– USNI News – The Pentagon requested a Fiscal Year 2020 budget that advocates changes in the way the Navy does business – pushing for lethal but “attritable” unmanned systems, artificial intelligence and hypersonics to give the Navy and Marine Corps an edge against high-end adversaries.

– Breaking Defense – An inside source explains the logic behind the 2020 budget’s most controversial call.

– War Zone – The service wants to get the first two unmanned ships quickly to help refine its requirements and craft plans for employing them in actual combat.

– Breaking Defense – The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. Bases burn. Warships sink. But we could fix the problem for about $24 billion a year, one well-connected expert said, less than four percent of the Pentagon budget.

– USNI News – The Navy is moving fast to acquire a new class of unmanned surface vehicles and hopes to award a contract for USV designs by the end of the year.

– War on the Rocks – The aircraft carrier fleet and the amphibious fleet are typically viewed as polar opposites: the fast nuclear carrier projecting strike aircraft from the deep blue on one side, and the plodding but versatile amphibious ship projecting Marine infantry in the littoral on the other. Despite obvious dissimilarities in speed, payload, and function, they both share a critically important place in the overall fleet architecture — they are both unaffordable anachronisms of a bygone era.

– USNI News – The top American officer in Europe wants two more destroyers stationed in his area of responsibility and a “better pace” of carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups moving through the region.

– CIMSEC – While the concept of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) may represent the major, new thrust in the Navy’s warfighting thought, it does not arrive out of a vacuum. In order to fully understand both the concept and implications of DMO, it is essential to first understand the seminal documents and thoughts out of which it grew.

– CIMSEC – The Navy needs to look beyond the fleet for ways to increase combat power…At a minimum that mix must include Marine and Army surface fires, fast attack craft, Air Force anti-surface warfare, and whatever else is needed to distribute firepower and sustain command of the seas.

– USNI News – The Navy is investing in its explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) force, doubling the number of unmanned systems platoons in the community in the next couple years and improving the technology on their unmanned underwater vehicles.

– USNI News – A pair of expeditionary fast transport ships (EPFs) are playing a key role in this year’s multi-national Pacific Partnership 2019 exercise focused on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the region.

– USNI News – The Navy has issued a draft request for proposal to design and build its planned class of 20 next-generation guided-missile frigates (FFG(X)).

– Breaking Defense – Are big, expensive vessels like amphibious ships and carriers too vulnerable in a long-range missile war with Russia or China?

– USNI News – A Pentagon budget plan to sideline an aircraft carrier, rather than refuel it, and redirect money for other defense priorities would save just $16.9 million in Fiscal Year 2020, USNI News has learned.

– USNI News – The Navy declared today that its F-35C Joint Strike Fighter was operationally ready to deploy and conduct missions around the world.

– War on the Rocks – The inability to keep up with the increasing speed of naval combat is only going to get worse. The advent of hypersonic weapons, particularly anti-ship cruise missiles, represents a grave threat to U.S. surface forces.

– Breaking Defense – The move could save more than $30 billion over 25 years to invest in high-tech weapons — but Congress is sure to explode in outrage.

– CIMSEC – What if world circumstances or political decisions forced the U.S. to look at achieving a 355-ship Navy far sooner than in 11 to 30 years? Possibilities range from how to stretch or improve what already exists, to more radical notions of foreign warship procurement, armed merchantmen, and development of a U.S. Navy foreign legion type force.

– National Interest – Are periodic cruises through waters where a coastal state claims rights and prerogatives beyond those codified by treaty enough to safeguard maritime freedom?

– Breaking Defense – If the Navy ever hopes to reach its goal of a 355-ship fleet, it won’t be by simply building new hulls and launching them. Instead, the admirals have long recognized they’ll have to extend the lives of dozens of ships already long in the tooth — and do so at a time when shipyard space is already stretched and less than half of its ships are able to complete scheduled maintenance on time.

– USNI News – The Navy is rethinking how it will employ its emerging MQ-8C Fire Scout rotary-wing unmanned vehicles to help Littoral Combat Ships take on tougher targets in a new age of great power competition.

– War Zone – The 30mm Bushmasters don’t come without controversy. The ship was originally slated to get much more capable 57mm guns housed in stealthy enclosures.

– USNI Naval History – The ballistic-missile development programs of the 1950s proved that processes are only as good as the people who manage them.

– War Zone – The new drone submarines will help lay the groundwork for the service’s ambitious future unmanned undersea vehicle plans.

– Breaking Defense – “We’ve spent a lot of time over the past years playing defense,” Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, director of surface warfare, said at the West 2019 conference here. “The best defense is a good offense, and the idea that we will go after the threat — at range — is something that we have to be able to do.”