Breaking Defense – HII today is unveiling its newest unmanned undersea vehicle, dubbed the Remus 620, the company’s latest play in an ongoing push to angle its product line towards the US Navy’s strategy for unmanned and autonomous systems.

CIMSEC – Tactical shiphandling is fundamentally different from merchant shiphandling – and navies need to teach both skills. Naval shiphandling curriculums currently tend to focus on safety of navigation and Rules of the Road situations, and for good reason. It is crucial that we are expert at this sort of foundational shiphandling…Unlike merchant mariners, naval officers also need to be able to handle their ships in both crisis and combat.

USNI News – Amid strategic competition with China, the United States plans to augment its ability to operate submarines out of Guam.

CIMSEC – Navies must be both technically and tactically proficient so they can understand their systems, adapt their warfighting methods, and dominate any adversary in a conflict.

USNI News – In the near future, the U.S. nuclear attack submarine fleet will be able to launch and recover an underwater robot from a torpedo tube.

CIMSEC – The Navy badly needs for the Naval War College command and staff course to become a year-long classified wargame-centric warfighting course.

USNI News – The trio of Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers could each field up to a dozen hypersonic missiles, with the first ship ready for testing in 2025

Breaking Defense – Within the next year the US Navy wants to initiate a “scoping study” aimed at determining if the service needs to establish a fifth public shipyard to support future submarine maintenance.

War on the Rocks – Across two centuries, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard have balanced the distinct missions of preparing for war while simultaneously managing the global responsibilities of peace. While some might wish away half of that historic pair of missions, the reality is that the nation needs sea services that can do both.

CIMSEC – A culture of constant learning according to the practicing naval tacticians’ own analysis of necessity of deeper research, learning, and exploration of the aspects of warfare will naturally lead to a stronger understanding and application of tactics as a whole in the Navy. 

CIMSEC – The CO sets the standard. He or she must make it clear that the first priority is combat readiness. Every CO must choose the level of “creative drama” with which they are comfortable, and how they project this priority to the crew. 

USNI News –  Five of the Navy’s oldest submarines are candidates for a three-year life extension.

CIMSEC – To rapidly assess and implement tactical adaptation based on combat lessons, the Navy must prioritize staffing its warfighting development centers in wartime, even if it means leaving some shipboard billets unfilled. Failure to rapidly capture, disseminate, and assess lessons from early combat will result in costly losses to our surface force before we can adjust to the character of the current war.

War Zone – USS Rhode Island’s public port call in Gibraltar follows the even more unusual Navy disclosure about the USS West Virginia in the Arabia Sea.

CIMSEC – Since 1845, the SWO community has reduced variance within its ranks and imbued a clearer identity in its officer corps through more robust, formalized training. To take this to the next level, the SWO community must standardize SWO qualification such that it incorporates the very best of what we already know about what SWOs need as warfighters and leverages the most experienced officers as assessors.

Hudson Institute – To enhance the proficiency of its force and unleash the creative potential of its sailors, the Navy should establish a virtuous cycle of operational learning. This will require organizational changes to generate opportunities and strengthen the relationship between warfighting concept development, experimentation, and training or exercise curricula. This paper reviews Navy strategy, identifies challenges in contemporary training, discusses key elements of a learning organization, and proposes approaches the Navy could adopt.

War Zone – It is extremely rare for the US military to reveal the whereabouts of nuclear ballistic missile submarines while they are on patrol.

1945 – James Holmes asks if DDG(X) has a cost issue.

USNI News – A pairing of a guided-missile destroyer and a supply ship in San Diego Bay last week was the Navy’s latest test to learn how to resupply its warships with missiles during a high-end conflict.

USNI News – This summer’s experimentation with the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA-7) explored how an America-class big-deck amphibious warship can better work in concert with a carrier strike group, the commander of U.S. 7th Fleet said Friday.

Hudson Institute – U.S. naval aviation risks sliding into irrelevance unless Navy and Marine Corps leaders embrace organizational and investment changes that would enable more effective operational concepts against peer adversaries. To support the approaches, naval air forces will need greater reach, adaptability, and capacity, which this study proposes to address by changing the composition of carrier air wings and repurposing aircraft based ashore or on surface combatants and amphibious ships.

Breaking Defense – If the US Navy is going to keep proliferating unmanned surface vessels throughout its fleet, then a key operating principle will be making them worthless to any adversary who might tamper with or steal the technology, according to a senior officer overseeing experimentation efforts.

USNI News – The United States and its allies want a force of 100 unmanned surface vessels patrolling waters from the Red Sea into the Persian Gulf by next summer, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet said on Tuesday.

CIMSEC – A long-term solution is needed to restore fixed-wing ASW capability, and fiscal reality demands this solution be flexible and affordable. Rather than build a new dedicated ASW aircraft, it may be better to instead develop a series of ASW pods and a more flexible aircraft suitable for both ground attack and ASW since either type of store can be carried on the pylons with equal ease.

USNI News – After years of delays, the Navy’s first-in-class aircraft carrier is underway on a two-month operational stress test of the carrier’s new systems and air wing as the ship and its crew prepare for an extended deployment early next year.