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.

USNI News – A look at the simulators used by the US Navy to train crews of the littoral combat ships.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy will immediately suspend submarine repair work at four dry docks in Washington state, following new concerns about their ability to withstand seismic activity.

Breaking Defense – Little is known about the details of the newly unveiled B-21 bomber, but IISS’s Ben Ho writes that from what we know, its mission set could expand to the sea.

CIMSEC – Today, who is making sure that the U.S. Navy is asking the right questions? Who is defining the vocabulary and the intellectual infrastructure of how we think about our contemporary challengers? And are we learning from each other, and developing the next generation of analysts who will be creative and intelligent enough to do the deep work, “read everything,” and come up with creative new ideas rather than rehashing old models? Andy Marshall believed in focusing on finding the right questions and defining their parameters. In Reflections on Net Assessment, naval and national security practitioners and analysts can still learn a great deal from Yoda in his own words, if we do the reading and remain reality-based in our search for wisdom in confronting the challenges of the 21st century.

Defense News – U.S. Fleet Forces Command is working on an initiative to make destroyers more independent of carrier strike groups during the deployment phase of the Navy’s force-generation plan, even as Naval Surface Forces is working to make them more operationally available in the sustainment phase that follows.

CIMSEC – The Navy recently issued Change 1 to one of its key new doctrine books, Navy Warfare Publication 3, Fleet Warfare. The change was issued to update the definitions of a number of key terms to keep them in accordance with joint doctrine. The issuing command, the Navy Warfare Development Center, says “Ultimately, Change 1 to NWP-3 enhances fleet-centric warfighting effectiveness through establishing a framework for the execution of fleet warfare at the operational level of warfare.” Certainly there is an advantage to maintaining consistency across the services in the definition of terms, but NWP-3’s contribution to warfighting effectiveness is less than it could be due to its generic approach to the subject. Granted, it is an unclassified publication, but nonetheless, it could have offered more practical detail on the evolving nature of the Navy’s approach to warfighting. An unclassified practical framework would be vital to operationalizing the Navy’s renewed emphasis on fleet-level warfare.

USNI News – First the fighter, then the destroyer and finally the submarine. That’s the order the Navy is set to introduce its next three major acquisition programs in the 2030s, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said last week.

War Zone – TF59 and its regional allies hope to deploy a fleet of 100 unmanned vessels by this summer as it works toward building a ‘Digital Ocean.’

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is firming up plans for the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel, after previously questioning the need or utility of the system.

USNI News – The Navy could deploy the aluminum hull, Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship to the Middle East as part of a future mine-countermeasures force in U.S. Central Command.