* Poland has ordered another 5 of Airbus Military’s C295 light tactical transports, for an undisclosed price. That will bring its fleet to 16, making Poland the type’s biggest single customer.
* The 3,750t Dutch OPV, HNLMS Holland, is impressing American allies over at Key West, FL, as it begins work in the Caribbean.
* While sailing on its first mission, into the Persian Gulf, USS New York (LPD 21) becomes the 1st American ship of its type to embark an Army AH-64D Apache attack helicopter.
* The US Navy is going to resume sink exercises (sinkex) during RIMPAC later this month.
* Rear Admiral Davyd Thomas, Deputy Chief of the Royal Australian Navy between 2008 and 2011, has been appointed Vice President of Austal’s defense business.
* MBDA continues work on its SPEAR Capability 3 project, which will re-use components from the dual-mode Brimstone light strike missile in a larger body with a 75 km range. The idea is to have each F-35A/C bay able to fit 1 MBDA Meteor long-range air-to-air missile (which just finished testing) and 4 SPEAR 3s. Britain’s F-35B, with its smaller and oddly-shaped bays, will be more of a challenge, and neither SPEAR nor Meteor are slated to be part of the F-35’s initial integrated weapon set in 2018.
* The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) published a code of conduct [PDF] to guide its members now that UAV civilian use seems poised to boom.
* The Christian Science Monitor provides some background context to explain the political backlash in South Korea that halted an expected agreement with Japan to share military intelligence. They have the shared threat in North Korea, but they also have a shared history – and that’s the problem.
* “Offshore control” [PDF], a strategy to deal with China offered by T.X. Hammes at the National Defense University.