Every Ship A Minesweeper? Navy Looks Beyond LCS

Every Ship A Minesweeper? Navy Looks Beyond LCS
Every Ship A Minesweeper? Navy Looks Beyond LCS

ANNAPOLIS: There are maybe half a million sea mines in arsenals around the world. To find and clear them, rather than rely solely on a small fleet of small Littoral Combat Ships, the Navy now wants at least some mine-hunting gear on a vessels ranging from modified oil tankers to catamarans to aircraft carriers. The…

Navy 2016: Stress, Shortfalls, & The Spectrum

Navy 2016: Stress, Shortfalls, & The Spectrum
Navy 2016: Stress, Shortfalls, & The Spectrum

2016 will be challenging for the Navy. At sea the fleet will continue to face demands that exceed its supply of forces, while at home the fiscal 2017 budget is likely to make difficult choices that prioritize high quality over adequate quantity. Most significantly for sailors, the supply-demand mismatch will get worse next year. While…

Navy’s Distributed Lethality Will Reshape Fleet

Navy’s Distributed Lethality Will Reshape Fleet
Navy’s Distributed Lethality Will Reshape Fleet

The Navy’s Surface Warfare leaders announced a new warfighting concept, Distributed Lethality (DL) nine months ago at the January 2015 Surface Navy Association symposium in Arlington, Va., and outlined it in the U.S. Naval Institute magazine Proceedings. DL is an innovative concept for how surface, amphibious and combat logistics ships can enhance the Surface Navy’s offensive “punch” in support…

Hill To Navy: Hurry Up On Rail Guns, Lasers

Hill To Navy: Hurry Up On Rail Guns, Lasers
Hill To Navy: Hurry Up On Rail Guns, Lasers

WASHINGTON: Rail gun bullets move seven times the speed of sound. Laser beams fire at the speed of light. But Pentagon procurement? Not so fast. But with both Congress and the Navy Secretary expressing impatience, the Navy is accelerating its efforts to move both lasers and rail guns from the test phase into the fleet. “We’ve…

LCS, JHSV ‘Marginal’ For Marine Ops: Gen. Paxton

LCS, JHSV ‘Marginal’ For Marine Ops: Gen. Paxton
LCS, JHSV ‘Marginal’ For Marine Ops: Gen. Paxton

WASHINGTON: Even as the Navy pursues cheaper ships such as LCS and JHSV, the Marines’ message is: Amphibious Warships; Accept No Substitutes. There’s real interest and opportunity in non-traditional ways to deploy Marines, assistant commandant Gen. John Paxton said today, but a purpose-built amphibious ship remains the Marine’s top choice to go to war with. The Navy’s two…

Introducing America’s New ‘Expeditionary Fleet’

Introducing America’s New ‘Expeditionary Fleet’
Introducing America’s New ‘Expeditionary Fleet’

What’s in a name? A lot, especially for the military. Over the next decade, the Navy will take delivery of at least 32 Littoral Combat Ships (LCS); 10 Joint High Speed Vessels (JHSV); three Mobile Landing Platforms (MLP); several Afloat Forward Staging Bases; and new versions of amphibious assault ships and Ship-to-Shore connector craft. New…

Rep. Forbes Vows To Keep 11 Carriers; ‘Still Working’ On Cruisers, UCLASS

Rep. Forbes Vows To Keep 11 Carriers; ‘Still Working’ On Cruisers, UCLASS
Rep. Forbes Vows To Keep 11 Carriers; ‘Still Working’ On Cruisers, UCLASS

[UPDATED with details from the subcommittee mark] WASHINGTON: Just hours before the House Armed Services Committee rolls out its mark-up of the 2015 defense policy bill, the chairman of HASC’s seapower subcommittee is vowing to save the USS George Washington from early retirement and to preserve the nation’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers. [Updated: The seapower subcommittee’s…

Marines Seek New Tech To Get Ashore Vs. Missiles; Reinventing Amphib Assault

Marines Seek New Tech To Get Ashore Vs. Missiles; Reinventing Amphib Assault
Marines Seek New Tech To Get Ashore Vs. Missiles; Reinventing Amphib Assault

NATIONAL HARBOR: Cheap grey-market missiles and commercially available radar kits are forcing the Marines to reinvent amphibious warfare for the 21st century. The new Corps concept, Expeditionary Force 21, predicts long-range threats will force the fleet to stay at least 65 nautical miles offshore, a dozen times the distance that existing Marine amphibious vehicles are…

Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots At Sea In 2016: Adm. Greenert

Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots At Sea In 2016: Adm. Greenert
Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots At Sea In 2016: Adm. Greenert

[UPDATED April 8 with more rail gun & laser detail from Rear Adm. Klunder] NATIONAL HARBOUR: 23 pounds ain’t heavy. But it sure hurts when it hits you going at seven times the speed of sound. That’s what a prototype Navy weapon called a “rail gun” can do, and it does it without a single…

The Navy’s 2014: Subs, Cyber, & Cheap Support Ships

The Navy’s 2014: Subs, Cyber, & Cheap Support Ships
The Navy’s 2014: Subs, Cyber, & Cheap Support Ships

The Navy, is, hands down, the service in the best shape for 2014. Every act of belligerent idiocy from Beijing – and there’ve been a lot of them lately – makes the Navy budget an easier sell. In stark contrast to the Army, the Navy has the central role in the new Pacific-focused strategy, a high-tech threat…

CNO Greenert: ‘We’re Not Downsizing, We’re Growing’ – Especially In Pacific

WASHINGTON: Full speed ahead and damn the drawdown — that’s the confident note that the Navy’s top admiral struck today. “We’re not downsizing, we’re growing,” declared Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, at the National Press Club. “The ship count is going up and the number of people is going up.” Adding up…

LCS’s Little Sister, JHSV, Finishes Navy Trials; A Clean Sweep

The first of the Navy’s new catamaran transports, the Joint High Speed Vessel Spearhead, has completed its acceptance trials, builder Austal and the Naval Sea Systems Command announced last week. Derived from an Australian-built commercial ferry that the US leased to experiment with, the twin-hulled JHSV is a smaller, cheaper, unarmed sibling of the triple-hulled…

JSF Survives, Global Hawk Dies, Global Strike Revives; Panetta’s Budget

PENTAGON: In what may come to be called the dawn of the 21st century drawdown of the American military, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today unveiled a budget he hopes balances smaller forces with sustained and far reaching threats. Panetta said the force that will result from the $525 billion budget request for fiscal 2013 will…

Navy To Drop 3 Ships in 2013; Won’t ‘Ever’ Hit 313-Ship Goal

UPDATED: Budget Cuts 8 JHSVs; Two LCS; Two LSDs Retire Early; 1 Virginia Sub Slips Past FYDP; Analyst Says Retirements AND Cuts Mean Service Won’t ‘Ever’ Hit 313 Goal WASHINGTON: The Navy plans to cut a total of 16 ships from its five-year budget, reducing the number of ships funded in fiscal 2013 by three,…