Forbes – The Navy’s lack of ship repair support in the central Pacific is a serious matter. 

War Zone – A veteran submariner explains the challenges crews face navigating complex undersea environments that they can’t even see.

AP – A Navy nuclear engineer with access to military secrets has been charged with trying to pass information about the design of American nuclear-powered submarines to someone he thought was a representative of a foreign government but who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent

USNI News – Last week, USNI News spoke with First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff Adm. Tony Radakin  about the ongoing deployment of Queen Elizabeth, the AUKUS deal in which the U.K. and U.S. will work with Australia to build a new class of nuclear-powered submarines, and less restrictive“come as you are” naval operations could be the future of maritime alliances.

CIMSEC – So, CNO: Remember your 18 February 1991 introduction to naval mine warfare. Thirty years on, the Navy’s mines and mining objective must make America’s adversaries worry about the threat of mines and seabed warfare systems more than their weapons concern the United States and its allies and partners.

USNI News – Almost a dozen sailors have been injured after a U.S. nuclear attack submarine hit an unknown underwater object in the South China Sea.

USNI Proceedings – Thinking about naval intelligence skills in three distinct ways can help community leaders make better use of industry and academia in developing talent.

1945 – A thought experiment: suppose the U.S. Marine Corps were looking for a winsome amphibious transport—let’s call it a “light amphibious warship” (LAW)—to help marines vault from island to island to pummel hostile fleets. Suppose these warships didn’t yet exist, and Congress seemed leery of procuring them. And suppose the U.S. Navy had light vessels on hand—call them “littoral combat ships” (LCS)—that were more or less a wasting asset…

CIMSEC – The current cryptologic warfare officer pipeline represents an outdated model in which senior officers had the flexibility to expose their new ensigns to diverse mission sets and applications of SIGINT during their initial tour, ensuring they developed a wide understanding of cryptology. In the increasingly specialized modern intelligence environment, NAVIFOR must adjust its career progression pipeline to ensure its young officers can provide better support to deployed forces.

War Zone – The Constellation class frigate will be notably larger and wider, displacing hundreds of tons more than the Italian design from which it is derived.

USNI News – The Navy has created a new task group on the East Coast to ensure it has ready destroyers that can deploy on short notice to counter the Russian submarine threat in the Atlantic Ocean.

1945 – James Holmes appraises the U.S. strategic perspective on the Mediterranean Sea.

CIMSEC – The variety of extreme natural disasters that annually hit U.S. Southern Command’s (SOUTHCOM) area of responsibilities, exacerbated by climate change, demonstrates the Command’s need for a permanently-assigned hospital vessel. 

USNI Proceedings – Integrating naval mining and mine countermeasures capabilities with EAB forces will improve sea-control and denial operations.

USNI Proceedings – Semiautonomous aviation platforms may mean more work, not less, for “backseaters.”

Defense News – Despite significant progress on unmanned systems and manned-unmanned integration in the past year, the U.S. Navy needs to move faster and is establishing a new task force to help, according to the chief of naval operations.

USNI News – With the use of drones becoming more prevalent, the Navy has found a way to ensure all of its surface ships can repel unmanned aerial vehicles. The Drone Restricted Access Using Known Electromagnetic Warfare system, or DRAKE, built by Northrop Grumman and originally used on Humvees during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now used across the Navy’s surface fleet.

Breaking Defense – Analysts from Govini say the Navy’s current investments leaves open the question whether the service can fulfill its vision for Distributed Maritime Operations in the next decade.

USNI News – USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB-4), which is serving as the training platform for exercise Operation Guinex that’s underway in the Gulf of Guinea. The area, with significant seaports and commercial traffic, is a known hotspot for piracy and theft on vessels at sea.

1945 – James Holmes writes that you have to be there to combat terrorism—or any other martial challenge for that matter.

USNI Proceedings – Dominance at sea depends on the Navy’s relationship with the American people.

War Zone – Adding modular weapons launchers to the Navy’s experimental unmanned vessels will allow the service to explore new distributed warfare concepts.

CIMSEC – From the effects of the Goldwater-Nichols act, to tensions between analysis and strategy offices in OPNAV, Wills discusses how Navy strategy and strategy development has changed over recent decades.

USNI Blog – What more can the Navy take away from the last 20-yrs of combat that it needs to remember and implement as a lesson identified to prepare for the next war?

Defense News – A port of vital interest to the U.S. military is bombed and destroyed in a future great-power battle, with sunken ships and piers in the water blocking access for ships trying to resupply American forces. Navy Seabee divers and salvage divers are scattered across the theater conducting smaller missions, but the fight can’t continue until this major job is done — the underwater wreckage cleared and the port infrastructure rebuilt so resupply at this hub can resume. In this worst-case scenario for the U.S., the only way to get the port operating again may be to integrate the usually-separate divers — underwater construction and salvage — into a single unit unlike anything the Navy has fielded in the past.