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Katherine Blakeley, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the Pentagon’s best hope to authorize a new BRAC round is to tie it to the military strategy Defense Secretary James Mattis is currently preparing, so that BRAC is useful even under a significant military buildup. “If you frame it right, you might be able to get more support,” Blakeley said.

The ancient Greeks took tragedy seriously. At the very height of Athenian power in the 5th century B.C., in fact, citizens of the world’s first democracy gathered annually to experience tragedy. Great theatrical productions were staged, presented to the entire community, and financed by the public treasury. While the dialogue and plot lines varied, the form, and the lesson, remained consistent. Prominent individuals fell from great heights due to their own errors, ignorance, and hubris. The injunction was clear: The destiny of society was in the hands of fallible men, and even in its hour of triumph that society was always perched on the abyss of catastrophic failure.

And Bryan Clark, a naval team analyst at the defense policy think tank CSBA, told TWS via email that "It is reasonable to assume he was referring to the submarines already reported to be operating in the area: USS Michigan and USS Cheyenne." Clark added that the revelation was "not particularly troubling" because so little was actually conveyed in Trump's comments: "It would not be unusual for two submarines to be operating in the East China Sea at any given time, and POTUS was not specific enough to help another country gain intelligence by trying to find or track the submarines," he said.

He avoided anything truly embarrassing or catastrophic (although I’m sure the Israelis chuckled when Trump arrived in Israel and announced that he had just gotten back from the Middle East). And when you add in all of the strain that the White House was under in the weeks prior to this trip, Trump’s advisers can pat themselves on the back for having pulled off a trip without major incident. We should be clear, though -- one reason the trip came off fairly well is that Trump started by visiting two countries, Israel and Saudi Arabia, that were eager and even desperate to please him. And although Trump’s rather harsh tone and cringe-worthy personal interactions at the NATO summit may not qualify as gaffes -- they simply reflected his true self -- they do mean that Trump undoubtedly missed an opportunity to really establish himself as the leader of the Atlantic alliance.

“If there was something wrong with the program then I would hazard a guess that the cuts would be much, much more significant than $20 million,” said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A $20 million reduction is “really not that significant” in the context of a $55 billion-plus acquisition project, he added. “It would be erroneous to conclude that this is any kind of a signal of concern or displeasure” on the part of lawmakers, he said. “It’s certainly not going to cause any kind of a slippage to the program.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, attributed the problem to a disconnect between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and OMB. "The Navy knew there were industrial base concerns with only buying one LCS in FY-18, but was told by OSD not to address modernization in this budget and to focus on readiness," Clark, a former Navy official, told Inside Defense in an email. "Therefore, the Navy stayed with the shipbuilding plan that was published in the FY-17 budget, which had one LCS in FY-18." But the decision created problems for the Trump administration, which does not want shipyards laying off workers during a promised naval buildup, Clark wrote. "OMB therefore told OSD and the Navy to tell Congress that DOD would reevaluate the LCS number for FY-18 to ensure the LCS shipyards remain viable for the planned FY-20 frigate competition," he wrote. "This was something the Navy intended to do anyway, and OSD and OMB should have simply addressed it upfront in the budget documents and briefs."