War Zone – Snakehead can be launched from a nuclear submarine and will accommodate many future tasks including intel collection.

War Zone – After steadily reducing planned F-35C squadron sizes the Navy wants to go the opposite direction now that the type’s first operational cruise is over.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy attack submarine force inventory is at a low, and maintenance backlogs are making it harder to conduct important development work, the commander of the submarine force in U.S. Pacific Fleet said this week.

Defense News – Aircraft carrier Carl Vinson returned home Feb. 14 after a six-and-a-half-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific, in the U.S. Navy’s first deployment of the “air wing of the future.”

USNI Proceedings – A strategy that takes advantage of the maritime geography surrounding China and uses a combination of inside and outside forces could deter or defeat Chinese aggression.

USNI News – The Navy and Marine Corps are finalizing a list of requirements for the Light Amphibious Warship that Marine leadership argues is key to how the service will fight its future island-hopping campaigns.

USNI News – The Navy sortied four East Coast guided-missile destroyers as the U.S. and NATO have massed naval forces in the region.

Defense News – As the U.S. Navy works through the detail design of its Constellation-class frigate and the concept design of its DDG(X) destroyer, the service wants to add all the latest offensive and defensive systems. But at least as important, leaders say, is leaving room for new systems down the road.

USNI Proceedings – The service must think about what it will take to fight and win in a future great power war.

USNI Proceedings – A navy’s strength lies not only in the number of hulls it possesses, but also in its ability to return damaged ships to combat as soon as possible.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has promised a first deployment for its new aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford by this fall — but that deployment won’t be a typical one. Ford won’t fall under the operational command of a regional combatant commander. Rather, it will conduct a “service-retained early employment” period where the Navy keeps full control over the ship’s activities and schedule.

Modern War Institute – Today, as the US military shifts priorities from counterterrorism to strategic competition, SOF have begun to rebalance to focus on both countering violent extremist organizations and competing with peer and near-peer actors. In light of SOF’s history with sabotage and recent renewed interest in the subject (strategic sabotage was listed as a priority research topic for the Joint Special Operations University in 2020, for example), the time is ripe for an analytical examination of the subject. Maritime sabotage operations in particular deserve further study given the growing importance of maritime regions from the Indo-Pacific to the Black Sea.

USNI News – The French Navy’s Charles de Gaulle Carrier Strike Group left today for its Clemenceau 22 deployment, which will last until April and take the CSG to the Mediterranean.

War Zone – The U.S. Navy’s F-35C stealth fighters, one of which has recently grabbed unwanted attention after a landing mishap aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson sent it into the sea, are also showing some fairly significant wear and tear on their debut operational cruise. Radar-absorbent skins are historically made of materials that are notoriously sensitive to environmental conditions. While it is known that significant leaps in the maintainability of radar-absorbent materials (RAM) were integrated into the F-35 design, recent images from the F-35C’s inaugural cruise raise potential questions about the ease of maintaining the jet’s coatings in the demanding maritime environment.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy is unlikely to pursue a formal program for unmanned surface vessels in the next five years, instead focusing on the enabling technologies first, several leaders said this month.

War on the Rocks – It’s time for an intervention. For the last decade, the Pentagon has been promising a more distributed and resilient posture in the Indo-Pacific, but it has not kept that promise. Highly concentrated with few active or passive defenses, American forces — and lives — remain dangerously vulnerable to attack. As Chinese military capability and capacity continue to grow, the failure to address this vulnerability is one major reason America has failed to reverse the erosion of the conventional military balance in the Indo-Pacific and restore the credibility of American deterrence.

CNN – The United States Navy is trying to retrieve its most advanced fighter jet from the depths of the South China Sea, an extremely complex operation that analysts say will be closely monitored by Beijing.

Breaking Defense – Analysts say straying too far from a parent design can cause problems, but so can being too faithful to it. 

War Zone – NATO and Russian warships mass in the Mediterranean as signs grow that the Kremlin is about to launch an invasion of Ukraine.

USNI News – Two U.S carriers and two amphibious ships, along with their escorts and 26 F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters drilled with a Japanese large deck warship last week in the Philippine Sea.

CIMSEC – It is high time that we remove the term “non-traditional security” from our consideration of maritime affairs, and either abandon it outright or confine it to the debates of sea-blind international relations pundits. A phrase that crept into the strategic lexicon in the long, calm lee of the last Cold War, “non-traditional security” is little more than a dismissive hand-wave relegating human-centric security issues to a nebulous category with no real meaning. As a term, non-traditional security at best adds no value in either the operational realm or in the analytic sphere. At worst, particularly in the maritime domain, it skews thinking and undermines a balanced approach to dealing with the challenges we face.

Defense News – Steps by Lockheed Martin to virtualize its Aegis Combat System are helping underpin the U.S. Navy’s vision for its future integrated combat system as well as the Pentagon’s vision for joint all-domain operations.

USNI Blog – As 2020 ground to a close, the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Operations, Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella, made the case for American sea power: “If you want airpower, if you want space power, then you have to be able to defend [it]. . . . What requirement does the Air Force levy upon the Joint Force? I’ll tell you, it’s called protection.” What in the world does the general’s call for protection have to do with sea power? The answer lies in America’s atrophied naval capabilities.

USNI Proceedings – Augment sailors with predictive maintenance and virtual reality tools.

War Zone – The new system is capable of making pinpoint electronic attacks but it’s so big that it requires major alterations to a destroyer’s superstructure.