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.

USNI News – The Navy will decommission the service’s first two Littoral Combat Ships later this year.

1945 – It’s one way to understand China’s maritime strategy in the Western Pacific. It’s also a way for the American sea services to plot strategy to deny China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy control of the sea, defeating Beijing’s purposes; to wrest control of the sea from China, granting the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps the liberty to use the sea lanes for their own purposes; and to project power as necessary to convert victory at sea into wartime triumph.

USNI Proceedings – Algorithmic warfare will require an energetic focus on software updatability, not today’s overwhelming emphasis on ship types and totals.

USNI News – The Navy is temporarily moving two MQ-4C unmanned aircraft from Guam to a base in Japan.

1945 – James Holmes writes that in a sense, our navy is suffering from a case of historical role reversal. It is playing the part of the Imperial Japanese Navy while China’s People’s Liberation Army plays the part of the U.S. Navy.

1945 – James Holmes writes that Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed is not wrong when he urges fellow lawmakers and the U.S. Navy to concentrate their fleet-design efforts on fielding the right “capabilities” to win in combat rather than obsess over “arbitrary” numbers of ships, warplanes, or armaments. 

CIMSEC – The parallels between Soviet-U.S. relations vis-à-vis the Caribbean and China-U.S. relations vis-à-vis the South China Sea are as striking as they are instructive. The Red Navy’s mistakes in its transatlantic ventures serve as salutary course corrections for the U.S. Navy’s transpacific undertakings today.

Navy Times – Small crew size has led the Littoral Combat Ships to encounter maintenance challenges not seen elsewhere in the fleet, issues that could imperil the ability of such ships to get out of maintenance on time and therefore lessen the number of ships available for operations, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

Associated Press – The U.S. Navy announced Sunday it seized an arms shipment of thousands of assault weapons, machines guns and sniper rifles hidden aboard a ship in the Arabian Sea, apparently bound for Yemen to support the country’s Houthi rebels.

USNI Proceedings – The United States must invest more time, greater research, and more financial resources to overcome data deceptions and adapt AI to military applications.

1945 – James Holmes writes “Cognitive warfare”? Yes, please—and more of it!

USNI News – The vice-chair of the House Armed Services Committee does not support the Navy’s “divest to invest” strategy of ridding the fleet of aging and expensive-to-maintain ships and systems to free up money for the development of unmanned platforms and other new technology, saying the sea service needs to focus on getting ready for a near-term battle instead of looking too far out into the future.

USNI News – The following is the April 26, 2021 Congressional Research Service report, Hypersonic Weapons: Background and Issues for Congress.

(Thanks to Alain)