PENTAGON: Despite his campaign pledge of a 350-ship fleet, President Trump’s first budget cuts Navy shipbuilding and aircraft procurement below what was enacted in 2017, documents released today reveal. Despite Trump’s criticism of President Obama’s defense plans, this budget sticks with Obama’s shipbuilding plan for 2018: eight ships. And it actually buys eight fewer aircraft… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: Consider 35 pounds of metal moving at Mach 5.8. Ten shots per minute. 1,000 shots before the barrel wears out under the enormous pressures. That’s the devastating firepower the Navy railgun program aims to deliver in the next two years, and they’re well on their way. “We continue to make great technical progress,” said… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump may have a clear preference for a “goddamned steam” catapult on the USS Ford and its successors, but his opinion is not based on any detailed Navy briefing about the ship, according to Sean Stackley, acting Navy Secretary. Trump may have derived his remarkably insightful observations about the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System… Keep reading →

Days after the Navy’s T-45 Goshawk trainers returned to flight under strict safety restrictions because of problems with their air supply, the service felt compelled to make them even stricter. An aircrew’s report of “minor headaches” prompted the tighter limits, a Navy spokesperson told Breaking Defense. Only one flight out of 92 over 48 hours reported such… Keep reading →

NATIONAL HARBOR: The long-delayed supercarrier Gerald Ford should set sail for builders’ trials this week, the head of Naval Sea Systems Command said today. If those builders’ trials and subsequent Navy acceptance trials go well, Vice Adm. Thomas Moore told reporters at the Sea-Air-Space conference here, “I think we’ll get the ship delivered in the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: If the Navy would buy one squadron of new F-18s (known as the XT, Block 3 or Advanced Super Hornet) instead of the carrier version of the F-35 it “actually improves overall mission capability, while substantially reducing cost.” But the Navy could go even one better and buy two squadrons of the new F-18, which… Keep reading →

The usefulness of the aircraft carrier, long the centerpiece of American naval power in the world, was in serious question, even by me, one year ago. Chronic underfunding, poor strategic assumptions and bad acquisition decisions had left the carrier defensively unprotected and offensively underpowered as its airwing both shrank in size and striking range. President Trump’s election and… Keep reading →

Speaking today on the hangar deck of the almost-completed aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, President Donald Trump explicitly pledged to build “the 12-carrier Navy we need.” Ever since the USS Enterprise retired in 2012, the Navy has had only 10 aircraft carriers, with the Ford soon to be commissioned as the 11th. On current plans,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Navy needs a vastly larger fleet — 414 warships — to win a great-power war, well above today’s 274 ships or even the Navy’s unfunded plan for 355, the think-tank MITRE calculates in a congressionally-chartered study. That ideal fleet would include: 14 aircraft carriers instead of today’s 11; 160 cruisers and destroyers instead… Keep reading →

UPDATED with McCain praise WASHINGTON: The Navy needs a bigger fleet of smaller ships than envisioned in its official Force Structure Assessment, says a congressionally-chartered study from the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. CSBA emphatically agrees with the Navy that the focus needs to shift from day-to-day counter-terrorism and presence operations to deterring (and if need be,… Keep reading →