CIMSEC – …I am very concerned about how junior officers are looking at our profession. What I hear them saying on the Yokosuka waterfront is that most of their time and effort is not spent working on “naval things” – shiphandling, tactics, leadership – but on an ever-growing cancer of administrative requirements. Every inspection and assist visit seems to have a longer and longer “checklist” of micro-things (all equally important, of course) that must be just so, or else an area is unsat or “ineffective.” Reporting requirements and the care and feeding of staff databases grow inexorably…

The War Zone – USNS Salvor is on the scene in the tense South China Sea to recover both aircraft that crashed on the same night while flying from the Nimitz.

CIMSEC – The U.S. defense industrial base has limited capacity to rapidly increase production in the event of large-scale conflict against a peer competitor, and global commitments further widen these gaps. 

CIMSEC – The leaders of the surface force must launch an effort to systematically protect time for tactics by aggressively pruning other requirements, or else these new efforts will fall short.

War on the Rocks – Can America deter China if its warships are stuck in port? Probably not. And the problem is made worse by chronic shipbuilding delays. This means the U.S. Navy is forced to rely more heavily on its legacy fleet, which requires more maintenance. And neither the Navy’s domestic shipyards nor its overseas facilities can meet current demand. Without immediate action, the Navy risks missing force design and operational readiness goals in critical regions like the Indo-Pacific.

Aware of the risk, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced plans to expand maintenance, repair, and overhaul activities in South Korean shipyards. From a purely economic point of view, South Korea has exactly what the United States lacks: the infrastructure, industrial capacity, and skilled labor to help sustain its navy’s ships. But more than that, partnering with South Korea makes good strategic sense, strengthening a key alliance that offers forward support for operations in the Western Pacific.

US Naval War College Review – Mine warfare is a persistent threat to naval operations and ocean commerce, and yet it remains a persistent area of underinvestment by the U.S. Navy. The recent history of the Navy’s improvisational approach to emergent mine threats suggests how the Navy might succeed by “preparing to be unprepared” before it faces mines again.

US Naval War College Review – Since World War II, fleet air defense has been organized around the principle of engaging threats as far out from the fleet as possible, motivated by early failures to engage the kamikaze threat. This approach remains as vital as ever and progressively more challenging in the face of the contemporary threats posed by cruise missiles and—increasingly—by drone warfare.

Breaking Defense – “The interesting part of this is it’s not just a kind of fleeting presidential idea, but this is, in fact, something that does kind of resonate with what the Navy’s finding it probably needs to do with the fleet through its own work,” one analyst said.

The War Zone – Two days after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar en route to the Caribbean, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford has not moved significantly from a position just west of Morocco in North Africa, the Navy confirmed to us Thursday. The flattop and elements of its strike group were ordered by President Donald Trump to join the ongoing enhanced counter-narcotics mission in the region, but it is unclear if plans have changed.

Breaking Defense – In this op-ed, Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem lay out three areas where action is needed to avoid a logistical catastrophe in deterring China.

The War Zone – Even as the U.S. continues to build up forces in the Caribbean ostensibly for an enhanced counternarcotics operation that could include inland strikes, there are reported plans underway for attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

Defense News – President Donald Trump’s decision to shift the nation’s most advanced aircraft carrier to South America in his campaign against drug cartels is pulling the ship out of the Mediterranean Sea at a time when a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been threatened by new strikes in Gaza.

Breaking Defense – Future operations in the Indo-Pacific will require persistent activity inside the enemy’s reach, according to a top naval commander.

USNI News – The U.S., under the direction of President Donald Trump, conducted three strikes on Monday against alleged drug trafficking vessels, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced via social media site X. The three strikes hit four vessels in the Eastern Pacific, Hegseth said in his Tuesday post. It is the first time that U.S. has hit multiple vessels during one operation.

Defense One – Trump’s first shipbuilding deal must not derail America’s bipartisan strategy to revive the foundations of its seapower.

The War Zone – The electromagnetic catapults and weapons elevators for Ford class carriers have historically been a headache, but changing now would create immense challenges.

Defense News – The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The Strategist – Bill Sweetman writes that they say you can’t get anything done by sitting on your rear end, but US autonomy and unmanned systems specialist Shield AI expects to prove that wrong as it enters the realm of large uncrewed combat air vehicles (UCAVs) with its X-BAT proposal.

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.