In the last year Japan has moved from making its first appearance at an international air show, the 2024 Singapore event, to providing radars to the Philippines and engaging in a full court press to sell the Mogami frigate to Australia.
In addition, South Korea will buy four new frigates and create a new air-to-air missile; all told, the three projects will represent roughly $4 billion in investments.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
The first 12 Constellation-class frigates will all be based out of Everett, Wash.
By using proven technology, the frigate program is trying to prevent the kind of high-tech teething troubles that bedeviled the Ford-class carrier and Littoral Combat Ships.
"In practical terms, [the delay] has almost zero impact because the LCS has, for the most part, not been deployed," much in the past 15 years said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Hudson Institute.
"I don't mean to be dramatic," said Navy CNO Adm. Mike Gilday, "but I feel like if the Navy loses its head, if we go off course and we take our eyes off those things we need to focus on, I think we may not be able to recover in this century."
It's been a whirlwind of a year — and the defense establishment has plenty of thoughts on how it's unfolded and what might come next.
"The contradictions and the flaws in this report are so blatant that I think it's a pretty weak reed to lean on...given the fact that [the Trump administration] basically were just doing Obama's shipbuilding plan up until this point," says Rep. Joe Courtney
It’s unclear if Robert O’Brien’s calls for hypersonic missiles on destroyers and building more frigates indicate he is inserting himself in Pentagon budget planning.
Earlier this month, two senators -- a Republican and Democrat -- wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on the administration to sanction Turkey after the S-400's radar was turned on.
“I don’t want to build a monstrosity. But I need deeper magazines on ships than I have right now,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said today.
Cyber resilience has become a frontline mission for the US military. Breaking Defense’s new eBook rounds up key reporting from the 2025 Alamo ACE conference with the latest developments in cyber offense and defense.
In his first substantive public comments about the fleet since assuming the job in May, Kenneth Braithwaite talks about carrier cuts, pumping up shipbuilding budget, and promises from Defense secretary Esper
A video released by the Navy shows Harpoon ship-killing missiles launched by the Canadian frigate HMCS Regina and US destroyer USS Lake Erie tearing into the ship, along with a French-made Exocet missile fired by an offshore patrol vessel from Brunei.
Existing amphibious ships might be the "Swiss Army Knife of the fleet," but the Navy and Marines want an enemy who "jumps on it in the opening gambit...they're gonna have the shock of their life."
"If we do come to blows with China, it's gonna be very confused for the first 30 or 45 days, and then we must fight in a distributed fashion," said Maj. Gen. Tracy King, Marine Corps’ director of Expeditionary Warfare