Center for Maritime Strategy – In the early 2000s the Oakland A’s showed the baseball world you didn’t need superstar salaries to win games. A’s general manager Billy Beane built rosters around undervalued statistics instead of traditional and costly “five-tool” players, proving you can recreate excellence in aggregate. Today, the US Navy is finding its traditional and costlyships aren’t enough to meet the needs of the nation. Defense circles are looking to unmanned vehicles, attritable systems, artificial intelligence, and other non-traditional military technologies and concepts as new ways to generate combat power. Advocates see a coming revolution, skeptics offer notes of reasonable caution and some are pushing back on the promised capabilities and utility of these systems replacing the venerable ships and aircraft of the past. The way to frame these new technologies is the same way the A’s thought about their unconventional players, not as perfect replacements for Cruisers, Attack Submarines, and Multirole Aircraft, but as “Ships in Aggregate.”

National Interest – James Holmes writes that a triad of SSGs, SSKs, and SSNs would comprise a forbidding implement of access denial for the US Navy in the Indo-Pacific. 

CIMSEC – With shipping and shipbuilding receiving high-level political and diplomatic attention across two administrations after decades of neglect, the United States has the chance to realize a much-needed maritime revival. Having initiated a change in course from the past forty years of stagnation, Washington should double down on its winning bipartisan strategy to build maritime power through allied investments in U.S. shipping and shipbuilding—and keep off the rocks and shoals that could run the nascent American maritime renaissance aground.

USNI News – The U.S. military conducted a fifth strike on a suspected drug boat, killing six people in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday afternoon.

National Interest – James Holmes says that after resting on its laurels for the better part of three decades, the US Navy must relearn how to fight a naval war—potentially as the weaker combatant.

National Interest – James Holmes writes in principle, he is all for fitting out a modern-day descendant of Iowa-class dreadnoughts. Whether doing so is practical is another question.

RUSI – Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru are preparing their fleets to secure resources and expand influence in the event of rivalries spilling into their maritime domains.

CIMSEC – The Navy must ruthlessly pursue two seemingly disparate capabilities – technical interoperability and the capability to operate in contested communications environments. The need for interoperability in naval operations has never been more critical. However, these operations will increasingly be forced to occur in contested communication environments, where data access and connectivity cannot be guaranteed. Balancing these two imperatives—interoperability and resilience in contested conditions—will be vital to successful maritime operations.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Navy must rebuild its capacity to shape and influence international maritime law.

CIMSEC – Small warships have a long history in the U.S. Navy and are poised to offer an evolutionary leap in capability. Small, highly automated, lightly crewed, blue-water warships will help offset the capabilities of competing fleets and ensure enduring maritime superiority for the U.S. Navy. It is time to build a prototype of the Lightly Manned Automated Combat Capability ship and its flotilla of innovations.

CIMSEC – The emergence of the Space Force’s fully funded, Long-Range Kill Chains (LRKC) satellite program for tracking moving land and maritime targets offers the Navy the opportunity to dramatically improve fleet tactical situational awareness and over-the-horizon targeting.

CIMSEC – The central challenge of modern naval warfare is grappling with profound decision-making under uncertainty. Our current doctrine, NDP-1 Naval Warfare, is an essential description of our forces, but it is insufficient as a guide for thinking through the friction, fluidity, and ambiguity inherent in conflict. To truly equip our Sailors to fight and win for tomorrow, the CNO should supplement this document with a doctrine focused on the cognitive art of warfighting. The solution is to champion a new, companion publication – NDP-1.1 Naval Warfighting.

CIMSEC – Unable to hide, the future of conventional air and sea-surface platforms is grim. When fighting competent opponents, those few, valuable, and conspicuous legacy platforms are likely to be destroyed. Modern warfare is not boxing, it is hide-and-seek. We should redesign our forces accordingly.

CIMSEC – The key to China succeeding is maintaining their anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) approach intended to keep adversary forces out of the first island chain. U.S. Navy operational concepts must make an explicit priority of targeting the C4ISR architecture that fundamentally enables China’s A2/AD approach and have it serve as a core organizing principle for Navy acquisition and force development.

