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It’s been rough sailing for the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship. The speedy, warship has come under fire for being lightly-armed, weakly-built, undermanned, and prone to rusting—and yet, at the same time, way too expensive. And in recent months, four of the 400-foot-long warships—half of the Littoral Combat Ships currently in commission—have suffered serious engine breakdowns, possible signs of systemic problems with the ship’s design and operating procedures. As if that weren’t enough for the beleaguered vessel, David Giles, a prominent ship-designer, is accusing the Navy of stealing his concepts for a high-speed cargo ship and illegally applying them...

DENVER -- Thousands saw a plane circling the Denver metro area late Wednesday morning, questioning where it may have come from and what it may be doing. Officials at a host of federal organizations had few answers. Denver7 began tracking a flight named IRON99 as it traversed from California over the pacific. It traveled over the Rocky Mountains and eventually over the Denver metro area. Its arrival over the Denver metro is what prompted questions from a host of locals who saw it circling, questioning what it might have been doing. Visually, the plane circled in a racetrack-style oval shape...

A routine training flight by the U.S. Navy’s E-6B Mercury “doomsday plane” captured the attention of sky-watchers this week in Colorado. The four-engine command-and-control plane based on Boeing Co.’s 707 airliner on Wednesday took off from Travis Air Force Base in California and circled over Denver before continuing on to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. It was apparently the hour-long racetrack holding pattern that turned the heads. “Did you see this today?” a newscaster at the KMGH, the local ABC affiliate, asked during a broadcast. “There was this plane just circling the metro, circling and circling, and many of...

The Zumwalt class stealth destroyer has become a floating example of just how miserably bastardized major defense acquisition programs can get. Now that the news has broke that the ship’s twin Advanced Gun Systems (AGS) won’t even have any ammunition to fire, because each shell costs nearly a million dollars, the Navy should quickly take another, highly proven route to replace the AGS mission set, and even expand it in the process. One of the shining technological stars of recent military operations abroad is the Army’s and the Marine’s High Mobility Mobile Rocket Artillery System, better known as HiMARS. The...

Roy D. Mercer prank phone call to a Navy Recruiter. Roy D. Mercer is a fictional character created by disc jockeys Brent Douglas and Phil Stone on radio station KMOD-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Brent Douglas, who performs Mercer's voice, uses the character as a vehicle for comedy sketches in which he performs prank calls. (Video)

USS ‘Zumwalt.’ Photo via Wikipedia On Oct. 15, 2016 in Baltimore on the U.S. East Coast, the U.S. Navy commissioned the guided-missile destroyer USS Zumwalt into service following a protracted and costly development. Six hundred feet long and displacing 14,500 tons, Zumwalt — the first of three stealthy land-attack destroyers — is America’s largest surface combatant in generations. But she’s not alone in her weight class. While the Americans were celebrating Zumwalt’s entry into service, on the other side of the world at a shipyard in Shanghai, the Chinese navy was hard at work on its own 14,000-ton-displacement surface warship. The Type 055 just...

"Norfolk is at risk over the next few decades if we don't do something to slow down sea level rise," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told a gathering in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval complex [1] in the world, is located in southeastern Virginia. "All our bases are in some way or other at risk," Mabus said. And that's not the only risk posed by climate change, Mabus said. The warming planet also expands the Navy's mission: "We're the first responders. We're the ones -- the Navy and Marine Corps are the ones sent. We get...

Multiple missiles have been fired at a US warship in the Red Sea - but there are no casualties, a US admiral says. More to follow...

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Dynamic Duo symbolized U.S. military airpower. The Air Force had its powerful F-15 Eagle air superiority fighter. But the Navy had the sophisticated swing-wing F-14 Tomcat, glamorized by the movie Top Gun. Yet had events worked out differently, the aircraft that Tom Cruise flew could have been an… F-15 Eagle? For a time, the Navy actually considered a carrier version of the F-15. The F-15N, or "Sea Eagle" as it was unofficially dubbed, was proposed by McDonnell Douglas in 1971, according to author Dennis Jenkins in his "McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle: Supreme Heavy-Weight...

PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The Navy and the Marine Corps are studying installing a vertical launch system in its San Antonio class of amphibious warships that would allow the ships to field larger offensive missiles, service officials told USNI News this week. The director of expeditionary warfare in the chief of naval operation’s office (OPNAV N95) told USNI News on Thursday both services were studying installing the VLS systems but that at the moment there was no program of record to back fit the capability into the hulls. “It’s certainly an asset we’d like to have,” Marine Maj. Gen. Chris Owens...

