War Zone – The U.S. Navy wants to decommission both of its Montford Point class expeditionary transfer dock ships as part of its budget plans for the 2023 Fiscal Year. Cutting these vessels, which are both less than a decade old, relatively young by ship standards, is ostensibly part of a broader reorganization of the Navy and Marine Corps to focus more on distributed operations. This logic seems highly questionable given that these floating logistics nodes, which are unlike anything else the service has now, offer capabilities that would be ideal for those new concepts of operations.

CIMSEC – A wing-in-ground maritime attack craft (WMAC) would present an opportunity to field a cost-effective, survivable asset that can punch above its weight and cost. Such a platform would assist the United States naval battlegroups in attriting adversarial surface platforms and shore-based area denial systems to pursue maritime superiority in a contested environment. The United States Navy should pursue the acquisition, experimenting with, and eventual conversion of commercially produced wing-in-ground craft to fill an anti-surface warfare role until purpose-built designs can be developed, tested, and fielded. 

Defense News – The U.S. Navy wants to decommission nine of its Freedom-variant littoral combat ships and eliminate the anti-submarine warfare mission for the ships, citing a trade-off between the cost of the ships and equipment versus the warfighting capability they’d actually deliver.

US Naval War College Review – In the end, the debate over aircraft carriers always boils down to cost; their acquisition costs are much higher than for any other single-item defense program, making them a natural target for criticism. Combined with a simplistic perception of vulnerability, high costs tend to cause critics to declare aircraft carriers unaffordable—but “compared to what?”

War Zone – The Navy needs more ships to carry missiles in order to overcome the loss of Ticonderoga cruisers, five of which could be retiring this year.

USNI News – The Navy is making the first major changes to the carrier air wing in a generation. The service just wrapped up the first carrier deployment of the F-35C Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters – the first new fighter jet on a carrier in 20 years – and is a few years away from introducing the first unmanned aircraft into the air wing. But while the Navy is moving ahead with new platforms and ways of fighting, it is still wrestling with maintenance gaps and a fighter inventory too small to deploy and train efficiently. The service is also shifting its strategy to focus on the Indo-Pacific, a vast region for the carrier air wing to operate in, after two decades of providing close-air support for combat missions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Defense News –  The U.S. Navy is nearly done assessing whether to put missile tubes on an unmanned surface vessel, comparing the idea to other options for getting missile launchers out to sea.

Breaking Defense – The selection of Remus 300 for the Lionfish program is a big win for HII, which has spent much of recent years positioning itself for the unmanned systems market.

USNI Proceedings – Female Naval Academy graduates tend to leave active duty long before their male counterparts; the Sea Services must reverse this trend.

USNI News – Since December, the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, Carrier Air Wing 1 and its escorts have been operating in the Adriatic and Ionian seas launching 80 to 90 sorties a day as far north as Lithuania for a variety of missions with NATO-allied aircraft from Romania, France and Italy. Some fighters launched from Truman are training, while some are set to police NATO’s airspace and prevent Russian aircraft from violating those borders.

War Zone – The U.S. Navy will reportedly seek to decommission between eight and 10 Freedom class Littoral Combat Ships, or LCSs, as part of its budget proposal for the 2023 Fiscal Year. This would despite the oldest example still on active duty being only seven years old. Last year, the service admitted that it would take years to implement critical fixes to the propulsion systems on all of the Freedom class vessels it has acquired to date.

CIMSEC – The submarine force needs sailors with specialized skills to maintain, operate and integrate UUVs into SSN(X) operations. Because the submarine force and the United States Navy at large lack a documented, repeatable, and formalized process for training UUV operators and maintainers, the qualitative concept and computational model presented in this article offers a bridge to scaling multi-UUV operations. The Navy needs to develop codified training and manning requirements for UUV operations and the infrastructure, both physical and intellectual, to support unmanned systems operations. The recommendations discussed here are focused on the specific use case of UUVs deployed from manned submarines.

Defense News – If you’re confused about the size of the future U.S. Navy fleet, you’re not alone.

Defense News – Over the past three years, the service has tightened its budget and changed its requirements, making the future look far less rosy for Ingalls Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries.

USNI Proceedings – The U.S. Navy’s “secret weapon” at Midway was a culture of learning and adaptation.

Breaking Defense – The Navy’s pitch to Congress to embrace unmanned technology is changing, analysts say, to one that embraces the ‘evolutionary’ rather than the ‘revolutionary.’

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has tried to convince Congress to let it decommission the cruiser fleet by making cost-based arguments. It’s tried readiness-based arguments, too, noting the drain on the ship repair industry. Now, the Navy is trying a new angle: the safety of the men and women onboard.

Breaking Defense – UISS will be a key mine countermeasures asset for the Navy moving forward, but it experienced significant issues during testing last fall, according to new details initially hidden from public view.

Navy Times – The stealthy and pricey fast-attack submarine Connecticut sustained damage to its forward main ballast tanks and sonar sphere when it grounded in the Indo-Pacific last fall, and the sonar dome needs to be replaced.

(Thanks to Alain)

1945 – James Holmes writes that a cheery huzzah! goes out to Representative Elaine Luria and Representative Jack Bergman for championing the cause of plainspoken language at the Pentagon.

Defense News – The upcoming budget request could include investments in maritime domain awareness close to home, with improved sensors to detect Russian naval threats to the homeland.

USNI News – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered the massive Red Hill Fuel Depot shuttered and abandoned, a reversal from the Pentagon’s attempt to appeal a Hawaii order to close the World War II-era compound, the Pentagon announced on Monday.

Defense News – The workload for Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command is growing as the U.S. Navy branches out to small ports and new operating environments around the globe, according to the command’s top leader.

Defense News – With the conflict in Ukraine not far away, fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman are conducting airborne patrols with NATO allied air forces in U.S. 6th Fleet.

Naval News – The US Air Force Research Laboratory has released a video of the QUICKSINK concept, which proposes an unique way to sink enemy vessels by employing a seeker-fitted Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).