Defense News – The U.S. Navy may have to pick just one of three major modernization programs on the horizon to fund — pursuing a new destroyer, a new attack submarine or a new fighter jet, the acting Navy secretary warns in a recent memo. The other two due would be postponed to budget limitations, he wrote.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy hopes to boost the number of days the littoral combat ship is operational by targeting the drivers of down time: design flaws in 32 parts that need to be replaced and a sluggish contractor-based maintenance model that needs to be made more responsive.

War Zone – The Boeing demonstrator for the MQ-25 Stingray program successfully passed fuel to an F/A-18 Super Hornet jet.

USNI News – The Navy and other services had hoped to be able to fire hypervelocity projectiles from various guns at a range of surface and aerial threats.

USNI News – U.S. Pacific Air Forces is crafting a dual strategy of defensive capabilities and dispersal of forces in order to negate the threat posed to its forces and bases by China’s increasing military capabilities, the PACAF commander said.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy has created a new program office to usher the next class of destroyer into the fleet, after the service has struggled to find a replacement for its aging cruisers and destroyers over the past decade.

Strikepod Systems – With great power competition driving shifts in weapons priorities, offensive mine warfare, long neglected since World War II, is on the cusp of dramatic change both within the United States Navy, and within the navies of U.S. adversaries as well.

CIMSEC – CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Captain Pat Roll (ret.), who served as a staff tactician for Admirals Ace Lyons, Joe Metcalf, and Hank Mustin. In this conversation, Capt. Roll discusses how tactical development fleshed out the execution of the Maritime Strategy at sea, the Navy’s use of cover and deception operations to move battle groups undetected, and the core relationship between strategy and tactics.

Breaking Defense – The first 12 Constellation-class frigates will all be based out of Everett, Wash. 

Forbes – The U.S. Navy wants offensive mine warfare capability, and it wants it fast. That’s the message from a new project called MEDUSA contained in the Navy’s latest budget release.

Defense News – The chiefs of the U.S., U.K. and French navies met in France on Thursday to affirm their commitment to deeper collaboration and interoperability between their fleets to address some of the most vexing maritime security issues around the globe.

USNI News – The Navy is poorly positioned to fully repair its fighting fleet of warships damaged in future high-end battles, the Government Accountability Office found in a report released this week.

CIMSEC – A call  to establish unmanned sea control squadron (VUS) squadrons. These squadrons would provide Sea Combat Commanders with a dedicated medium-range ASW aircraft that would allow commanders to detect, classify, track, target, and engage submarines outside their weapons engagement zone. 

War Zone – After some 16 years of research and development, the U.S. Navy appears poised to kill its electromagnetic railgun program. The service has not asked for any new funding for the project in its latest budget request and says it will wrap up all the work it has planned now by the end of the current fiscal year, before effectively putting what’s left of this effort into storage.

1945 – James Holmes discusses the casual claim that because the United States spends more on defense than the next X countries combined—X usually being defined as ten or upwards—it is so crushingly superior that it need not spend more and could probably get away with spending less on the armed forces.

War Zone – “Body-worn” signal snooping gear gives American special operators an additional way to spot and track enemy forces, and monitor their surroundings.

USNI News – The Navy is now pushing the Littoral Combat Ships out into the Pacific in force after more than a decade of stops and starts and studies.

USNI News – The long-delayed Navy Fiscal Year 2022 budget request submitted to Congress May 28 reflects modest increases in several areas, but overall shows no significant changes, either in weapons procurement or readiness accounts.

US Naval War College Review – Technological advancements in weapon systems, platforms, and communications raise questions about the continuing relevance of blockade strategies and tactics that were developed during previous eras of naval warfare. If modern navies are using a centuries-old strategy, to what extent do the old rules still apply?

USNI News – The American aircraft carrier based in Japan will make a rare deployment to U.S. Central Command to support the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan later this summer.

CIMSEC – When attempting to answer the question of what the U.S. military should be ready for, the responses are usually positive ones, statements of actions it should be prepared to undertake. But another possible answer is a negative one, a statement of what the U.S. should reject doing, and should choose to not be ready for. When the U.S. makes an effort to be ready for one eventuality, it is reducing its readiness to respond to others. Policymakers should consider both sides of this coin, and more consciously accept risk.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Department of Defense is like an NFL franchise that, for lack of any game tape, relies solely on the athletic testing numbers to determine how ready their players are for the next game. Internal metrics of success, as the only numbers available, take on an outsized importance in predicting battlefield success. But anyone with even a small amount of military (or athletic) experience understands that there is more to winning than simply being the most proficient person on the field. A military, like a football team, has to be effective, as well.

CIMSEC – The adoption of this new data framework for military readiness would go a long way toward achieving the quantitative underpinnings necessary to support the service chiefs’ vision and it can be used to fix the fundamental problem they call out: the “gold-plating” of existing force requirements at the expense of future capability. 

USNI Proceedings – Presence that is not backed up by authorization for substantive action is rarely a deterrent.

CIMSEC – Software-defined tactics will yield a lasting advantage for American military forces by leveraging the comparative advantages of western societies: openness and a focus on investing in human capital. There is no time to waste.