– 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.

– CIMSEC – The recent online republication of a 1993 Proceedings article from Capt. Christopher H. Johnson, “The Surface Navy: Still in Search of Tactics,” by the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) in July 2018 can be interpreted two ways. The reprint either suggests that Capt. Johnson’s cautionary tale of 25 years ago went unheeded and the Surface Forces are substantially unchanged in our approach to the development of tactical proficiency, or it serves as an invitation to examine what has changed.1,2 As the Surface Warfare community prepares to gather for the annual national symposium of the Surface Navy Association, I choose the latter interpretation and offer that there have been significant changes, particularly in the last five years.

– USNI News – The Navy may follow up October’s carrier strike group operations in the Arctic with another foray into the icy High North, with leadership considering sending a group of ships into a trans-Arctic shipping lane this summer, the Navy secretary said.

– War Zone – The new rounds dramatically expand the ability of the guns on these ships and other platforms to engage surface targets and air and missile threats.

– CIMSEC – Whether artillery begins to rain on the Korean peninsula, or Iranian mines litter the Strait of Hormuz, or a major terrorist attack unfolds, the Navy must never again allow itself to totally do away with preparing for the high-end fight. The story of the modern American Navy is unfortunately that of an organization that was divorced from the main purpose that had long animated its spirit, and dysfunction radiated throughout its institutions as a result. A difficult transition looms ahead, its urgency underscored by the sudden naval ascendance of a great power rival.

– USNI Proceedings – Nearly ten years into its time in the Information Warfare Community (IWC), naval intelligence has not “left the beach” with a sense of urgency to acquire and field cutting-edge systems that will vault the community into the era of big data and human-machine pairing. Instead, it largely has remained complacent while watching dramatic change occur in the information domain. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of mass digitization, artificial intelligence, robotics, and rapid technological change: the big data era. Yet naval intelligence persists in using the same tools, people, and tradecraft as in 2009. In a global security environment where “margins of victory are razor thin,” this must rapidly be addressed.

– USNI News – The Navy deployed a new ship pairing – a destroyer (DDG-51) and an amphibious transport dock (LPD-17) – to test out a new concept that could supplement amphibious squadrons and surface action groups as a formation in future operations.

– War Zone – Big claims abound about mysterious objects submariners detect below the waves, so we went straight to the source and what we found out was surprising.

– Defense News – The U.S. surface fleet has a big year in store for 2019, and we’re going to start getting more details very soon on what the future has in store for surface warriors.

– USNI Proceedings – Offensive submarine operations against highly capable modern diesel boats in the littorals require new tactics.

– USNI Proceedings – Although they appear to have disappeared from carrier strike group operations, submarines still are vitally connected to defense of the fleet—but only when and as needed.

– USNI Proceedings – To counter the return of peer competitors, the Navy is taking steps to expand the fleet and make it more deadly by distributing lethality to smaller surface ships in the form of ship-killing missiles. Distributed lethality increases the effectiveness of the U.S. fleet, but it is deficient in one key respect: it does not include Coast Guard cutters.