– Washington Post – The F-35 has features that make pilots drool. It is shaped to avoid detection by enemy radar. It can accelerate to supersonic speeds. One model can take off and land vertically. Onboard electronic sensors and computers provide a 360-degree view of the battlefield on flat-panel screens, allowing pilots to quickly identify targets and threats. But its greatest strength has nothing to do with those attributes. The Defense Department and Lockheed Martin, the giant contractor hired to design and build the plane, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, have constructed what amounts to a budgetary force field around the nearly $400 billion program.

– BBC – A US Navy ship has arrived in Singapore as part of US plans to increase its military presence in the region.

– Defense News – Yet, water-going robots bring unforeseen challenges — technological ones, to be sure, but also legal, regulatory and ethical tangles. Drones that fly or crawl on the ground are controlled by radio waves, but it is difficult — often impossible — to communicate with underwater vehicles. The answer, it seems, is autonomy — robots that are not remotely piloted, but that operate on their own. “There are legal implications,” especially if the drones are armed, said Card, the director of naval intelligence and the chief of information dominance. “We are going to really have to think our way through this.”

– US Navy – Gulf Deployment for US Navy’s Laser Weapon – The US Navy is going to deploy a high-power laser ship self-defense system to the Gulf of Arabia early next year. The Laser Weapon System (LaWS) prototype will installed on the amphibious transport dock USS Ponce and, in addition to undergoing tests in theater, will provide an operational capability against any hostile fast-attack craft or unmanned aircraft.

– Flight International – Boeing is unveiling an updated version of its F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter concept at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington DC.

– Flight International – Lockheed Martin is taking the wraps off its submission for the US Navy’s prospective unmanned carrier launched surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington DC.

– Washington Times – Life aboard a fast-attack submarine can be rough: Quarters are cramped, operations are hectic and privacy is just a memory, veteran submariners say.
But as the Navy prepares to assign women to fast-attack subs, one of its first female submariners is relishing the challenge of serving in the “dolphin brotherhood.”

– Aviation Week – There must be a typo. That’s the understandable first thought that could pass through anyone’s mind upon seeing the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) new cost estimates for the Navy’s proposed Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), which is meant to combine S- and X-band radars for simultaneous and unmatched air and ballistic missile defense (BMD). The Navy plans to first put the AMDR on its DDG-51 Flight III destroyers. AMDR’s total price tag is now estimated at about $5.8 billion, compared to the $15.2 billion projected by GAO last year.

– Aviation Week – As the rhetoric boils and simmers over North Korea’s increasingly capable ballistic missiles, it might be wise to consider a thought posed recently by Vice Adm. Richard Hunt, the U.S. Navy director of staff, during an interview with Aviation Week. “Preventing conflict is as important as prevailing in conflict,” Hunt says.

– US Naval Institute – When in doubt about grave questions, reach for the classics. What would the likes of Alfred Thayer Mahan or Julian Corbett say about the fate of the big-deck aircraft carrier or nuclear carrier (CVN)? I suspect their ghosts would voice skepticism.

– Defense News – This is definitely a place, not just a patch in the sea.

– NBC – The U.S. Navy is shifting a guided-missile destroyer in the Pacific to waters off the Korean peninsula in the wake of ongoing rhetoric from North Korea, U.S. defense officials said. The USS McCain is capable of intercepting and destroying a missile, should North Korea decide to fire one off, the officials said.

– Aviation Week – Tom Donilon, the nation’s security adviser, recently provided a short list of what will be important – from a military perspective – for a successful U.S. focus shift to Asia and the Pacific and it’s critical to note what he included as well as what he did not.

– AP – Workers in the southwestern Philippines have removed the last major part of the U.S. Navy minesweeper USS Guardian from a protected coral reef where it ran aground in January, and the damage will be assessed to determine the fine Washington will pay.

– The Diplomat – Two detailed arguments on the end of the aircraft carrier emerged earlier this month.

– Wired – During a year of budget cuts that has the U.S. military freaking out, the Navy is improbably signaling it’ll take major steps forward on developing laser cannons.