– Defense News – As storms go, it wasn’t a biggie. Eight-to-12-foot waves, 40 mph winds. But the ocean’s saltwater was a baptism of sorts, as the U.S. Navy’s latest littoral combat ship (LCS) left behind more than 2,000 miles of Great Lakes freshwater sailing and entered the Atlantic on Aug. 17 for the first time.

– Aviation Week – Maritime missiles are in a period of rapid evolution. Warships and submarines are persistent platforms with deep magazines, for long-range attacks on land targets and hostile ships. But more warships now carry effective missile-defense gun and missile systems and countermeasures, while sea traffic has continued to grow rapidly worldwide—creating a major challenge in terms of collateral damage. Some of the biggest decisions in the past year involve the U.S. Navy, which is moving toward an arsenal of “net-enabled” weapons—missiles that take advantage of other sensors to find and hit targets, but can still function if communications are down. Two quick-reaction missile programs have been started recently, along with a large, expensive and remarkably low-profile airborne radar to support them.

– US Navy – Zap, crackle and pop – Energy weapons are finally moving from the laboratory to the real world. But they are hardly the super-weapons of science fiction…and the US Navy is leading the pack in terms of weaponizing them.

– Aviation Week – As budget-cutters swipe at major Pentagon programs and sequestration threatens to tighten the leash on expected expenses, the U.S. Navy remains focused on building its future surface warfighting fleet, and the service is pinning its hopes on futuristic ships like the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).

– Wall Street Jouranl – The U.S. is planning a major expansion of missile defenses in Asia, a move American officials say is designed to contain threats from North Korea, but one that could also be used to counter China’s military. The planned buildup is part of a defensive array that could cover large swaths of Asia, with a new radar in southern Japan and possibly another in Southeast Asia tied to missile-defense ships and land-based interceptors.

– Washington Post – Gwenyth Todd had worked in a lot of places in Washington where powerful men didn’t hesitate to use sharp elbows. She had been a Middle East expert for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. She had worked in the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, where neoconservative hawks first began planning to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But she was not prepared a few years later in Bahrain when she encountered plans by high-ranking admirals to confront Iran, any one of which, she reckoned, could set the region on fire.

– Defense News – A new, high-powered effort to boost development of the littoral combat ship (LCS) is kicking off, intended to help implement numerous proposals and suggestions to integrate the new ship type into U.S. Navy operations.

– Aviation Week – With Senators up in arms over disputed reports that a Russian submarine cruised around the Gulf of Mexico undetected for a month, it was an opportune time for DARPA to award SAIC a contract to develop an unmanned vessel that can shadow a submerged submarine throughout its patrol.

– Aviation Week – U.S. Navy emails and other documents suggest that officials muzzled bad test results for the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) variant, the USS Freedom, at a crucial time in the program’s development, when the service was considering which seaframe to pick for the $30 billion-plus fleet. Top program officers for the ship and at Naval Sea Systems Command (Navsea) told subordinates to avoid certain language in the test-result reports because of concerns over the downselect decision, the documents show. One naval officer said in an email he would delete the offensive wording of the report.

– The Diplomat – The AirSea Battle concept for countering China’s military rise is expensive and unhelpful. And could even spark a nuclear conflict.

– San Diego Union Tribune – As the third ship in the Navy’s littoral class left a Wisconsin shipyard this week, the inaugural step toward its eventual home in San Diego, the Navy billed it as an “exponential” improvement over the controversial first vessel in the line.