News

The most likely scenario for the repair is that the Navy will have to send Fitz home on a heavy-lift vessel, said Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  "There is no way they can get it repaired overseas,” Clark said. “What they are doing now is trying to determine whether it can be repaired enough to make it home on its own power or if they should put it on a heavy-lift ship. From there it’s going to go into a long repair period at one of the private yards.” Clark said General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego would be a logical place to do the repair.

Trump is handling the military as a businessman would, said Peter Haynes, a senior fellow focusing on defense strategy and warfare at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 

One thing the Trump and Obama administrations agree on, regarding the military, is the need for another round of Base Realignment and Closure. A window appeared to open recently that would have allowed for BRAC, but that window may be closing. CDI Straus Military Reform Project director Mandy Smithberger and CSBA research fellow Katherine Blakeley discussed the issue with Government Matters.

The most likely scenario would be a modified version of the America-class big-deck amphib that would add two catapults to launch aircraft, similar to World War II-era straight-deck escort carriers. 

The newest Ford-class vessels have a service life of 50 years, but the Pentagon may find itself confronted more forcefully by China and Russia by the 2030s, according to a January 2017 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a nonprofit think tank that advocates for a Navy reconfiguration. 

Congress has been generous in raising the budget caps each year since they were enacted in 2011 — but not as generous as Trump wants them to be in fiscal 2018. Trump wants to nearly triple the average annual raise in the defense caps of $18.5 billion, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.