– 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.