The Pentagon and Navy leadership say the USS Harry S. Truman must retire so modernization might live. The White House wants to blow that plan up.

“In the ideal world we would want our competitors to respond to our moves instead of us responding to them… We would want to make many of the first moves on our own.”

While two carriers attracting most of the attention, a smaller US footprint is being established between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where Russia — and Turkey — are raising concerns.

The Coast Guard wants to operate more consistently in the Arctic, but has a fraction of the icebreakers that Moscow can deploy.

Navy Research Lab’s LARADO (Laser-sheet Anomaly Resolution and Debris Observation) project conjures images of a Wild West cattle drive, and in a way that is apropos as space scientists have long been attempting to wrangle better estimates of the population of on-orbit debris.

WASHINGTON: The Navy is scrambling to write its new acquisition and operational playbook on the fly, a decision based as much on what US rivals are doing as it is on what the service hasn’t done in recent decades. The construction and innovation booms being undertaken by the Chinese — and to a lesser extent… Keep reading →

While the Air Force bet the farm on F-35, the Navy put its airpower eggs in multiple baskets, from legacy fighters to new drones.

US forces ready to do more as other nations and Lockheed Martin watch for clues as to how an F-35 fell out of the sky without warning.

In future wars, “one of our battles is going to be just getting off of the pier,” the Navy’s top civilian said, because of cyber attacks against Navy forces and infrastructure.

WASHINGTON: The entire US government — not just the Pentagon — needs to wake up to the intertwined threats of cyber warfare and political subversion, Army and National Security Agency officials say. It’ll take a major cultural change to get the whole of government to compete effectively in the grey zone between peace and war.… Keep reading →