The US military has launched strikes on radar sites in Yemen, the Pentagon announced, according to Reuters. The move comes in response to failed attacks on the US navy destroyer USS Mason. According to the Pentagon’s initial assessments, three “radar sites” in the Houthi rebel-controlled area of Yemen were destroyed in the attack. The US military vowed to respond to “any further threat to our ships and commercial traffic,” according to a statement cited by Reuters.

The Navy and Lockheed Martin are looking at developing a variant of the LRASM missile that fires from a deck-launcher on a ship - as opposed to having a weapon that only fires from aircraft and vertical launch tubes. Lockheed Martin is developing a new deck-mounted launcher for the emerging Long Range Anti-Ship Missile engineered to semi-autonomously track and destroy enemy targets at long ranges from both aircraft and surface ships. The weapon, called the LRASM, is a collaborative effort between Lockheed, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency, or DARPA. The LRASM, which is...

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Following the completion of its review earlier this year, the Navy announced Sept. 29, it will modernize all rating titles for Sailors with the establishment of a new classification system that will move towards occupational specialty codes similar to how the other services categorize skill sets. "In modernizing our enlisted rating system we are not only giving our Sailors increased opportunities within the Navy, such as a higher level of flexibility in training and detailing, but also increasing their opportunities when they transition out of the service. In aligning the descriptions of the work our Sailors do...

Next month the first DDG-1000 Zumwalt class stealth destroyer will be commissioned into US Navy service. The program has been through three name changes since it began two decades ago and the design’s planned production run has been slashed dramatically from nearly three dozen hulls to a measly three. The truth is that the assault on the Zumwalts started long before production was cut. The ship you see today, even in all its exotic glory, is the sad result of a long series of illogical cost-cutting initiatives and spastic fiscal re-prioritizations by the Navy. These misguided measures left the final...

Intelligence Specialist 2nd Class Janaye Ervin is currently facing potential administrative action for failing to show respect to America’s national symbols, Military.com reports. According to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickman spokesman Bill Doughty, Ervin would not stand for the national anthem while in full uniform Sept. 19.. .. “On September 19,2016, while in uniform, I made the conscious decision to not stand for the Star Spangled Banner because I feel like a hypocrite, singing about “land of the free” when, I know that only applies to some Americans,” Ervin wrote in a Facebook post. “I will gladly stand again, when ALL...

Ervin explained in her Facebook post that on September 19, "while in uniform, I made the conscious decision to not stand for the Star Spangled Banner because I feel like a hypocrite, singing about 'land of the free' when, I know that only applies to some Americans." Ervin said in the post that she was punished by Navy officials and that the "equipment I need to do my Naval job" was taken away.

A sailor who refused to stand for morning colors may now face administrative action, Military.com reported late Wednesday. Naval Education and Training Command spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows did not detail the specific actions the Navy is taking against the young, African-American sailor. The young woman is training at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Pensacola, Fla., and is expected to continue training with her class. She sailor posted an eight-minute video to Facebook late last month explaining why she was following in the footsteps of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick by not standing during the national anthem....

PARIS --- After spending billions of dollars, the US Navy has finally abandoned the Littoral Combat Ship concept, saying it will turn the first four LCSs into training ships and that all future vessels will be equipped for a single combat mission. Although deliberately worded to minimize its import, the US Navy statement below is a clear acknowledgement that the LCS concept has been an abysmal failure. But, even as it looks to mitigate the disastrous effects of having ordered a dozen LCS at once, before checking whether they performed as claimed (they have not), the Navy makes no mention...

Hull for hull, at least one landlocked country can match Canada's Atlantic fleet. How the Royal Canadian Navy stacks up on the high seas In 2017, Canada's last destroyer, HMCS Athabaskan, will be retired, forcing the Royal Canadian Navy to lean on the U.S. to protect its ships from air attack. Last year, the vessel, flagship of the Atlantic fleet, twice broke down while at sea. Meanwhile, even Canada's newly renovated submarines won't last more than a few years without a few billion dollars in upgrades. Critics have called the Royal Canadian Navy "decayed," "neglected" and "embarrassing." But how small...

Not an AP photo: NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) — The U.S. Navy’s futuristic Zumwalt destroyer has arrived in Rhode Island for its first port visit since leaving the shipyard to join the fleet. The stealthy destroyer arrived at Naval Station Newport Thursday afternoon. It left Bath Iron Works in Maine, where it was built, on Wednesday. It’s headed to its commissioning in Baltimore, then to its homeport in San Diego.