CIMSEC – Shore-based team trainers – attack centers – are critical for submarine crews preparing for deployment to exercise the full range of tactical skills in a challenging training environment. These trainers focus on modeling complex ocean environments, sensors, and warships, resulting in a high-cost trainer with only two to three attack centers at each shore facility. The limited number of trainers coupled with high demand means that submarine crews in shipyard availabilities are low priority for these trainers, often going weeks between opportunities to use them. If the Navy wants a more lethal submarine force, it requires more low-cost training options for Pre-Commissioning Units and those in long shipyard overhaul.

National Interest – James Holmes writes that long-range weapons will not totally reshape war as we know it—but they could blur the difference between offensive and defensive operations. 

Naval News – The U.S. Navy retired its last Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships this week in Bahrain, ending a legacy of over three decades of service in the forward-deployed mine countermeasures mission as part of Task Force 55. The replacement ships, Independence-class littoral combat ships, have struggled to meet the requirements of operational mine countermeasures missions.

CIMSEC – How to accelerate production with facilities today without waiting for a miracle or new production facility. 

USNI News – The last Avenger-class mine countermeasure ship left naval service in the Middle East this week.

USNI News – Which part of a spear makes it lethal? The shaft. Without its alignment of all vectors behind the tip, a spear is no more deadly than a stone. Likewise, unless the Foundry and Fleet behave like a shaft, focusing all their energy toward delivering ordnance on target, the warfighting leg of the triad is compromised. Fleet readiness consists of the manning, training, maintenance, and security programs that underpin it. But not only do these programs often fail to support one another, they are usually in direct competition for limited resources. Achieving effective balance and coordination will require an inexorable focus on warfighting that only the CNO can provide.

CIMSEC – For the U.S. Navy, the past 30 years of post-Cold War experience featured a major institutional reorientation toward the low-end spectrum of operations in a highly permissive threat environment. This facilitated widespread dysfunction across critical warfighting development functions that are crucial for preparing the Navy for war. The result has been one of the most pivotal eras of decay and atrophy of high-end warfighting skill in the modern history of the U.S. Navy.

CIMSEC – In support of developing a new Navy Deterrence Concept, the U.S. Navy needs to develop and train to new tactics and techniques in how to operate just below the threshold of armed conflict. The PRC and PLAN are very comfortable in this realm under the doctrine of their “Three Warfares” and have only grown bolder in their day-to-day operations in the Pacific. The recent collision between PLAN and CCG vessels provided the world a reminder of how dynamic and volatile the situation has become, but it will not dissuade the PLAN from further attempts to exert sea control and sea denial through non-lethal means.

Naval News – The US Navy’s newest carrier strike group (CSG) has conducted operations in the High North alongside NATO allies, in a deployment underlining the deterrent impact CSG presence can bring in the region. The CSG also integrated into NATO operational command structures.

CIMSEC – A common saying in safety organizations is to consider the “half-life of scared” as a measure of the decay of institutional urgency after an accident. In 2017 the U.S. Navy lost 17 sailors in two tragic collisions that prompted an assessment of how the Navy looked at fatigue, human-centered system design, and an overzealous “can-do” attitude. The United States Fleet Forces Comprehensive Review (CR) recommended 112 corrective actions. In the ensuing two to three years, the Navy checked off all those actions as complete and built a system to ensure that the changes were enduring – as recommended by the report. Recent events, however, specifically a series of Class “A” mishaps in the past year, call into question the effectiveness of those changes across the Navy enterprise.

CIMSEC – With Admiral Caudle assuming the post of Chief of Naval Operations, the Navy has a timely opportunity to realign its strategic narrative with its emerging operational reality, especially in the Indo-Pacific. After years of experimentation with distributed maritime operations, integration of unmanned systems, and renewed industrial partnerships, the Navy must overcome headlines about past scandals and failures to restore the faith of the President, the Department of Defense, Congress, and the American people. The task before the new CNO is to seize this moment and make clear how the Navy will prevail in the next maritime era.