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Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the United States's overuse of its shrinking Navy has caused serious backlogs in needed maintenance. For the past two decades, the United States has deployed 100 ships continuously at sea, despite a smaller fleet. As a result, the Navy has been forced to deploy ships more frequently and for longer periods of time. In 1998, only 4 percent of ship deployments lasted longer than six months. Today, every single deployment is longer than six months. Clark said this has caused many of the Navy's ships to skip maintenance, compounding problems the service faces today. "The reason we've been unable to do the maintenance is because everybody's out there getting deployed," Clark said at the Hudson Institute. "We need to keep ships in port, we need to get the F-18s back into the depots." The administration has not yet detailed what types of ships would be added to the fleet in the proposed expansion. Clark said the Navy has requested additional submarines, surface ships, and amphibious ships.

Here’s the truth: The Trump administration measured its $54 billion increase against budget caps put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act. But the Obama administration routinely spent above those caps, and it accounted for a large portion of that $54 billion in its last budget projection. “Just to keep what you have now, $35.5 billion are already spoken for,” says Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

A study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Australia’s Strategic Forum, published late last year, underlined China’s increased expansion and militarization in the South China Sea, especially since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. According to the study, by pushing “through boundaries of international law and norms of international behavior, and [taking] much higher risks than its Western counterparts,” the Asian power is “now close to claiming effective sovereignty over” the strategic waterway and has installed “military facilities on several newly created islands” in the area. Moreover, to “prepare the global space for [its territorial and military] expansionism,” the communist-ruled country, described as “a rising revisionist state” by this joint research, has carried out “an extensive program of psychological warfare.”

The shoot-and-scoot mobility of rocket trucks is just one advantage of the land-based missile systems, says David Johnson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C. Unlike anti-ship weapons carried by aircraft or naval vessels, land-based weapons can have “deep magazines,” with no serious physical limitation on the number of missiles available. And the ATACMS conversion may just be the start, as the US military develops a next generation of land-based missiles that could target ships in any military theater of operation. “ATACMS is attractive because it’s already been developed—you may have to change the guidance technology, but it’s an approved system,” Johnson says. “Whether it’s an interim solution or just an idea to start thinking of how to solve the problem, long-ranged fire is an advantage that these systems will bring to those theaters that will complement joint military operations.”…The US military could sidestep this dilemma if it chose to “emulate China by fielding mobile, land-based missile forces of its own,” said Evan Montgomery, a senior fellow at CSBA, in a recent report titled “Reinforcing the Front Line: US Defense Strategy and the Rise of China.” Land-based anti-ship missiles positioned on the territory of U.S. allies could provide the same reassurance while also being much less vulnerable militarily—and perhaps reduce the overall risk of open war by acting as a powerful deterrent.

Speaking on Capitol Hill at the rollout of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments' report on the structure of the future fleet, Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he wants to open up a new contract competition on the frigate's design, entertaining both U.S. and foreign proposals. "We've got to look at the challenges we're facing that the littoral combat ship does not address," he said. Speaking to reporters following the briefing, McCain said he plans to hold hearings in the subcommittee on seapower to discuss the frigate's evolving requirements and how to proceed on the program.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to hold hearings on the Navy’s frigate program amidst calls to open the competition to more domestic and foreign designs. McCain – a constant critic of the Littoral Combat Ship, which serves as the basis for the Navy’s frigate plans – told reporters on Tuesday that hearings before the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee would seek to reexamine the entire frigate program. “The frigate acquisition strategy should be revised to increase requirements to include convoy air defense, greater missile capability and longer endurance,” he said at an event outlining the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ recent U.S. Navy fleet architecture study, reported Inside the Navy. “When you look at some of the renewed capabilities, naval capabilities, that both the Russians and the Chinese have, it requires more capable weapon systems.”