– CIMSEC – As the United States Navy looks to space and cyber as new domains for warfare, it also ought to look deeper: to the seafloor. Increased competition for vital resources and the intent to control critical sea lines of communication will drive nations and their navies to the seabed.

– War on the Rocks – An interesting future war scenario by T.X. Hammes.

– CIMSEC – an excellent introduction to the future of naval warfare on the seabed.

– War Zone – The Navy’s two hospital ships are expensive to operate and maintain, but offer capabilities found in no other Navy in the world.

– USNI Proceedings – The U.S. Navy has been in steady decline qualitatively, quantitatively, and culturally in its ability to wage naval warfare against a peer adversary since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Navy has lost the corporate knowledge and cultural ethos to fight a peer navy and to prosecute an offensive naval campaign successfully. The causes are many, but of particular note are geopolitical shifts, budgetary pressures, and training focus. The Navy must move swiftly and seriously to escape its predicament while adversaries challenge the United States around the globe and several build blue-water navies and land-based anti-access systems specifically designed to defeat the U.S. Navy.

– US Naval War College Review – If the United States is to develop and maintain the capacity to defeat—and thereby have the ability to deter—sophisticated antiaccess strategies that threaten to reduce the U.S. presence in, influence over, or access to contested regions, a coordinated, articulated, and persistent intragovernmental approach is required, not just Department of Defense (DoD)–only planning.

– USNI Proceedings – The Navy’s commanders and future commanders must study and practice command and control at every opportunity in war games and in real-world operations, while never ceasing to learn how to implement it at every level of command. This will be key to our success in a future conflict with a peer or near-peer competitor. It also will be core to any failure we may face in that conflict.

– US Naval War College Review – America is suffering from a strategy deficit in the South China Sea. For nearly a decade—and at accelerated speed since 2014—Beijing has been salami slicing its way to a position of primacy in that critical international waterway, while eroding the norms and interests Washington long has sought to defend. To date, however, Washington has struggled to articulate an effective response.

– USNI Proceedings – The foundational principle for all operational excellence is integrity. Integrity means adhering to standards when nobody is watching and freely admitting mistakes when they are made.

– War Zone – The service will use the retired aircraft as parts sources to keep other jets flyable before turning those planes over to the Marines.

– War Zone – Arguably a U.S. Navy surface combatant’s most important weapon deals in electrons not high-explosives, and it’s more important now than ever.

– CIMSEC – The sudden rise of a powerful maritime rival is coinciding with the atrophy of high-end warfighting skills and the introduction of exceedingly complex technologies, making the recent stunning revelations about how the U.S. Navy has failed to prepare for great power war especially chilling.

– BBC – US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is making a historic call at Vietnam, the first time a ship of this size has visited since the Vietnam War ended. The nuclear-powered carrier set anchor off the port city of Danang, where US combat troops first landed in the war, making this a highly symbolic location.

– Breaking Defense – By 2020, for the first time, the US Navy will put a lethal laser on a warship.