the American war machine. These attacks were unjustified and well beyond reasonable debate about the size and shape of, or even the need for, the armed forces. They fed a distorted narrative about American military life that deterred many young people from even considering service. Critics on the right who claim without evidence that the military is now corrupted by wokeness are committing the same sin. In fact, the military is full of smart, dedicated, and tough men and women. The true corruptors are those who refuse to rise above partisan politics to serve the nation and a greater cause.

Defense News – Defense officials are optimistic that billions of dollars of investments in the U.S. submarine industrial base will increase capacity to and even above the required two-a-year attack sub construction rate, allowing the U.S. to build for Australia under a new international agreement without restricting the American fleet.

CIMSEC – Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has greatly expanded its data-technology and collection capacity to meet analytical needs, creating a challenging paradigm:  a data glut and an information deficit. Data literacy is key to reducing the disparity.

Defense News – The Navy and Marine Corps’ fiscal 2024 budget request would invest in long-range missiles and the platforms that shoot them — surface combatants, fighter jets and nimble Marine Corps units — while slashing the amphibious ship fleet.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy intends to decommission 11 ships in fiscal 2024, including eight ahead of their planned end of service life — fewer than the 24 it requested to decommission in its FY23 submission, but still likely to reignite debate on Capitol Hill.

CIMSEC – The concentration and distribution of a force will flex and evolve as its platforms suffer depletion. As commanders look to employ mass fires, they must be mindful of how to spread depletion across the force, how to interpret the adversary’s expenditures, and how inventory pressures can be manipulated through the last-ditch salvo dynamic.

Defense News – The next five-year defense budget plan, slated for release later this month, will focus its surface Navy investments on Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Constellation-class frigates, according to the service’s surface warfare director.

EurAsian Times – On Saturday, the US 7th Fleet announced the arrival of its fast-attack submarine USS Springfield at the naval base in the South Korean port city of Busan in an apparent show of force aimed at the North.

(Thanks to Alain)

China Maritime Studies Institute – If there is a war over Taiwan, an extended Chinese blockade is likely to determine the outcome. While a blockade might include intercepting ships at sea, the primary focus would be on sealing airfields and ports, particularly on the west coast of Taiwan. China could sustain that type of blockade indefinitely. Penetrating a prolonged blockade and keeping Taiwan alive would require a serious U.S. investment in systems and operational concepts that we currently do not have. Unless we make that investment, we may win the first battle, defeating an attempted landing. But we cannot win the war.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is taking a “strategic pause” from buying amphibious ships, and using that time to study not just how many ships it wants but also the capabilities they should have when the service resumes buying them.

CIMSEC – From the Seminole Wars to Vietnam and Iraq, American riverine capability has been critical for irregular warfare and beyond, but assembling the brown-water navy has always been an ad hoc process. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated how important rivers and the riverine environment are to larger, more conventional conflicts in today’s era, characterized by strategic competition as well as irregular conflict.

1945 –  There are two pressing reasons to keep irregular warfare at the forefront of debates over American strategy, operations, and tactics. 

CIMSEC – Assembling massed fires from distributed forces will be a complicated challenge. It will involve mixing and harmonizing the kill chains of different payloads, platforms, communities, and services. Each of these factors comes with a variety of its own dependencies and pitfalls. As the services look to operationalize mass fires, they must be mindful of how too much complexity and too much sensitivity to tight coordination can threaten to yield brittle operational designs.

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.