The Navy Thread

Earlier this month, a medium-long range shipboard surface-to-air missile malfunctioned and exploded above the Navy destroyer USS The Sullivans.

The scheduled missile exercise occurred on July 18 at approximately 9 a.m. off the coast of Virginia, according to the US Navy Institute.

The Navy and Huntington Ingalls are nearly one-third complete with initial construction of the soon-to-be USS Tripoli, the second new America-class amphibious assault ship slated for delivery in December, 2018.

The USS Tripoli, called LHA 7, is being built at a Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It is scheduled for launch in July, 2017, service officials said.

“LHA 7 is approximately 30% complete. Fabrication has started on 211 units, 97% of all units, and 84 grand blocks are erected — 47% of the total,” Navy spokesman Mathew Leonard told Military​.com in a written statement.

The first America-class amphib, the USS America or LHA 6, was commissioned and delivered to the Navy last year.

“The Navy and Ingalls have identified lessons learned from design and construction of LHA 6 for incorporation into design and construction of LHA 7 to improve production and quality. These lessons learned were addressed at Unit Readiness Reviews prior to the start of fabrication of each unit, for incorporation into the LHA 7 build strategy,” Leonard said.

The America-class amphibs are engineered to carry more Marine Corps F-35B Short-Take-Off-and-Landing Joint Strike Fighters, MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, CH-53 Super Stallions and UH-1Y Huey helicopters.

Designed as aviation-centric amphibs, the first two America class ships do not have well-deck for amphibious vehicles but rather are engineered with a larger hangar for aircraft, increased storage for parts and support equipment and additional aviation fuel capacity to support a higher op tempo, Navy officials said.

Technical adjustments were made to the flight deck of LHA 6 to better enable the ship to withstand the heat generated by the take-off and landing of the F-35B; these changes are being built into LHA 7 earlier in the construction process, Leonard explained.

“LHA 7 is being built as a repeat of the LHA 6 with very limited changes to the design. After delivery of LHA 6, a group of significant changes to the ship’s flight deck structure and equipment were necessary to accommodate the F-35B aircraft. These improvements are being incorporated into the basic build of LHA 7, which is expected to yield a better overall technical solution at reduced cost,” Leonard added.

The flight deck modifications to LHA 6 entail adding intercostal structural members underneath flight deck landing spots numbers 7 and 9, Navy officials explained.

“With the added structure, these two landing spots will provide the capability to perform closely timed cyclic flight operations with the F-35B without overstressing the flight deck,” a Navy official explained.

There are also numerous minor changes that were made during LHA 6 construction that will be implemented on LHA 7 to improve production and quality, Leonard explained.

The LHA 7 design will incorporate a high-tech Navy ship-based computing network called Consolidated Afloat Network and Enterprise Services, or CANES, Leonard said.

Overall, the USS Tripoli will be 844-feet long and 106-feet wide and have a weight of more than 44,000 tons. A fuel-efficient gas turbine propulsion system will bring the ship’s speed up to more than 20 knots, a Huntington Ingalls statement said.

The ship will be able to carry a crew of 1,204 and 1,871 troops, meaning the ship is being engineered to carry a Marine Expeditionary Unit, the statement added.

America class ships are outfitted with a group of technologies called a Ship Self Defense System. This includes two Rolling Aircraft Missile RIM-116 Mk 49 launchers; two Raytheon 20mm Phalanx CIWS mounts; and seven twin .50 cal. machine guns, Navy officials said.

If the reports are true, somewhere beneath the waters near Sweden's eastern coast lies a submarine. The submarine is about 65 feet long and 11 feet wide. It has no signs of damage and the hatches are closed: Whoever was aboard the submarine when it went down was unlikely to have escaped, Ocean X Team, the group who claimed to have found the submarine, announced.

Perhaps the most tantalizing clue, however, was the cyrillic language on the side. It appeared to be proof that the submarine originated in Russia. After Swedish newspaper Expressen published video of the submarine Monday, that detail provoked considerable, and understandable, attention.

Throughout the Cold War, officially neutral Sweden was harassed by Soviet submarines, most notoriously during the 1981 "Whiskey on the Rocks" incident, when a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden. Just last year, there were signs that Russia had returned to old tactics: There were sighting of unknown submarines in Swedish waters and reports of underwater radio transmissions in Russian. The Russians denied any involvement, however, and there was little clear evidence.

When news of this submarine was announced this week, speculation about Russian activity in Swedish waters quickly reappeared: In initial interviews Monday, Dennis Asberg from Ocean X Team said that it appeared that the submarine was modern, perhaps from the 1980s or 1990s. Tomas Ries, a lecturer in security policy at the Swedish Defense University, told the Expressen newspaper that it appeared to have been on a secret mission that had gone wrong. The Swedish military announced that it was investigating but refused to comment.

However, a closer inspection has led some experts to believe that the ship is not modern. In fact, it may predate even the Cold War by half a century: Russian news site Lenta.ru noted that the cyrillic lettering seen in videos of the wreck include letters used in a way that was phased out with the Russian orthographic reform of 1917-1918. After reviewing the footage, Per Andersson, a retired colonel in Sweden's coastal defense force, told Expressen that he was "very confident" that the submarine was a Russian Som-class submarine (better known by its nicknamed Catfish) that sank in 1916.

On Tuesday, the Swedish armed forces released a statement that said they supported this theory, saying it the wreckage was "most likely" that of the Russian Catfish vessel that had sunk after a collision with a Swedish vessel during the World War I. Ocean X Team's Twitter account confirmed that this could be a possibility, but said more investigation was needed.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time that supposed evidence of a Russian submarine in Swedish waters has been a false alarm: In 1995, Sweden revealed that the undetected underwater sounds that had lead to a hunt for Russian submarines were in fact created by minks or other small, otter-like animals. In Russian state media, Sweden's reaction to the submarine provoked mocking. "Here we go again?" read the headline to a dismissive story on Sputnik News that predicted that the submarine would later turn out to be a fishing boat.

However, both countries may be glad if the submarine isn't modern. Sweden may well be keen to avoid open conflict with Russia – but many Russians still bitterly remember how 118 people died aboard a sunken Russian submarine in 2000.

The Navy has created a new task force to address ballistic missile defense and integrated air and missile defense in the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) area of responsibility.

Commander, Task Force Sixty Four (CTF 64) out of Naples, Italy, will address the growth in these mission areas by providing a “captain level commander for maritime units focused on BMD and Aegis Ashore and a Navy component planning staff to support the Area Air Defense Commander,” according to a July 23 memo.

The task force will stand up on October 1 and report to U.S. 6th Fleet. Its mission is “to execute operational and tactical integrated air and missile defense including mission planning, execution, operational and tactical control of assigned units for Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe/U.S. Naval Forces Africa, U.S. Sixth Fleet and to provide direct support for BMD planning,” according to the memo.

The task force’s creation comes as the Navy has sent its third Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense-equipped destroyer to Rota, Spain, and is preparing to send the fourth this fall. The four ships, from their European homeport, will dedicate their time to both routine missions like partnership-building exercises as well as missile defense patrols on behalf of the United States and NATO. An advance team has already deployed to the first Aegis Ashore missile defense site in Romania, and the second site in Poland will be operational in 2018.

The task force will help organize air and missile defense and ballistic missile defense missions as forces in the region continue to grow through the rest of the decade.

Creation of CTF-64 comes as Russian forces have stepped up air patrols since the seizure of the Crimean region of Ukraine in 2014.