Defence Blog – The U.S. Navy said it completed the final planned flight test of the Harpoon Block II Update on Jan. 16, concluding system-level flight testing for the obsolescence update. The test validated the missile’s land-attack profile following earlier trials against guidance performance and moving maritime targets, with initial deliveries planned later this year.

(Thanks to Alain)

The War Zone – The A-10, now in the twilight of its career, is uniquely suited to protect naval assets from lower-end threats, such as swarms of Iranian small boats.

USNI News – New Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle says he is crafting a plan for formations beyond the carrier strike group that don’t have peak military capability, but are good enough to meet the needs of U.S. commanders downrange.

CIMSEC – Expectations of a genuine American shipbuilding renaissance should be kept in check. The United States is ill-suited to quickly transform from a virtual non-participant in commercial shipbuilding to a competitive producer of large cargo vessels. More likely is another round of costly subsidies, continued shipbuilding dysfunction, and little progress toward addressing the country’s key maritime challenges. Rather than devote substantial resources to this questionable enterprise, U.S. policymakers should pursue pragmatic solutions that more directly remedy commercial and naval shortcomings.

CIMSEC – The strategic imperatives facing the United States, Japan, and South Korea demand immediate, decisive action to secure enduring maritime security across the Indo-Pacific. Trilateral collaboration in naval shipbuilding is no longer optional, it is necessary. Together, the alliance has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to counter China’s expanding naval power, restore American shipbuilding strength, and ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific for decades to come. By pooling resources, expertise, and industrial capacity, the alliance can design and produce a fast-attack missile corvette tailored to the region’s urgent needs: maritime domain awareness, deterrence, and enhanced interoperability among allies and partners. A corvette fleet, built with Asian shipyards and American innovation, will empower ASEAN partners on the frontlines of maritime coercion, illegal activities, grey-zone conflict, and Great Power Competition.

Defense News – After a U.S. warship visited the Chinese-built Ream Naval Base on the south coast of Cambodia last week, analysts warn the government here should brace for a response from Beijing.

National Interest – James Holmes writes that Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle’s advice on reforming US Navy doctrine is at once prescient and rooted in age-old wisdom.

USNI News – Two aviation companies under contract to develop armed, unmanned aircraft and control systems for the U.S. Navy teased what they are working on this week during the Singapore Air Show.

USNI News – A Marine F-35C Lighting II fighter shot down an Iranian military drone that approached a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea,

The War Zone – The U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Preble used its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system to down four drones in a demonstration last year, Lockheed Martin has shared.

Breaking Defense – While the carrier strike group will remain the backbone of naval power projection, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle says its time to look for alternative options, especially unmanned systems, for more specialized regional scenarios — part of a Tuesday preview of what he called his forthcoming “hedge strategy” for the Navy.

Naval News – General Dynamics NASSCO is looking to U.S. Navy for interest in new VLS reloading destroyer tenders, known as AD(X), as part of a combined buy of common hulls with the future AS(X) submarine tender.

The War Zone – Boeing expects to close out production of new Super Hornets in 2027 and has already stopped building EA-18G Growlers.

The War Zone – Amid the ongoing military buildup, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that no one knows who would lead Iran next should the Khamenei regime fall.

SeaPower – Rather than continuing to field a shrinking force of exquisite ships and aircraft, the Navy should field a larger force of crewed and uncrewed platforms that gain an edge over opponents through their payloads and ability to combine in a diverse array of changing effects chains across domains. By shifting complexity from inside individual ships and aircraft to the kill chains between them, this fleet could gain decision-making advantages over adversaries and generate capacity or capability when and where it is needed.

USNI News – The surface force will net a total of seven Littoral Combat Ships after the Navy shelved plans to decommission the hulls ahead of their expected service lives, USNI News has learned.

Navy Lookout – The announcement of the Defiant-class battleship signals a sharp reorientation of US naval force structure, moving away from distributed lethality towards massed, concentrated firepower to address the widening magazine gap with China. However, the revival of such leviathans sits uneasily with a fragile US industrial base that has struggled to deliver even basic escorts, raising doubts over the programme’s deliverability.

The War Zone – The last four Avengers in Bahrain were carried off on a heavy lift vessel at a time of crisis, where mining the Persian Gulf could come into play.

The War Zone – Assets continue to pour into the Middle East, including high-end air defenses, but there still hasn’t been a large migration of airpower.

RUSI – If the US no longer abides by rules, how does it expect revisionist states to do so?

Australian Strategic Policy Institute – Bill Sweetman’s view on the future of the US defense industry.

War on the Rocks – Beijing would be most afraid of losing the advantage it has today from its anti-ship missiles. Blunting that advantage with unmanned systems will require maximizing the benefits they can offer against anti-ship missiles while minimizing the drawbacks. Unmanned surface vessels that resemble munitions rather than ships would be the more effective tool to counter this threat.

The first step to unlocking their potential asymmetric advantage is to make the distinction between the two types of systems. A more precise taxonomy could clarify the functions that each type of unmanned surface vessel is meant to perform and help identify the roles that each should play in the sea denial mission.

The War Zone – While today’s surface Navy puts major emphasis on carrier strike group and expeditionary strike group deployments, driven by the resource realities and the global threat environment, the current Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) wants to take a far more flexible and tailored approach to sending his vessels on cruise.

FRPI – Plans have now been unveiled for the USS Defiant, the lead ship of the so-called Trump class of guided-missile battleships. According to the concept materials released so far, this vessel would combine a sprawling arsenal of vertical launch cells, hypersonic missiles, and lasers with a forward-mounted 32-megajoule railgun. In other words, at a moment when American shipyards are struggling to produce sufficient numbers of current surface combatants, the proposed solution is to task them with building 35,000-ton “super combatants” packed with immature or outright nonexistent technologies.

Could such a ship actually work? What risks does it introduce, technologically and industrially? And perhaps most importantly, what would a return to battleships mean for American fleet structure and an already overstretched US shipbuilding sector?

Naval News – Statements by U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (RADM) Derek Trinque, the Director of Surface Warfare (N96) at the 2026 Surface Navy Symposium reveal the U.S. Navy’s intentions to spread the hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) missiles throughout the surface fleet.