– USNI News – Targeted investments in improving weapons and decoys could propel the U.S. submarine fleet to be the underwater answer to anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) threats.

– BBC – In the North Sea, off the coast of Norway, Nato has been conducting its largest ever anti-submarine warfare exercise.

– Reuters – The Pentagon is considering sending U.S. military aircraft and ships to assert freedom of navigation around rapidly growing Chinese-made artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea.

– Real Clear Defense – It’s tough to winnow the U.S. Navy’s priorities list down to five weapon systems. However, I applied a secret method to come up with the definitive, incontrovertible list of the Top 5 Weapons the U.S. Navy Needs Now. The list employs such metrics as a system’s national-level importance, its capacity to multiply the fleet’s offensive and defensive fighting power, and its ability to exploit enduring enemy weaknesses at manageable cost to the United States.

– War on the Rocks – Aviation history was made last week: an unmanned aircraft — the X-47B — successfully completed an air-to-air refueling demonstration, taking 4,000 pounds of fuel from a KC-707 tanker aircraft. This historic achievement followed last year’s equally revolutionary series of carrier launch and recovery operations by the X-47B. You would think that the Navy, cognizant of the need to take advantage of the promise of robotics would be aggressively pushing to do further testing, to make unmanned carrier-based surveillance and strike aircraft real, and thus extend the reach and power of the aircraft carrier — the crown jewel of America’s conventional power projection forces. Instead, the Navy wants to decommission the two X-47Bs (named Salty Dog 501 and Salty Dog 502) and put them in museums, even though they have 80% of their approved flight hours left. Such an action flies in the face of the imperative to counter the most strategically troubling elements of the emerging set of anti-access/area-denial threats that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and his team are aiming to offset.

– Reuters – The U.S. Navy has stopped accompanying commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a mission it began last week in the wake of Iran’s seizure of a cargo ship.

– National Review – Jerry Hendrix of the Center for a New American Security took to the pages of National Review to advocate the elimination of the aircraft carrier from the arsenal of the U.S. Navy. A former naval aviator, Hendrix is a serious man and a gifted navalist, so his arguments should be taken seriously. Under scrutiny, however, his logic wilts, his understanding of modern warfare is revealed as unrealistic, and his ability to hone in on actual cause-and-effect relationships is questionable.