“I don’t think it does move us in the right direction”, Clark said. “It opens up the aperture too much in terms of what that future frigate could be. It makes it seem like it could be anything, a ship that’s only able to do surface warfare and ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] missions in support of distributed lethality. It could anything from that, which is a relatively less capable ship all the way up to a frigate that can do air defense or another ship and do anti-submarine warfare. “The Navy, instead of opening a wide aperture and seeing what comes in, needs to make some choices about what they need this ship to do. It needs to be a more capable ship that’s able to do multiple missions: anti-submarine warfare, air defense and surface warfare. All three of them about the same time. So, it needs to be a multimission ship and not something that’s single-mission or dual-mission, like the RFI implies.”
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