- Associated Press – Top defense leaders argued Wednesday for the U.S. to ratify a long-debated treaty governing ocean rights in order to bolster the nation’s national security interests in the Asia-Pacific region and other key global waters.

- BBC – EU naval forces have conducted their first raid on pirate bases on the Somali mainland, saying they have destroyed several boats.

- Reuters – The first of a new class of U.S. coastal warships will be sent to Singapore next spring for a roughly 10-month deployment, spotlighting a move that may stir China’s fears of U.S. involvement in South China Sea disputes.

- Daily Telegraph – A major retreat over aircraft for the Royal Navy’s new carriers will be announced today, abandoning plans to buy the conventional take-off version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, will tell MPs that the Government will now purchase the jump-jet model of the plane instead.

- Aviation Week – The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) USS Freedom is plagued by extensive corrosion and manufacturing issues more recent and serious than anything the Pentagon or prime contractor Lockheed Martin has publicly acknowledged thus far. This is based on a guided tour of the ship in dry dock, as well as sources intimately familiar with Freedom’s design, repairs and operations, U.S. Navy documents and defense analysts.

- Foreign Policy – Does the U.S. military have the resources for an Asian century?

- Associated Press – When a boat springs a leak, it’s often the Coast Guard to the rescue. But who rescues the Coast Guard when one its new ships does the same thing?

- Daily Telegraph – The Royal Navy no longer has enough warships to dedicate one to fighting piracy off the coast of Somalia all year round, it was reported.

- Pacific Standard – Is an unassuming group of Chinese bloggers who are obsessed with military hardware doing the Pentagon’s work? Or Beijing’s?

- Defense Technology International – Most aircraft slated to go onto aircraft carries have to go through an electronic magnetic interference test that bathes the design in about 200 volts per meter. But the test platform for the Navy’s unmanned carrier-launched airborne surveillance and strike (Uclass) aircraft program, will have to endure 10 times the electronic stress. Undoubtedly that means the Navy wants a design for its unmanned carrier-launched airborne surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft program that would be able to fire a permanently installed, rechargeable, anti-electronics weapon.

- Defense Technology International – The U.S. Navy’s F/A-XX strike fighter, the EA-18G Growler, an unmanned combat aircraft (currently exemplified by two X-47B test platforms) and a nascent arsenal of specialized air-launched standoff weapons are all part of a new emphasis on exploiting the electro-magnetic spectrum.

- The Atlantic – Mark Bowden writes that in April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran. Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it.

- Defense Technology International – Bill Sweetman describes how if Scotland becomes independent, there may be no place to base the UK’s ballistic missile submarine force.

- Technology Review – How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.

- San Diego Union Tribune – The Marine Corps will begin assigning women to newly opened combat jobs this year, conduct research on their physical capabilities, and in the most striking move, open the infantry officer training course to them, the commandant said in a message to all Marines Monday.

- Washington Post – The U.S. and Japanese governments said Thursday that they will move about 9,000 Marines off Okinawa to other bases in the Western Pacific, in a bid to remove a persistent irritant in the relationship between the two allies.

- The Economist – America’s navy riles China in its backyard

- DefenseTech – An exceprt from an analysis of what the J-15 will mean for China’s neighbors written last sumer by DefenseTech’s go to China guru Andrew Erickson.

- DefenseTech – Some photos of China’s entire carrier-based fighter fleet.

- Daily Telegraph – A series of errors contributed to the grounding of a nuclear-powered submarine off the west coast of Scotland more than two years ago, a report has found.