Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments senior fellow Bryan Clark said during the hearing that he worried the Navy had begun this process with too many details left undecided, and said that the Navy should be able to better determine what it wants without first requiring industry feedback.
“I think what it does is 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 from a ship that’s only able to do surface warfare and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] missions in support of distributed lethality, the Navy’s new surface concept. It could be from anything from that, which is 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,” Clark said towards the end of the hearing.
“And 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. So, it needs to be able to do anti-submarine warfare and air defense, and surface warfare, all three of them, all at about the same time. So, it needs to be a multi-mission ship and not something that’s single mission or a dual mission ship like the RFI implies.”