In response to a question from subcommittee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he thought the RFI was too vague and questioned whether the U.S. Navy actually knows what it wants.
“I think what [the RFI] does is open up the aperture too much in terms of what that future frigate could be,” Clark said. “It makes it seem like it could be anything from a ship that’s only able to do surface warfare and [surveillance] missions in support of distributed lethality, the Navy’s new surface concept — a relatively low-end ship or less-capable ship — all the way up to a frigate that can do air defense for another ship and do anti-submarine warfare.
“I think the Navy needs to — instead of opening a wide aperture and seeing what comes in — make some choices about what they need the ship to do, and it needs to be a more capable ship that’s able to do multiple missions.”