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Primarily, the challenge is how to address the onset of great power competition and how to deter great power conflict with revisionist and increasingly aggressive states like China and Russia. But it’s not only deterrence, in practical value it’s what kind of deterrence. In the ‘90s our understanding of deterrence was essentially deterrence by compellence – if you invade this country then we will come in, and after three or four months of assembling our forces, we will go in and kick you out of that country.  Given the anti-access/area denial networks developed by the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians, for example, which threaten our ability to project power globally and come to the defense of our allies, that approach may not effectively deter such powers from aggression. In a globalized era, that approach could prove prohibitively costly as well. Political and economic interests are intertwined and the world so interconnected, so even if we’re the victor, the economic and political effects of any kind of conflict would range from problematic to catastrophic. How then do you reshape how you do deterrence? One of the things that we argue for in “Restoring American Seapower” is a “deny-and-punish” approach. Instead of a delayed, but massive response to aggression, what I’m going to do is position more offensively equipped, more networked, and more globally arrayed and regionally savvy naval forces in areas of likely aggression to deny the threat’s goals and as well as punish the aggressor there and around the rest of the world. Those are the kinds of primary challenges that we’re looking at, from both an operational and strategic angle.

Kate Blakeley, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who previously worked at the Congressional Research Service, said Democrats are in a good negotiating position. “Democrats have some leverage, because you need eight Democrats to pass this spending bill in the Senate,” she said. “The Democrats are keeping mum, but they would have a hard time not passing a relatively clean bill that keeps non-defense discretionary spending at the [2011 Budget Control Act] level, without deep cuts. Democrats might also accept more OCO money than the $5 billion in the House appropriations bill if that’s the price of a good, clean bill.”

It would have been a quick and easy fix if the military had simply sent out a press release detailing Vinson’s plans and clarifying the initial release, said Brian Clark, retired Navy officer who was a senior aide to former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A flawed narrative might have been stopped in its tracks and prevented rattling a region on the brink of conflict, he said.  “It’s really shocking that they let this go for nearly two weeks without trying to correct the record,” he said.

The five months DoD has to spend its newly appropriated funds really won’t be that hard, Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio. “They’ve been anticipating this [money] for literally over a year at this point. They submitted the fiscal 2017 request way back in February of 2016, we are not almost seven months through the fiscal year. They’ve had a lot of time to think and to plan and to prepare,” Blakeley said. “They have a really good sense of where all this funding is going to go.”

“It was aimed at both our allies and adversaries, and it appears to have worked, to some degree,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush’s administration who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. But Mr. Edelman drew some critical distinctions between the two presidents. Nixon’s “madman” act generally masked a calculated strategy, which is not yet evident in Mr. Trump’s approach. Nixon’s national-security team was better coordinated than Mr. Trump’s, at least so far. And even in Nixon’s case, the madman strategy worked better later in his presidency, when he and his aides were more seasoned.

“The Trump team certainly has opened the aperture,” former Pentagon adviser Hal Brands, now at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in the District, told The Washington Times in March