The Navy is pushing back against a Government Accountability Office report issued last week saying the Littoral Combat Ship's anti-submarine warfare package will not add significant capability to the fleet and criticizing the early deployment of LCS-1 and LCS-2.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense plans to use the M80 Stiletto, its small, speedy prototype ship commissioned in 2006, as a test bed for new technologies, and there are no plans to use it again for operational missions, a Defense Department official told Inside the Navy last week.

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command is hoping to carry the concept of the Common Submarine Radio Room installed on guided missile, ballistic missile and attack submarines over to the surface ship fleet, according to a broad agency announcement.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' push for efficiencies has prompted the Navy to launch a new study of its prepositioning program, according to a directive from Navy Under Secretary Robert Work.

The Coast Guard will do its best to bring in assets that were formerly part of the Deepwater acquisition program on budget, according to commandant Adm. Robert Papp, but the four-star conceded that factors beyond the service's control may inflate costs.

Louisiana lawmakers met recently with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus at the Capitol Hill office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to discuss the closure of Northrop Grumman's Avondale shipyard in Louisiana, but a Landrieu aide told Inside the Navy little progress was made.

The Commandant of the Coast Guard says that he may have short-term solutions to the shortage of ice breakers in the service's fleet, but has yet to discuss with the White House whether to extend the lives of the existing icebreakers or build new ones from scratch.

The Navy has re-opened negotiations with the two teams competing for the Littoral Combat Ship contract, the service said on Aug. 23.

The Navy could see its fleet fall to as few as 250 ships if overall government budget pressures start to have a strong impact on defense spending, Congressional Research Service naval analyst Ronald O'Rourke argues in an article published August 20 in the Autumn 2010 Naval War College Review.

Fleet Forces Command plans to tweak its methods for transitioning new technologies to the fleet, according to a memo posted to the command's website by Adm. John Harvey.

China is expanding its nuclear attack submarine force in the coming years and may double its fleet of quiet diesel submarines as the country seeks a long-term balance of conventional and nuclear-powered attack subs, a senior Pentagon official told reporters last week.

The Navy is reaching out to industry to get help in improving the readiness and reliability of the diesel engines on LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious assault ships, which have suffered several high-profile mishaps involving engine contaminants that have sidelined several ships in the class.

Fleet Forces Command has issued instructions calling for the end of "continuous maintenance" and the re-establishment of dedicated depot maintenance availabilities to redress maintenance problems, particularly with regards to Aegis radar systems, that were uncovered earlier this year.

Senior Navy and Marine Corps officials are having a major debate over whether to lay up two of the three maritime prepositioning squadrons to address Defense Secretary Robert Gates' efficiencies initiative, service sources tell Inside the Pentagon.

A load-on load-off crane designed to aid with seabasing capabilities has completed science and technology testing at the Office of Naval Research and will soon be transitioned to Program Executive Office Ships and N42.

The future of amphibious warfare as envisioned in the beginnings of the AirSea Battle concept will likely look vastly different from the current idea of amphibious assault due to the proliferation of precision warfare, according to the under secretary of the Navy.

Cost baselines for four of the assets in the Coast Guard's ill-fated acquisition program -- including its largest planned buy, the Offshore Patrol Cutter -- have not been re-examined since the service took over the project from Integrated Coast Guard Systems three years ago, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The Defense Department's big push for efficiencies will shape the costly SSBN(X) nuclear ballistic missile submarine program and future blocks of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, according to Pentagon industrial policy chief Brett Lambert.

Days after the Pentagon's top weapons tester decried reliability rates of the Virginia-class attack submarine, the program office pushed back against allegations of reliability problems, telling Inside the Navy that any depiction of the submarine as unreliable is "inaccurate."

Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) has appealed to President Obama to prevent the closure of the Northrop Grumman-owned Avondale shipyard in his district in 2013 by steering some defense contracts to it, according to a spokesman.