A Bomber For the Navy

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.

U.S. Advance and Russia’s Deep Concerns: The Operations Center in Ochakiv

USNI Blog – Russia has been carefully observing the activities of the U.S and British navies in the Black Sea region. It protested through diplomatic channels that the main thrust of Sea Breeze 2018, a Black Sea exercise with Ukraine, was anti-Russian. And according to the Russian Institute of Strategic Research, it was not a coincidence when after Sea Breeze 2017, the United States revealed plans to build a maritime operations center in Ochakiv, a small city located between Crimea and Odessa at the mouth of the Dnieper River.

Adapting Command and Control for 21st Century Seapower

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).

232 Unmanned Ships May Be Key To Countering China, Russia

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.

The Navy’s Newest Nemesis: Hypersonic Weapons

CIMSEC – In January 2019, Chinese Communist Party leaders announced that the newest iteration of their DF-17 missile system was being designed to overwhelm and sink U.S. aircraft carriers and surface combatants stationed in the West Pacific. According to official statements from the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), a targeted salvo of eight hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) set aloft by DF-17s would swamp a surface vessel’s close-in point defenses and annihilate it through incredible transfers of kinetic energy.