Bryan Clark, a retired nuclear submariner at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis and coauthor of a fleet-architecture study published by CSBA earlier this year, explained, “In our analysis, we expect surface combatants to quickly expend their VLS magazines even in a small confrontation and need to leave the conflict area to reload.” Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper at the Ferrybridge Group and the Hudson Institute and a coauthor with Clark on the CSBA fleet-architecture study, added that “Distributed Lethality,” the surface fleet’s new doctrine for a more offensive posture, “succeeds or fails on the strength of the logistics that support it. If a ship has to head back to a selected port to reload, it is out of action for an unacceptable period of time.”
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