“Our adversaries look at our budgets process and exploit it,” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Countries such as China and Russia, Clark explained, send representatives to neighbor nations and tell those governments they can’t rely U.S. because the Navy currently is stressed in terms of meeting all the mission needs. “To be deterred, aggressors must be presented with the possibility that their goals will be denied,” Clark said. “It will also require a larger fleet, as regions such as Northern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean become hot spots for great power competition and confrontation.”
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