CDR Salamander – Bryan Clark and Bryan McGrath suggest a way for the U.S. Navy to confront the threat posed by China.

War Zone – The U.S. Navy recently conducted successful flight tests of a UAV carrying an aerial laser system designed to map the ocean floor in shallow water areas. While details are scarce, we know that the tests used a Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, system aboard a small unmanned helicopter. While such a system could be an important tool for making detailed topographic maps of waterways and littoral areas, there could be other potential applications of well beyond general cartographic ones.

Navy Times – Though U.S. defense leaders talk about the idea of great power competition, they often do so in the future tense — and often about a conflict that would start in the South China Sea. But the U.S. Navy’s regional leaders say great power competition is already taking place in Europe and there’s a race underway to assemble a strong enough coalition of allies and partners to keep day-to-day tensions with Russia at a simmer, instead of boiling over into an all-out conflict. Perhaps nowhere is that clearer than the Black Sea.

Breaking Defense – Shipbuilding executives say they can take the strain of maintenance for a fleet of unmanned vessels, but industry and the Navy have historically struggled with the warships they are currently managing. 

CIMSEC – Navy doctrine on planning for maritime security operations is inadequate.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy completed its three-part explosive shock trials on aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford on Aug. 8, with no major casualties on the first-in-class ship and less damage to repair during an upcoming maintenance availability than expected.

USNI Proceedings – Designing and fielding information systems capable of preventing compromise and weapon systems that cannot be hacked is a readiness imperative.

War Zone – An intriguing upgrade has been installed on the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Abraham Lincoln that points to new defensive capabilities.

Wired – The latest weapons in the global information war are fake vessels behaving badly.

CIMSEC – Fleet Problem IX—an exercise conducted almost a century ago—is still instructive for naval strategists, tacticians, and planners today. While it is remembered, and rightly so, for demonstrating the offensive potential of the aircraft carrier, it also demonstrated their vulnerability, particularly when the adversary presents an opposing carrier fleet with a multi-layered A2/AD system consisting of complementary capabilities. 

National Interest – James Holmes writes that a divest-to-invest strategy might yield a fleet equal to the challenges America will confront decades from now. But divestment might leave too little combat power in the fleet to, say, repel a Chinese assault on Taiwan in the next few years.

War Zone – The U.S. Navy has been experimenting with a variety of drone delivery concepts in recent years in order to ease its logistical burden.

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.