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Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the Navy could potentially reach 355 ships at less cost than the CBO projected. The CBO assumed that all of the additional ships in the larger Navy would come from new construction. But the service could help increase force levels by not retiring ships as quickly as current plans call for, Clark said. “You could get to a larger fleet sooner and … with a little less cost,” he said. But it would still require about a 20 percent increase in the shipbuilding budget, he added. From a fiscal and political perspective, ramping up to 355 ships is “feasible,” Clark said. “The key will be if there’s continued perception that you need a larger Navy to deal with security challenges that the country is facing.”

A Congressionally-commissioned study of a future fleet and operational concepts for the Navy by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments released this year described how similar anti-ship capabilities could be used not just to defend against, but to contain an adversary. In the study’s example, expeditionary ground units (this case used U.S. Marines, but could just as plausibly be ASCM-equipped U.S. Army units) equipped with coastal defense ASCMs and air defenses positioned on Japan’s Southwest islands (which include the Ryukyus and Senkakus) could “contain an adversary’s power projection capabilities.” The relatively close proximity of the Southwestern islands to each other means that batteries of land-based ASCMs, especially in concert with naval and aviation support, could effectively keep China’s North Sea and East Sea fleets bottled up inside the first island chain, unable to break out into the wider Western Pacific.

Generally, a laser is expected to have more than 50 kilowatts of power to be used as a weapon. Within six to eight years, U.S. forces could begin using laser systems of more than 300 kilowatts, said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The military is also weighing the possibility of mounting lasers on drones to shoot down ballistic missiles, said Gunzinger. But the lasers will have to be much smaller before they can be used in combat aircraft. Engineers are currently running into physical limitations on how much portable power can be produced, and ways of cooling the technology.

Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the budget appeared to be heavily influenced by OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, a fiscal conservative who, as a member of the House, supported a government shutdown rather than increase federal spending. She said the administration's policy position of "paying for higher defense BCA caps with one-for-one cuts to non-defense discretionary cuts instead of an actual repeal of the BCA caps for defense" was "highly salient" to any projection or analysis of DOD's future topline. "How much money will DOD be able to ask for next year, given the deficit hawk imprimatur on FY-18?" she said. Blakeley said OMB's budget documents show flat defense spending over the five-year period known at the Pentagon as the future years defense program, or FYDP. DOD should plan for $587 billion in FY-19, $598 billion in FY-20, $612 billion in FY-21 and $624 billion in FY-22, according to OMB.

This is the question Hal Brands (who blogs over at Shadow Government) and I tackled in a recent article for Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable? Spoiler alert: We argue the Islamic State threat was not inevitable. We take considerable pains to show how different choices by Presidents George W. Bush and Obama would have likely headed off the Islamic State threat long before it reached its peak in late 2014. Nothing in our argument transfers blame for the toll from the terrorists, where it belongs, to American policymakers, who could have made different choices that would have stymied the terrorists more effectively. But weighing carefully where American policies fell short is a vital part of policy analysis and essential to doing better against whatever terrorist threats emerge after the Islamic State.

In its first year, when big changes are easiest, the White House chose domestic cuts over national security. Strengthening the U.S. military was one of the key themes of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. After saying that “our military is a disaster,” and “depleted,” he colorfully promised to make the U.S. armed forces “so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody – absolutely nobody – is gonna mess with us.” Trump painted his plans in bold strokes: increasing the size of the Army to 540,000 soldiers, adding 20,000 Marines, bringing the Air Force to at least 1,200 combat aircraft, and increasing the Navy to a fleet of some 350 ships.