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Given the low radar cross section and the ship’s ability to operate close to shore, Zumwalt could conceivably be a credible special operations insertion platform like how the service uses its guided missile and attack submarines, Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News last week. “Originally because the class had this focus on the littoral, it seems like there was always some expectation that they may do special ops off the ship. It’s always been focused on littoral environments and some of those things were baked in at the beginning,” Clark said. The additional features the Navy has added over the last ten years appeared to have increased the special mission emphasis.

To get up to speed, the Navy could join the Coast Guard's icebreaker acquisition program to provide ship design oversight and production management. It took this step in the early 2000s when the Coast Guard began its national security cutter program, according to a defense expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.

Fighting right up to the line that would clearly trigger a Western response is known as “grey zone conflict,” says Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank that has run several war games with Eastern European nations. “They’re doing a very good job of playing at the edges,” he says of the Russians. Because an obvious U.S. military response may not be considered desirable in such circumstances, there is a premium now on developing U.S. systems that can ght as surreptitiously as Russia does, by disrupting their military command and control with electronic warfare and cyberattacks, Clark says…So the Pentagon is investing more in ground-based missile systems with names such as the Long Range Precision Fires and the Multi-Mission Launcher that are not as easily detected as aircraft and can get closer to enemy targets, Clark says. The propensity of Putin to fight right up to the line that could trigger U.S. military involvement and the way Russia’s long- range air defenses are keeping U.S. forces at bay “are the two big military challenges the U.S. is just now coming to grips with,” Clark says.

Experts dismissed Carter’s demurral. “The lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam may not be publicly stated as directed against China,” said Andrew Krepinevich, president emeritus of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, “[but] diplomatic niceties aside, it is a clear and welcome sign that the United States is becoming serious about maintaining peace and stability in the region in the face of China’s increasingly belligerent behavior.” “Through its overtures to the Philippines and now Vietnam, the United States has the potential to transform China’s militarization of South China Sea islands into a military cul-de-sac, flanked by the Philippines to the east and Vietnam to the west,” said Krepinevich. “Secretary Carter deserves a great deal of credit for these encouraging initiatives to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the defense of peace, stability and respect for the rules-based international order.”

Mark Gunzinger is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments…and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources. He and his colleague at CSBA, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations Bryan Clark, have released “Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air and Missile Defenses” to serve as a how-to guide for reshaping missile defense policy and capability. Gunzinger discussed their work on National Defense Week.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the luxury of assuming that air and missile attacks on its bases and forces would either not occur or would be within the capacity of the limited defenses it has fielded,” analysts Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an influential defense policy think tank. “These assumptions are no longer valid.”