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What madman would propose adding diesel submarines to the U.S. Navy’s all-nuclear silent service? There are a few. The topic came up at an early March hearing before the U.S. House Seapower and Force Projection Subcommittee. Representatives from three teams that have compiled competing “Future Fleet Architecture” studies convened to debate their visions with the committee. Published by the Navy Staff itself, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the MITRE Corporation, the studies explore everything from overall ship numbers to the types of hulls comprising the future fleet to the mix between manned and unmanned platforms.

Because companies won't hire excess workers in advance, they will have a huge challenge in expanding their workforces rapidly if a shipbuilding boom materializes, said Bryan Clark, who led strategic planning for the Navy as special assistant to the chief of Naval Operations until 2013.

 “The key to survival on the battlefield is not being seen,” said David Johnson, a leading scholar and former top advisor to the Chief of Army Staff. “If you saw the BAE autonomous tank… it is radically smaller than anything we have now, and smaller for a vehicle on the battlefield is a good thing.”

The traditional post-Cold War American way of war, focused on long-range strike and the rapid establishment of air and sea superiority, is changing. The United States is confronting new challenges by developing operational concepts that create a more favorable strategic environment and allow the United States to prevail in conflict with the military it already fields. In 2010, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments produced a report proposing an Air-Sea Battle (ASB) concept that outlined China’s ability to create no-go zones and the imperative for the U.S. military to withstand an initial attack and then execute a high-intensity campaign. The Pentagon sought to distance itself from the assertive concept, which was particularly controversial in its emphasis on strikes against the Chinese mainland, and rolled out a replacement joint concept. More geopolitically neutral and with a greater substantive role for the Army, the Joint Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC) concept is still at its core very similar to ASB. As it considers the role of new operational concepts in the Western Pacific, the Pentagon should acknowledge that access is contested, but not concede that access has been denied. Continued access and maneuver may remain possible even in hostile environments. Alongside the third offset, the United States should utilize cost imposition strategies and encourage China to spend on operationally weaker areas, particularly ones where it will cost more for China to address its shortcomings than it would cost for the United States to exploit them. Tactically, the United States should emphasize resilience, thereby reducing the attractiveness of early strikes. Finally, instead of creating one operational concept, the Pentagon should produce multiple operational concepts, including concepts for lower-intensity conflicts that originate in maritime and territorial disputes.

"In a more-robust budgetary environment, when some of the budget pressure is off, if you feel like there's more money going around you don't have to twist people's arms as much to have their programs come in at the budget numbers," says Katherine Blakeley, a former defense policy analyst with the Congressional Research Service now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said: “That’s $3 million to shoot down a three-or-four-hundred-dollar drone. . . . What if you could do that with a beam of light that costs a buck?”