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McCain was speaking at the roll-out of a new report, "Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy," by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The report was one of three commissioned by Congress to study new capabilities and organizational plans for the Navy's future fleet. The CSBA report specifically advocates for truncating the LCS program as soon as possible and building a larger guided missile frigate, similar to what McCain supports. The study also calls for building 71 frigates; the frigate, like the LCS, falls into the small surface combatant family of ships. The Navy currently has a requirement for just 52 small surface combatants, according to the service's 2016 Force Structure Assessment.

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.”

ABSTRACT: The authors discuss the erosion of US military primacy and the corresponding dangers for American grand strategy and international security. They analyze three options for restoring strategic solvency and recommend a signi cant expansion of US defense resources to bring capabilities back into alignment with US global commitments. 

Undersea threats to the homeland have concerned U.S. leaders since long-range submarines joined enemy navies about a century ago.