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Predictable opposition scenarios, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or Russian incursions into the Baltics, could happen so quickly that the United States would be forced to attack and dislodge units as a first response, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“We’ve been talking in every other meeting I’m going to about how networks are being degraded… but we’re going to rely on this exquisite network to do air defense,” David Johnson, a retired colonel, thinktank scholar, and top advisor to former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, told an Association of the US Army conference last week. “The question I ask is, what is the backup?”

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is looking to up the ante on electronic warfare by mating EW and computer networks in a whole new way to launch cyber-attacks, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) says in a recently released report. “The PLA believes that EW is one of the best ways to counter stronger military powers, CSBA notes in its report, “Reinforcing the Front Line U.S. Defense Strategy and The Rise of China. In addition to developing a variety of dedicated EW platforms, CSBA says, the PLA “has embraced the concept of Integrated Network Electronic Warfare (INEW), which seeks to meld EW and computer network into a ‘hybrid capability.’” CSBA says, “INEW promises to make network warfare relevant to areas traditionally dominated by electronic warfare by enabling network attacks to ‘bridge the air-gap’ and enter relatively unprotected, isolated battlefield networks.”

Katherine Blakeley, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Republicans are likely to try to attach a defense supplemental to the broader fiscal 2017 appropriations bill, which needs to be passed by April 28 to avoid a federal government shutdown. That move would put maximum pressure on reluctant lawmakers in both parties to support additional funding for the military. “The more leverage you can put on any one pivot point,” she said, “the greater the likelihood it will come through by hook or by crook.”

McCain praised the conclusion of both the CSBA and MITRE studies that the Navy should halt procurement of Littoral Combat Ships and future frigates as soon as possible, and instead move toward a more powerful small surface combatant design. McCain has been a frequent critic of the LCS program. McCain was particularly impressed by the "comprehensiveness" of the CSBA study, according to his statement. He said CSBA's study should be the "starting point for the new administration's review of naval forces." President Trump campaigned on a goal of building the Navy from its current size of about 270 ships up to 350 vessels. "It proposes necessary new strategic, operational, basing, and force structure recommendations that deserve immediate consideration by Navy leaders," McCain said. The CSBA study makes a host of recommendations, perhaps most notably moving away from the Navy's current basing strategy and instead creating a forward deployed set of "deterrence forces" to be augmented with a "maneuver force" in the event of a crisis.

Another alternative structure, developed by Bryan Clark at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, proposes a fleet architecture “to provide the United States an advantage in great power competition with China and Russia or against capable and strategically located regional powers such as Iran.”…