War Zone – SEWIP Block III is much more than just a naval electronic warfare system. Northrop Grumman’s Mike Meaney breaks down its real potential for us. 

BBC – A 20-year-old US Navy sailor has been identified as the prime suspect charged with starting a fire that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard warship in 2020.

USNI News – The Navy is putting Littoral Combat Ship Minneapolis-Saint Paul (LCS-21) back together after completing a repair to beef up the complicated gearing mechanism that links the ship’s gas turbines to its diesel engines…but how the rest of the fleet of Freedoms will be repaired and who will pay for it is still an open question. The complexity of the repair, as currently devised, will take years to trickle into ships already in the fleet…

1945 – If you want to control something you have to be there to control it. Showing up intermittently and going away will not cut it if your opponent is there, in force, all the time, to impose its will.

BBC – The US Navy has filed charges against a sailor over a massive blaze aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard in 2020 that destroyed the amphibious warship.

USNI News – The Navy is making Littoral Combat Ship deployments in the Indo-Pacific region more flexible and unpredictable, allowing the service to respond to impromptu engagement opportunities and ensuring the LCS are not tied to any fixed location for too long.

Clio’s Musings – This post assesses the potential of naval blockade as the principal component (along with cyber – not addressed) of a US national strategy of military-economic warfare versus China.

CIMSEC – This article asserts that the U.S. Navy will increasingly be called upon to operate in the constabulary end of activities short of war and proposes a 4-part constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives (C-R-E-I) analytical model for preparing the staff estimate to inform the mission analysis phase of the Navy Planning Process (NPP), when utilized to plan for such activities. 

CIMSEC – Broad agreement exists that the Department of Defense’s, and thus the Navy’s, acquisition system is bound like Gulliver by Lilliputian processes, resulting in an inability to adapt. This inflexibility threatens to increase the risks to operating forces as they face a growing number of adaptive adversaries, ranging from China and Russia, North Korea and Iran, to the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and others. Well-intended legislation and increasing reliance upon computer modeling to inform the selection of future platforms and systems are major contributors to the current situation. Greater reliance on experimenting with prototypes at sea could provide a large improvement.

Breaking Defense – The senior officer overseeing the testing and fielding of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship mission packages said on Thursday that fielding the mine countermeasures portion of those systems has become a “key priority.”

Defense News – The Navy’s submarine force of the future will have to balance its need to remain stealthy against a need for information from the joint force.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy will ask the submarine industrial base to do a delicate dance in the coming decade: continue building two Virginia-class attack subs a year, ramp up the pace of building the much-larger Columbia-class ballistic missile sub, and begin designing and building the SSN(X) next-generation attack sub, all while restarting a submarine repair capability.

Shephard – Additional USN vessels are to receive the AN/SEQ-4 Optical Dazzler Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) directed-energy weapon for C-UAS operations.

USNI News – Two Iranian warships are nearing the English Channel, according to satellite photographs reviewed by USNI News. The ships are thought to be headed to the Baltic Sea to represent Iran in a July 25 naval parade off the coast of St. Petersburg to commemorate the 325th anniversary of the Russian Navy.

USNI Proceedings – China has been infiltrating U.S. networks for years. A comprehensive, preemptive cyber attack on the U.S. Navy is not hard to imagine.

1945 – How do you change a culture? That question courses through a new congressionally mandated report from retired marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery. The coauthors warn that failing to renovate the surface navy’s culture would court defeat against an increasingly well-equipped, increasingly rowdy Chinese navy.

Naval News – Quantity has a quality all of its own. And when the quality relates to U.S. Navy missiles, having more of them is inevitably a massive increase in capabilities. The latest Block V Virginia Class submarine will greatly increase the number of missiles which can be carried. In effect this will make it a cruise missile submarine (SSGN). Yet it will not take away from this otherwise flexible anti-ship, anti-submarine, intelligence and special forces platform.

War on the Rocks – Given the very real limitations on deploying additional personnel or platforms to existing forward bases or to aspirational new ones in the Western Pacific, Washington ought to adopt a more peripheral approach to conflict management in the region. An emphasis on platforms that do not require new basing rights would offer a more mobile and survivable posture. 

Global Times – A Beijing-based think tank is keeping an eye on an increase in close-range reconnaissance activities this year by US Navy ocean surveillance ships in the South China Sea, saying in a report released on Tuesday that the US is attempting to monitor Chinese submarine activities in the region and provide anti-submarine intelligence support.

CIMSEC – U.S. Navy and Department of Defense bureaucratic and acquisition practices have frustrated innovations promoted by Chiefs of Naval Operations and the CNO Strategic Studies Groups over the past several decades.¹ The Navy could have capabilities better suited to meet today’s challenges and opportunities had it pursued many of these innovations. This alternative history presents what the Navy could have been in 2019 had the Navy and DoD accepted the kinds of risks faced during the development of nuclear-powered ships, used similar prototyping practices, and accepted near-term costs for longer-term returns on that investment.

National Review – Jerry Hendrix on why a troubling new report on the Navy’s surface-warfare capabilities and culture matters.

USNI News – By 2025, the Navy will have solved its strike fighter shortfall in part by changing how it will field the F-35C Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter. Instead of two squadrons per air wing with 10 tails, the Navy will now field a single squadron with 14 tails.

CIMSEC – CIMSEC shared questions with Captain Eric M. Sager to discuss the Submarine Force’s new Aggressor Squadron (AGGRON). In this conversation, Capt. Sager discusses what AGGRON is doing to enhance undersea lethality, the vital importance of connecting adversary doctrine to submarine force development, and how a dedicated Red team makes for much more realistic high-end combat training.

War Zone – The Navy’s Optical Dazzling Interdictor, or ODIN, was photographed installed on the USS Stockdale during a replenishment in the Pacific.

Navy Times – The Navy is poised to start selecting sailors and civilians this summer to become warrant officers and operate the MQ-25 Stingray carrier-based refueling drone.