– Breaking Defense – The Navy is looking to get out of the missile defense business, the service’s top admiral said today, and the Pentagon’s new missile defense review might give the service the off-ramp it has been looking for to stop sailing in circles waiting for ground-based missile launches.

– USNI News – Naval Surface Forces is continuing its push for an experimental squadron that would help figure out how to best leverage new platforms such as the Zumwalt-class destroyers and unmanned surface ships.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy is zeroing in on a cost and the shape of its new frigate as it prepares to launch an open competition this summer.

– CIMSEC – “There’s a good chance…we’d lose the opening stages of this war,” remarked one high ranking official at a recent conference on Multi-Domain Operations.

– Defense News – For this edition of The Drift, I want to circle back to some things that I haven’t written up yet from my pre-Surface Navy Association interview with Rear Adm. Boxall, who was incredibly generous with his time, and cover some ground I haven’t made publicly available yet. I’m also going to dive into a couple Navy-related items from the Missile Defense Review.

– USNI News – The Littoral Combat Ship mission package program office considers itself to be out of the technology development business and fully into testing and production.

– USNI News – The investigation into the web of corruption spun by contractor Leonard Francis has wreaked havoc on the Navy’s ability to fill senior leadership roles, unintentionally stalled hundreds of officers’ careers and thinned out the service’s flag ranks.

– Navy Times – The Navy will say farewell to its last operational F/A-18C Hornet fighter jets in a special ceremony at Naval Air Station Oceana on Feb. 1.

– CIMSEC – The paper is about synergy. It demonstrates the power of using analytical tools in a logical sequence to generate, develop, and assess new concepts and technologies in warfare.

– Breaking Defense – Smaller unmanned vessels will act as expendable scouts and decoys, larger ones — over 50 meters — will carry masses of missiles, while manned ships will carry both the largest systems and the human beings essential for rapid adaptation in combat.

– USNI News – The Navy is still looking at a variety of options to arm the dormant 155mm Advanced Gun Systems aboard the Zumwalt-class of guided-missile destroyers.

– CIMSEC – Vice Admiral Hank Mustin earned a reputation as a hard-charging commander and a cunning tactical innovator. At the apex of his career in the 1980s Cold War U.S. Navy, Admiral Mustin played a critical role in the Navy’s force development. From developing new tactics to organizing large-scale fleet exercises, to introducing new weapons and drafting requirements for future warship types, Mustin was at the very forefront of naval force development in an era of great power competition. In these excerpts, Mustin shares his experiences and insights on leading naval force development, experimenting with new weapons, and how generating fresh tactical insight can make friends and foes in some of the most powerful places.

– National Interest – A U.S. access-denial strategy, then, would impose a hard fate on China. Which is the point. Threatening fearful consequences could deter Beijing from aggression tomorrow morning, and the next.

– Defense News – An update on where some of the most important surface Navy programs stand heading into 2019.

– Defense News – After spending the better part of the past two decades supporting small wars in the desert, the Navy is starting to bring the SEALs back into the fold as it faces threats from major powers such as China and Russia.

– USNI News – The Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship will replace the service’s oldest as the forward-deployed big deck in the Pacific.

– USNI News – In 2018, the Navy stressed the basics of training, crew qualifications and readiness following two fatal ship collisions the year before. 2019 will be all about moving beyond the fundamentals and focusing on lethality.

– Defense News – The Navy plans to spend this year taking the first few steps into a markedly different future, which, if it comes to pass, will upend how the fleet has fought since the Cold War. And it all starts with something that might seem counterintuitive: It’s looking to get smaller.

– Breaking Defense – The Navy’s top surface warfare officer called for his crews to rapidly develop “a sense of urgency” about the Russian and Chinese navies.

– Defense News – Bryan Clark, the retired submariner and brilliant naval analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been saying for months now that there was a shift happening in the surface force toward more passive sensors, and that the DDG Flight III may not be best suited for that new model.

– Defense News – What the surface fleet wants is a single combat system that runs on every ship, and runs everything on the ship, and that doesn’t mind what hardware you are running so long as you have the computing power for it.

– Breaking Defense – After years of delays, budget fights, and searing debates over the role that the ship will play, three Littoral Combat Ships will head out on their first deployments this year.

– Defense News – The commander of the Naples, Italy-based U.S. 6th Fleet, Vice Adm. Lisa Franchetti, has a front-row seat for the renewed great power competition.

– Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – Owen Cote writes that the question of whether submarines are getting harder to hide depends very much on whose submarines you’re talking about, who’s hunting them, and where. To some degree, undersea geography is destiny, when it comes to hiding and finding nuclear submarines.

– War Zone – The haunting image depicts a scene that hopefully won’t ever be repeated during an operational deployment.