– BBC – The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the Middle East to send a “clear and unmistakable message” to Iran.

– Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments – Although logistics has traditionally been a U.S. strength, it now risks becoming a major weakness that could cause the United States to lose a war against China or Russia. The U.S. Navy’s logistics force is currently optimized for uncontested operations and is too small and vulnerable to support the current fleet – much less a larger or more distributed one – in a conflict with a peer adversary.

– CIMSEC – Throughout history, maritime nations have used naval blockades to wreck the economies of their adversaries and bend them to their will. However, the impact of blockade in history has been overstated. Throughout history, blockade has been a part of military success, but it has never been the primary key to victory.

– Defense News – The White House has canceled plans to decommission an aircraft carrier 25 years early as a cost savings measure, a plan that was largely opposed on Capitol Hill.

– USNI News – The Navy is adding a fourth amphibious ship to its forward-deployed fleet in Japan and is bringing home one of the destroyers that has been forward-deployed the longest.

– National Interest – Russia and others need to take notice.

– USNI News – The U.S. Navy is employing tools it used in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 to help find a Japanese F-35A that crashed earlier this month.

– C4ISRNet – A test announced in late March could herald an enormous change in the way the Navy modernizes its ships, while making a once prohibitive cost of maintaining older ships attainable.

– Defense News – …made by the Undersecretary of the Navy…

– Breaking Defense – While two carriers attracting most of the attention, a smaller US footprint is being established between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where Russia — and Turkey — are raising concerns.

– CIMSEC – Calculating the power of a fleet is a daunting and imprecise task…

– CIMSEC – Rather than sending the B-1 Lancer into early retirement, the Department of Defense could transfer it to the Navy for duty as a land-based ship-killer. Considering its speed, range, payload, and flexibility to employ the new Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), the B-1 is an ideal candidate for rebirth as a Sea Control Bomber.

– National Interest – Dust it off and put it to use? One of the world’s great naval minds has some ideas.

– War Zone – Nearly six decades after the first Orions entered service, the Navy is getting close to retiring the P-3C from active duty for good.

– 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.