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The committee's mark of the fiscal year 2018 defense policy bill directs the Navy to begin designing a smaller carrier. The three organizations that conducted force structure assessments, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Mitre Corp., and the Navy's assessment division in the office of the chief of naval operations (N81), all recommended the service add smaller aircraft carriers to its future fleet.

Taken overall, the CBO estimates compared for example to the similar 2015 study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, (CSBA) are inflated by a whopping $450 billion...

When the CSBA study came out, the same chorus of nuclear opponents complained modernization was unaffordable and unnecessary even at that price. They lost that argument, and a solid majority of Congress continued to support going forward with the strategic deterrent modernization program, which is the very bedrock for all of U.S. and allied security.

Rather, the Turkish president sends another signal – following such moves as signing a deal with Russia to purchase S-400 air defense missiles – that Turkey is a force to be reckoned with, not lectured to. The recent arrests demonstrate Erdoğan’s strength to his domestic constituency and signal his determination to lead a “New Turkey,” one that does not need the West. In fact, Erdoğan may have an interest in keeping Gülen at arm’s length, as former Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman suggested. The accused coup plotter’s ongoing stay on American soil provides Erdoğan with endless justification to criticize the U.S. – criticism that buys him a lot of political capital at home as well as in the region.

But months into the administration, and with work on next year’s budget already wrapping up, many future Trump appointees will have little opportunity to contribute to the big projects that will likely define their tenures, said Eric Edelman, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration.

Hal Brands and Colin Kahl make the characteristic argument that Trump’s approach to the world — resting on economic nationalism, extreme homeland security, amoral transactionalism, and aloof militarism — may undermine American leadership in the international system over time. Elizabeth Saunders similarly describes a Potemkin-like approach to foreign policy that slowly erodes the pillars of American power.

One way forward would be to begin rewarding officers for prudent decisions in putting the brakes on deployments of ill-prepared surface ships, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., and a former strategic planner for the Navy.

“Right now what happens is decisions on whether to say no to a particular deployment generally rise all the way to the level of the chief of naval operations,” Clark said.

“Because people don’t want to go and tell CNO, hey, I can’t do this, below that level the can-do attitude sort of persists,” he said.

Such decisions should perhaps be pushed down to the fleet-forces command level where an officer has enough seniority to be able to stand up and say no but is still close enough to a readiness problem to directly understand it, he said…

“In theory it’s a great idea, but in practice it’s probably infeasible,” said Jan van Tol, who retired as a captain from the Navy in 2007 after a career that included command of three warships