– National Interest – The APS-154 transforms the P-8 into a surface-surveillance platform similar to the U.S. Air Force’s E-8 radar plane.

– CIMSEC – As the United States winds down from two regional land conflicts that have dominated the 21st century, great power competition with China and Russia rightly dominates defense planning and operations. Consequently, American seapower must once again evolve to meet the challenges of sustaining America’s prosperity and security in a multi-polar world. No element of modern seapower is more worthy of evolution than the operational relationship between the Navy and Marine Corps, and this essay asserts that the 21st century approach to command and control (C2) of these forces must embrace the integrated approach offered by the Joint functional commander concept and its maritime instantiation, the Joint Forces Maritime Component Commander (JFMCC).

– USNI News – The F-35B Joint Strike Fighter is not only changing the way Marine forces conduct their missions, it is also changing the way the amphibious navy can do its work in the absence of an aircraft carrier.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy is scrambling to write its new acquisition and operational playbook on the fly, a decision based as much on what US rivals are doing as it is on what the service hasn’t done in recent decades. The construction and innovation booms being undertaken by the Chinese — and to a lesser extent Russian — navies, are forcing the admirals at the Pentagon to push new, still mostly theoretical, unmanned technologies into the water as quickly as possible for urgent make-or-break tests.

– USNI News – The Navy has a new Offensive Missile Strategy that replaces an older and narrower plan and tackles offensive lethality in a three-pronged fashion: sustaining current systems, enhancing current systems and developing next-generation weapons to address future threats.

– USNI News – Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer has issued formal letters of censure to the former commander and tactical action officer of USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) for their roles in the June 17, 2017, collision between a destroyer and a merchant ship.

– War Zone – The compact weapons could give subs substantially greater magazine depth, a hard-kill anti-torpedo countermeasure, and more.

– Breaking Defense – Naval aviation is on the mend as readiness rises and fleet age falls.

– CIMSEC – Part 3 in an excellent fiction series on near-future naval undersea operations.

– War Zone – Filipino fishermen have spotted the U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp sailing and conducting flight operations off the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

– War Zone – Until now, we thought the Navy abandoned its interest in hydrofoils in the early 1990s.

– CIMSEC – While much of the news surrounding ships and their growing price tags focuses on aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines, there is another class of ship that likewise threatens to break the Navy’s bank – amphibious ships.

– Defense News – Recent delays and a shakeup in the Virginia-class buying profile, along with a high-profile quality control issue right out of the gate on the missile tubes destined for Columbia have raised red flags and concerns about the submarine building enterprise and its ability to handle the mammoth $115 billion program without delays and major overruns.

– USNI News – Based on the Navy’s current vision of its future fleet, the service will be too top-heavy in the coming years, having more large combatants than it says it needs and not enough small combatants. But many attractive options exist today to add lethal capabilities to these large combatants and to extend their lives, and fewer options exist to speed the growth of the small combatant fleet, leaving the Navy pondering how best to invest in its surface force.

– Washington Times – An internal Navy study has faulted the sea service’s failure to prevent the leaking of secrets and technology to foreign adversaries, including China and Russia.

– USNI News – The Navy has more questions than answers on how it will use unmanned warships in the future, but it knows now is the time to get unmanned surface vehicles into the water and start learning.

– Forbes – As the U.S. Navy buys more and more modern ships, it is overlooking a cheap and mundane force multiplier, the humble training fleet. With the overtasked American surface fleet desperately looking to shed duties that distract from warfighting-oriented missions, a training fleet offers an ideal solution.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is shaking up its plan for acquiring a new, much larger and more deadly version of its Virginia-class attack submarine it aims to start buying this year.

– Breaking Defense – The Army’s experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a “game changer” that’s turned the tide in “at least 10 wargames,” the commander of US Army Pacific says. “Plans are already changing at the combatant command level because of this.” The key: the unit cracked the Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China’s dense layered defenses of long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. “Before, we couldn’t penetrate A2/AD. With it, we could,” Gen. Robert Brown said of the task force’s performance in “at least 10 exercises and wargames.”

– War Zone – The U.S. Navy’s first-in-class amphibious assault ship USS Wasp recently arrived in the Philippines for a major annual exercise carrying a U.S. Marine Corps contingent that includes at least 10 F-35B Joint Strike Fighters. This is a larger than average number of the combat jets than Wasp-class ships normally embark, but is a force structure that the Navy and Marines are looking to standardize. It’s also one that could help lay the groundwork for a future operating concept that could turn amphibious assault ships into light carriers, as necessary.

– USNI News – Naval forces forward-deployed in the Pacific took a big step in raising their warfighting proficiency, completing their first advanced training event hosted by the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC).

– USNI News – The Navy’s mine countermeasures community brought all three legs of its triad together for a single experiment – aboard an allied ship – to see how well they could combine their gear and people to tackle a common threat.

– CIMSEC – Despite a lengthy pedigree of combined naval operations, the U.S. Navy must continue focusing on interoperability with allies.

– USNI News – Vice Adm. Bill Merz told the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee on Tuesday that the distributed maritime operations concept – which is appropriate when facing potential peer or near-peer adversaries – requires a different mix of ships within the fleet, as well as a different approach to logistics and medical care for the fleet.

– USNI News – Unforeseen problems in repairing USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) will push delivery of the carrier back to the fleet by three months, into October